There’s nothing better than a relaxing Sunday spent with a good book. Or lots of books. And fun tote bags to help carry all those books.

It was hard to crawl out of bed this morning, especially after a fun, but exhausting night seeing Stromae in concert, (Side note: if you don’t know who Stromae is, you should look him up mainly because of the dance moves) but the pages of freshly printed books were calling me.  Judy, Caitlin, Catherine and I all headed over to the Brooklyn Book Festival to browse the huge book selections and to see Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, On Beauty, and NW (and more), interview fellow author Daniel Kehlmann about his newest book, F: a novel.

This was my first time in Brooklyn and I loved it (mainly because of all the book loving people!)

Waiting in line to see Zadie Smith, who was fantastic.

We also went to a panel discussion on writing about cities, where we heard from authors Phillip Lopate (ed. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology), Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America), and Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Leaving Brooklyn).

Along with getting a bunch of freebie posters and bookmarks, I now have a huge list of books to read sometime in the future (let’s be honest, I probably won’t get to most of them until winter break) as well as some inspiring ideas from the authors I heard from.

I think my favorite thing that I heard today was from Zadie Smith and Daniel Kehlmann when discussing Kehlmann’s novel, Smith commented that one of the points Kehlmann’s book made was that the eyes are not the window to the soul. That there is no person inside of us, observing from within like the plot of a movie, but that we are instead a whole body, made up of a million moments all crashed together, unorganized and fluid. Kehlmann then went on to question the existence of depth of soul altogether, which got a tad existential for me, but I liked it anyway.

The tote bags, like the authors, also got a tad existential. But in a good way.

Have a good Monday, everyone!

XOLily