Read All About It: National Book Festival
BIBLIOPHILES SHOULD HEAD down to the National Mall on Saturday for the ninth annual National Book Festival, which is bringing dozens of notable authors to D.C. From cookbook author and Food Network chef Paula Deen to novelist John Irving, readers of all ilks and tastes can find something to flip through at this year’s festival.
While the format doesn’t chang much from year to year, this year the festival is going high-tech — the Library of Congress will be disseminating information through Twitter and Facebook. If you follow the Library on Twitter, you can get day-of updates, or else join the Library’s Facebook page. And you can also head over the festival’s Web site, where you can find podcasts with interviews with festival authors.
Several of the authors who are coming recently chatted with Express about the festival, their new works and thoughts on how the U.S. is doing in terms of literacy.
Children’s author Kate DiCamillo, a Newbery Medal winner for “The Tale of Despereaux,” will be at the Festival to read from her new book, “The Magician’s Elephant.” She was at the festival in 2002 and 2004.
“Both times it just got a huge turnout,” she said. “I felt a little like a rock star there, which is kind of nice but also disconcerting.”
DiCamillo’s new book is about an orphan who learns from a fortune-teller that the sister he believes dead is alive. She tells him that if he wants to find his sister, he should follow the elephant, and an elephant appears.
“A journey is a great way to tell a story,” DiCamillo says. “It’s about hope and redemption and love and forgiveness; those seem to be the things I’m obsessed with on some cellular level. They just keep showing up in books I write, whether I intend for them to be there or not.”
DiCamillo said that reading as a child “helped me understand the world I was in.”
“When parents say, ‘How can I make my kids read?’ I say, ‘Do they see you reading books for your own pleasure?’” she said. “I think that reading can sustain you for a lifetime, and it helps you understand your place in the world and helps you dream.”
Children’s author Jon Scieszka (pictured) is also a return participant in the festival. Scieszka has two new books out, “Truckery Rhymes,” which is nursery rhymes retold by trucks; and “Robot Zot,” about a 3-inch tall robot that wants to take over the world. Its illustrator, David Shannon, will also be at the festival, and Scieszka said the two would do a presentation.
Scieszka, who taught elementary school for 10 years, said the experience was “great training and background for everything I do.”
“I ended up teaching every grade from first to eighth, and it gave me a new understanding of how kids’ brains worked, since they’re different from adults’,” he said, adding that “we’re on very shaky ground” with literacy in the United States.
“Even more frightening of late is boys and reading,” Scieszka said. “We’ve been testing kids over 25 years now, and we’re finding out that boys are doing worse than girls. But we don’t do anything about it and just test them again next year. The mania for testing has adversely affected reading, too … and kids see reading as just a school thing.”
Best-selling author Nicholas Sparks is a newcomer to the festival, but says that it’s “always nice to meet and talk with readers who enjoy my work” and that “honoring reading and literacy in general is always a wonderful thing.”
Sparks’ new novel, “The Last Song,” just came out, and it will be released as a movie starring Miley Cyrus in January. While a number of his books have been made into movies, this is the first time he wrote the screenplay before writing the novel.
“It was actually easy to do that,” he said. “Screenplays are easy, and I don’t find them nearly as challenging as a novel. They’re much shorter. The hard part is coming up with a good story, and once you understand the screenplay structure, the acts, the plot points, it’s just writing.”
Sparks said that schools should encourage kids to read books they’re interested in.
“While I understand the point of everyone reading common literature, it is a narrow set of books written years ago,” Sparks said.
“I’m not sure that encourages the joy of reading. Schools would be well served to broaden their curriculum and allow students to read books by modern authors and to encourage reading in general, and that’s served by having kids pick the books they want to read.”
» The National Mall between 7th and 14th streets NW; Sat., Sept. 26, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., free. (Smithsonian)
Written by Express contributor Amy Cavanaugh
Photo by The Washington Post
