Reading Glasses - Fan Group discussion

Use this post to discuss book events happening in Portland, Oregon.

Powells usually has the most book events so I'd check their website. They post the schedule for the whole month. It even includes book groups! Some author events are held at Barnes and Noble but I feel not as many.

I think the Rose City Book Fair is next June, though I've never been and I don't know anything much about it.

Registration seems to be closed already, but there is the NW Book Festival

I often use the books section of thePortland Mercury to find events, which is how I found out that there is a used book sale at a DoubleTree in the Lloyd District for the Friends of the Library.

A good resource for looking up events is Literary Arts Calender

I've found signing up for the newsletters or facebook pages from various libraries and various Friends of the Library locations/programs. The schools and libraries often have children's book fairs. Some churches and schools do annual used book sales and some of them can be impressive in size and selection. So it's always good to keep an eye out on their public events.

Wordstock is coming up in November. I'm torn on whether I'd recommend it though. The only Wordstock that I've been to was when it was still pretty new, cheap to attend and everything was in the Portland Convention Center. Back then, I absolutely loved it. Since then, I haven't been able to go, but I've heard some pretty bad things since it moved to the Portland Art Museum and "various locations". Things such as expense, unfulfilled obligations, technical difficulties and the distance between locations.

Having helped run a lot of conventions myself, I can sympathize with the problems, involved in that situation. I understand that it's no one's ideal and usually has to do with budget issues or last minute contract disputes. Things are inevitably going to go wrong when event staff and attendees go from location to location. Equipment and your guest speakers will show up at the wrong place, or not at all Tech guys struggling to be everywhere at once. Inevitably, some events that people paid extra for are going to be less smooth than they expected and complaints will roll in. So I am sympathetic and I hope that this year they've worked out the kinks.

Oh yes and right before Wordstock there is the associated Lit Crawl