“This is certainly an unconventional venue for a reading festival,” observed author Chuck Klosterman as he surveyed the El Cortez Hotel ballroom. “Usually when you’re at a book event, it’s in a more academic setting. I like to get there early and look around and wonder, ‘Is he here for the book event? Is she here for it?’ You can never tell ... Here, it was pretty easy to tell.”
Klosterman drew a crowd of about 80 bookworms for his Saturday afternoon session at the Vegas Valley Book Festival, a two-day reminder that literacy and Las Vegas aren’t mutually exclusive. The author of four books (and national magazine contributor) chatted amiably about his favorite topic, pop culture, from the obsessive nature of Led Zeppelin fans to the importance of low-culture distractions in a time of geopolitical strife.
At Las Vegas High School on Saturday night, keynote speaker, author and NPR contributor Sarah Vowell deadpanned, “I’ve always dreamed of playing Vegas.” She read to about 200 attendees from three of her essay collections, and admitted that crime novels and movies had given her a skewed vision of Las Vegas.
“As I’ve learned today, you have schools here,” she said with mock surprise. “I guess the children of hookers have to go to school somewhere.”