Selling (other people's) books with some great Maine authors, Portland, Nov. 29

I hope the Americans among you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday. Our part of Maine was stricken with widespread power outages, but prior investment in a generator saved Thanksgiving dinner for twenty-some-odd at our house. It's still running out there, 36 hours after we lost power, noisily keeping the 19th century at bay.

For those with power or without who are looking for a more soulful way to participate in our country's crazed celebration of retail purchasing this weekend, Longfellow Books in Portland is hosting a genuinely fun event as part of the "buy local" effort in our region.

It all takes place tomorrow, Saturday Nov. 29. First, children's author-illustrators Chris Van Dusen and Scott Nash will be competing in a "draw off" against one another from 11 am to 1. This, I expect, will be quite amusing.

Then, from 1 to 3pm, authors Richard Russo, Monica Wood, Brock Clark, Genevieve Morgan and myself will each have some of our own handpicked titles of other people's works, and try to outsell one another in singing the praises of said titles.

Come on by; it should be a lot of fun.