Monday Edmund White presents Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel 7pm @ Central Library Patricia Hampl presents The Florist's Daughter 7pm @ Dutton's Red Hen Press poets read their work 8pm @ Boston Court Main Stage, Pasadena Tuesday Oliver Sacks presents Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain 7pm @ Central Library Roger Director presents I Dream in Blue 7:30pm @ Barnes & Noble, The Grove Francisco Goldman presents The Art of Politcal......

Monday Lisa See discusses and signs Peony In Love 7pm @ Vroman's Tuesday Get ready for the big Holiday. Or, you know, read a book. Wednesday Celebrate the big Holiday. Read a book in the shade. Thursday Chris Nichols presents The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister 7pm @ Vroman's Zenon Neumark presents Hiding in the Open 7:30pm @ Village Books Friday Recovery from the big Holiday if yesterday wasn't enough. Lay around. Relax. Read......

Monday Bridget Kinsella Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on The Outside 7pm @ Book Soup Trevor Corson discusses and signs The Zen of Fish 7pm @ Vroman's Tuesday Viken Berberian presents Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets 7pm @ Book Soup Bridget Kinsella presents Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside 12pm @ Vroman's Joseph Marshall presents The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn 7pm @ Vroman's Eric Lichtenfeld......

The Festival of Books is a lot of fun and a set of curious paradoxes. The first is that it's an enormous social festival about books, an art form usually enjoyed, unlike, say, theater, film, or music, by oneself in silence. Another is that much of the point of the festival is to see writers in the flesh, even though the point of a writer, really, is that their thoughts and feelings reach their......