The National Book Festival: A Retrospective
I ended up back at the National Book Festival on basically a whim. I last went back in 2016, which was also the first time I’d ever been. When I saw that the festival was going to be back in person this year, I knew I wanted to try to make it work.
Let’s get this out of the way at the top: Yes, I bought more books. Eight of them, specifically. (And one more at the International Spy Museum the next day.) I will not be taking questions at this time.
I truly love the Washington Convention Center. It seems so compact and unassuming from outside, but then the inside is like a rabbit’s warren. You have to tame it like a wild beast. There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than the one that comes when you finally realize you’re heading to a room on instinct, rather than staring at an unhelpful map.
Brendan, my travel companion and literary friend (hi, Brendan!), and I planned our itinerary in advance, which is my first piece of advice. Whether it’s the National Book Festival, SDCC, or Coachella, know who you want to see, where they’ll be, and what time they start their panel, set, or signing. We were overwhelmed by the schedule online, but it only took a little time to read through the list, talk about our top choices, and narrow it down to a coherent agenda.
As it was originally planned, our day started with a 10am panel on Saturday morning. In actuality, we did not get to the convention center until probably 10:30, and we headed straight downstairs to the bookselling section (ruh-roh).
That’s my second piece of advice: Go with the flow. If you need to skip a panel to rest, do it; if you want to leave early, go for it. (Also make sure you build in food and water breaks or plan to sneak out of panels early or in late to keep yourself fed and hydrated.) We had stayed out a bit later than expected the night before—mostly wandering the National Mall and swatting mosquitoes by the Reflecting Pool—and one of us hadn’t slept in over a day, so we needed to give ourselves some time to get going (and to get breakfast) in the morning.
Anyhow, after breakfast sandwiches and coffee at the Baker’s Daughter, we walked over the convention center, grabbed our programs and complimentary tote bags, and, with some time to kill before our first panel of the day, we decided to check out the books for sale downstairs. A lot of the kids’ programming and activities were also down there, plus the signing lines and booths for book lovers in every state, but at that point in the morning, the hall was still pretty quiet. We stopped at a few state booths, then dove into the books.
For the National Book Festival, in particular, I do recommend heading right to the books, if making purchases is your main priority. Almost all the books I ended up buying were already on my TBR list, and going downstairs immediately meant we had the pick of the litter with absolutely no line to speak of. Were we then walking around with tote bags full of books literally all day? Yes. But 1) it was worth it, and 2) I don’t know what those bags are made of, but I barely felt the weight on my shoulder. Book festival magic~
After losing our minds over the books for sale, we headed up to Magic to Haunt You with authors R.M. Romero and Rose Szabo, a panel on magical realism. After that was our 12:10 panel: Feeling Burned Out? This Session Is For You, with Celeste Headlee.
I’m starting a new paragraph for this panel, because I truly think it changed my life. I have to admit that Brendan flagged this one, and I was initially just going along to hang out with my friend. But Celeste Headlee changed my mind within thirty seconds of starting her talk. She’s an incredible speaker, so down-to-earth and empathetic, and her panel was one of the only times I’ve ever listened to a Q&A session and enjoyed it. She answered every question, no matter how specific or random, with care, and I felt like I was learning so much. I would’ve listened to her talk for all three to five of the hours in which we’re apparently capable of concentrating. Though I didn’t snag a copy of her book, Do Nothing, I’m absolutely going to break the moratorium in order to buy both it and We Need to Talk. I want to learn everything Celeste (as Brendan and I called her; I hope she doesn’t mind) has to offer.
Anyhow, feeling restored, Brendan and I split up for our next panels, so I headed back to the YA room for You’re Such a Nightmare, which was one I was super stoked about. The panel featured Tiffany D. Jackson and Ryan La Sala, who were absolutely wonderful together. I had already bought Jackson’s The Weight of Blood that morning, because I’ve been eyeing this Carrie remix for months (read my thoughts on it in this week’s missive, coming soon). But after hearing La Sala speak, I knew I also needed his novel, The Honeys, and sprinted back downstairs to meet Brendan, who had also gone back to buy another book.
The last panel we hit that day was The Power of Laughter with Nuar Alsadir, but I can’t lie——we were kind of exhausted by that point already, so we skipped out early and then blew off the last two panels on our agenda to give our brains a break. We headed back to the hotel to rest instead. We had planned to take it easy most of that night, but then the hotel bartender basically shamed us into going out and gave us excellent recommendations for a speakeasy and a place with adult Carpi-Sun. So in the end, I think everything worked out as it was supposed to.
I won’t bore you with the details of the tourist-y stuff Brendan and I did (though I will spam you with pictures at the bottom of this post), because I know you’re just here or the books. And what books they are!
You’ll learn more as I read them all, but here are the eight that I purchased at the festival:
And here’s the one I spotted on the shelf at the International Spy Museum, remembered having just added to my to-read shelf on Goodreads, and had to snag:
As I mentioned, almost all of these were already on my radar, with the only exceptions being The Honeys (which I bought after hearing the author talk, as is meant to happen at a good con) and Book of Night, which I mostly bought for the cover and the description. That one was really the only impulse purchase. I’ll level with you—I basically used the festival as an excuse to nab a bunch of books I’ve been saving to my TBR, and just got very, very lucky with the selection that was available.
Overall, it was a fun and rewarding, if exhausting, trip. I would love to make the National Book Festival an annual visit, since I of course love books and also hold a really special place in my heart for DC. It’s such a cool city, full of a lot of history and culture, and even when our country is a fucked place to live, seeing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian or the Lincoln Memorial is never not going to make me tear up.
I haven’t had the chance to travel very much over the last few years, for obvious reasons, so spending a weekend in a different city—and with a friend I haven’t seen in person since last year—was wonderful. And I haven’t felt the kind of rush that I did walking into the festival since I unexpectedly got to go to NYCC last October. The National Book Festival was a chance to learn and to listen in a way that doesn’t often happen, and I am so glad for the opportunity to attend.
Clockwise from top left: train reading (The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow); Amtrak views; Brendan and I taking a White House selfie (not pictured: a teenager in a white buttondown at 11pm on a Friday who was absolutely a Republican); the speakeasy we were bullied into visiting, where we drank fancy Long Island iced teas; the Lincoln Memorial; and the Washington Monument.
