I had a really great time at the Baltimore Book Festival a couple weekends ago. One of my events was on the same stage immediately after my friend Lawrence Burney discussing his book with Jeff Chang, who also had a new book. Chang wrote one of the great hip hop books, Can't Stop Won't Stop, so I was excited to meet him and really flattered that he bought my book, and I bought his new one and got him to sign it. Water Mirror Echo actually only came out a couple days ago, I got it early. Chang really excels at giving you anything that might be in a straightforward Bruce Lee biography but threading it into a wider cultural narrative about Asians in America, and how the specific details of the life of the most famous Asian American (even now, 50 years after his death) have all these resonances and ripple effects right up through today. A lot of the subject matter, both about Bruce Lee's films and about midcentury China and Hong Kong and some of the nastier incidents of anti-Asian xenophobia in America, are relatively unfamiliar territory for me so it's been really engrossing and eye-opening. For instance, I had never heard of the term 'Sick Man of Asia,' so watching Fists of Fury for the first time hit a lot harder after reading Chang's explanation of how that film in particular and in some ways Lee's entire career were a refutation of that trope. 

On the second day of the Book Festival, I read from my book at Normal's Books and Records. A lot of the other writers at Normal's were poets, but the author who directly preceded me was Tim Paggi, a playwright who read from this entertaining recent satirical horror novella. On the cover Paggi shares a co-author credit with Jenny Johnston, who is the fictional protagonist and unreliable narrator of the book (or perhaps just the radically forthright narrator of a bizarre story). I enjoyed the way he started with an inherently over-the-top premise -- basically, someone climbing the corporate ladder by killing people and telling you about it in chipper self-help language -- but didn't just sit back and play up that contrast over and over. There's a mischievous whimsy to the writing that keeps it entertaining. And it takes place in Towson in the 1990s, a place and time I can think back to very vividly, which is fun for me. 

Crack The Sky are a band that formed in West Virginia but, by a twist of fate, became enormously popular in the Baltimore area in the '70s and remain comparatively unknown in the rest of the country. 

Tyson Koska, a professor at Towson University (my alma mater), wrote a book about Crack The Sky, and I stumbled upon it while strolling around the Book Festival checking out all the different book stores' displays and snapped up a copy. It's a playfully arranged book, a lot of it is just interviews with the band and associates, but it goes pretty deep into how the band formed, how they wrote and wound up with this unusual career, and how frontman John Palumbo wrote his lyrics -- at one point Palumbo refers to the band's sound as "a cross between King Crimson and Steely Dan and Jethro Tull," which I think gets pretty close to explaining their appeal. Sometimes Koska does something a bit like the Motley Crue book The Dirt where each member of the band remembers a story a little differently and he just presents everyone's recollections side by side, and leaves it up to you to believe what you want. 

Yes, this is the Baltimore Book Festival edition of Reading Diary, all of these are things I bought that weekend. I am constantly on the lookout for books to read to my 10-year-old son every night and just fostering that love of books in him, and Max Meow is a sort of knowingly silly riff on superhero comic books that's right up the alley of some of my son's favorite books. He was into it, and there were a few good jokes that might have went over his head but made me chuckle, I'm probably gonna pick up some more books in this series, there are a few now. 

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