The Road to Taos: Are Book Tours Worth It?

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby never made a movie entitled, The Road to Taos, although they performed admirably in Morocco, Bali, Singapore, Zanzibar, Rio, and Hong Kong. All on a back lot at Universal Studios. Not likely that they ever attempted the Road to Needles, which is where we drove this morning.

But a few words about last evening at the delightful Skylight Bookstore on Vermont Street in LA. A small crowd, so without friends and relatives, I have to wonder if it is worth it. As we drive through the desert, images of book talks float like mirages, and singular occurrences surface.

…on the Mendocino-Sonoma coast, The Cairo Codex outsells The Zealot, and every other book. Ok, loyal friends are great.

…at Book Passage in Marin, a woman from India tells me she intends to recommend The Cairo Codex to her book club on her arrival back home in India.

…at the Capitola, CA, Bookstore, a woman who lived in Cairo for four years invites us to her house to see a painting by a friend of the inside of St. Sergius Church in Old Cairo—the very church where the Codex was found!

…at Skylight books in LA, a woman from the Midwest who married an Egyptian, has a film agent son named Ramses, and asks, “Can you write a screenplay?”

If serendipity is the magic that catapults a novel onto the public stage, perhaps book talks are worth it. What do you think?

Linda

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Book Tour, Education, Egypt, Family, Fiction, Taos, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.