Cape Town Book Fair Reflection

As you may know, I decided in about December last year that I would no longer allow my studies to prevent me from reading and keeping my mind from growing.

So I attended the Cape Town Book Fair today. And it was amazing. Beyond amazing. But more about that in later posts.

Somebody (who does not read, and shall remain nameless for the purpose of this discussion) asked me why in the heck I would want to attend a day full of stalls and talks and authors when I could just as well go to a library and read the book by myself.

Why? Because it’s like a gazillion bookshops in one place. That’s why.

Because it’s not just books and authors, it’s the air of the place.

Bookish people often go through school being the outsider, the weird kid with her nose in a book. That was true for me, until high school. In my high school being the bookish type was really not so bad.

Anyway, when that person asked, indignantly, why I would want to spend the first day of the Winter recess around books and bookish people – I guess that hurt a little, and it smelled of way back when.

So what I liked most about my first ever book fair was this: being surrounded by bunches of other bookworms. People who love the smell and the feel of a book, new or old. People who love the written word, who dream about it, who forget to eat because of it.

These are people with wide open minds, who flit from one subject to another, who can follow a conversation with me. Oh, I love the non-readers too, but there is something special in being surrounded by the bookish type.

More subject-specific posts on the CTBF will follow within the week.