Scenes from a Book Fair in Taiwan

A Polish bear carries a rocket, a cosplayer hunts monsters, and more; plus, book club on American Pastoral and an outing to see Cloudgate

Taipei Book Fair before the crowds arrived. Photo credit: Gray Tan.

Hello dear readers! Albert and Michelle here. The Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE), a six-day mega-event, just ended yesterday.

Our hearts and minds have been full to bursting. We’ve seen kids sprawled on the floor immersed in books. We’ve run into old friends and made new ones. We browsed Thai manga, heard Polish songs, and discovered an independent publisher dedicated to children’s books about local customs—including our latest obsession, Ghost Month. As writers, we often despair that nobody reads books anymore. But the dizzying number of book-related stalls and exhibits, interviews and talks, gathered in this space of twenty-three thousand square meters—that’s over four football fields—did much to renew our hope.

How to describe the insanity? A Buddhist missionary tried to convert us. A likely deranged man gave us some free reading materials describing the moon’s existence as a human conspiracy. A Taiwanes…