Booty from the land of book nerds

Every once in a while, I stop and wonder why I'm still so devoted to Portland.  My neighborhood is crawling with boys in handlebar mustaches and girls in skinny jeans and big, ugly glasses that sneer at the outdated.  I can't walk to the store or the bank without being aggressively smiled at and cajoled by some poor wage slave promoting the ACLU, HRC, or Greenpeace.  The traffic is ridiculous for a town this size.  The housing costs are still overinflated.  Our summer is six weeks long and at night the screams of a thousand drunks filter through my windows.

BUT THEN...Wordstock comes around.  Every year this festival brings together a dizzying mix of author readings, workshops and panels scattered among rows of vendors hawking books, journals, and other ephemera.  Even though the convention center setting makes me feel like I'm in a miserable hybrid of multi-ring circus and strip mall, I never fail to thrill at being surrounded by masses of other book nerds.  If nothing else, Portland is a city of readers.

For me, this isn't just the source of a few cute facts like Portland's libraries being among the busiest in the nation or that Powell's buys 3,000 used books over their counters every day.  It means I'm part of a huge, wildly diverse tribe of residents who value the written word.  This is no small thing. 

I caught the last bit of Anthony Doerr's question and answer period at Wordstock and he said, more or less, that novels are one of the most essential ways we have of getting into another person's head.  The empathy we get from fiction (and nonfiction for that matter) makes us better people.  It's nice to know that, even though we may fail to retain the lessons learned from all those pages, we are at least trying.