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Saturday, March 5, 2011

Shanghai Literary Festival


What a great month to be in Shanghai! Both the Literary Festival & the Jue Music+Art Festival are going on right now. All of my free time is filled with books, music & art. Life is good.

I was in Shanghai last year during the Literary Festival, but wasn't able to go to any of the events because of my teaching schedule. English teaching jobs generally require you to work nights & weekends, which is just when all of the author lectures & events were scheduled. But now that I have a Monday to Friday office job, I'm free to rub elbows with all the other bookish people in Shanghai.

I got tickets for seven of the events, including the Literary Death Match. I don't know what that is, but the name is enough for me. I was also lucky enough to get a ticket to see Peter Hessler, the famous author who wrote River Town & Oracle Bones, both fascinating accounts of life in China.

I went to my first festival event this weekend. The atmosphere was comfortable & the audience was chummy. I passed around my new Kindle for all to ooh & aah over. Then I downloaded a few of the books whose authors I will see in the coming weeks - one click & I had the e-books in the palm of my hand. The best thing of all is that all those books are still just one thing :)

4 comments:

scott said...

Ha! Look at you! Getting all fancy... :-)

I like my paper books, but those kindles sure are tempting. I'm waiting for the 3g version...

Nancy Lewis said...

Yeah, I don't really understand the value of 3G on a Kindle. What makes it worth waiting for?

Scott said...

Whoops, I meant the next generation kindle, which I believe will be the third generation, but I guess that term is overloaded! I believe they already 3g wireless versions in the current generation.

Nancy Lewis said...

Yeah, I can't wait for them to put a touch screen on it - the current navigation is kind of clunky. & with a touch screen we could "write" on it too, which would make things like crossword puzzles easy to do on the Kindle.

But so far, I love love love it. How did I move to Asia without one?