Now we’re talking. About reading…

President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, will
preside over the ninth National Book Festival, to be held on the
National Mall on Saturday, Sept. 26.

The daylong event celebrates the joys of reading and literacy.

Participants can meet and hear from about 70 award-winning authors,
poets and illustrators, and take part in a variety of activities.

The festival is organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and is free and open to the public.

Former first lady Laura Bush inaugurated the festival in 2001,
modeling it after a similar event she held as first lady of Texas.

But she was a librarian, after all, and had a great love of books.
Now we’re turning to Kindle and other electronic means of delivering
content more and more and…

Wait….this AP piece doesn’t say anything about celebrating the joy
of bound volumes of books you hold in your hands and turn the pages and
mark up the margins and keep on your shelves cluttered with all your
other favorites over time.

Pope Benedict, an ardent reader and prolific writer, calls his
books his “friends”. Many of us share the feeling, and the submission
to a weakness when in a bookstore on a mission to find one thing,
causes us to instinctively drift from shelf to shelf, distracted in a
time-suspended exploration of so many possible discoveries.

Sorry, I digress. Good news is that this is sponsored by the Library of Congress. What would they be without books?