For someone who loves reading as much as I do, it's odd that I don't often go to book festival events. Well, not really, most of them are during the day and I have a Job. But this year I have seen two events.
The first one was Ben Moor and his book, More Trees to Climb. I have written about Ben Moor before. Well, not so much about Ben, more about his wonderfully marvellous beautiful moving funny lovely one-man Fringe shows. I've seen 'em all and loved 'em all. He's collected three of the shows together into a book - Not Everything is Significant, Coelacanth and A Super-Collider for the Family. I recommend it. It's marvellous. And it has a really cool retro design on the cover.
I wasn't sure what the book festival event would entail, whether it would be Ben reading passages from all three of the stories, or if he would be performing one in its entirety, or whether there would be a Q&A session afterwards, which is de rigeur at book festival events. I was hoping there would be questions afterwards as I had already decided to ask him if he'd rather have a really heavy head or gravity defying arms, much to Toria's amusement. Or was it bemusement? But sadly there was no Q&A, just Ben performing Coelacanth. Not that that's anything to be sad about, it's lovely. It's about love and romance and family and competitive tree-climbing and isolation and numbness and acceptance and hope and peace, and bits of it are really funny. And it has a big stick in it, (which I want to steal because it is a nice stick) and an eye-patch which once I wrecked with just the power of my mind. Well, that was a different eye-patch, but you know what I mean. So, that was Coelacanth. If you get the chance to see Ben doing his plays, take it. Totally worth it. Beautiful.
And the other event I went to was David Sedaris. He's an American comedy writer and one of his sisters is Amy Sedaris who has acted in quite a few things you might know. Google her, I can't be arsed typing it out. I've read several of David's books. I know he writes a column for the New Yorker and I think that at least some of the books are collections of the columns; the chapters have that sort of feel about them. Each of them is a story in and of itself and the only constants are the characters - David, his family, his partner Hugh. He talks about his life, his childhood, jobs he's had, mistakes he's made. He has a very distinct written voice, funny and wry and not ashamed to admit his flaws or talk about the stupid things he's done. His story about the performance art he tried to do when he was on drugs is hilarous.
He read two shortish pieces. One was in the shape of an email from a woman to a friend, thanking her for a wedding present of a voucher for two free pizzas which started off funny and got funnier - and crueller - as it went on. The next piece was very interesting in terms of structure. He was talking about his recent trip to Australia and some of the things they did and saw, which included feeding raw duck meat to a kookaburra, but he tied it into another story about he and his sister Amy singing a song about a kookaburra when they were kids, a song he'd learnt at school. Neither anecdote was really much of story by itself but tying them together made them interesting, relevant, poignant and funnier. He talked a little bit about it in the Q&A afterwards, about how neither anecdote was worth much individually, but how interweaving them made them into something different. It was interesting for me to see a little bit of how he works at his writing to craft something from almost nothing. Must get his new book.