Saturday, Sept. 8 – Bash for Books: Celebrating The Great Gatsby
7 p.m.
Rachel D. Murrah Civic Center
1050 W. Morse Blvd.
Winter Park
407-599-3341
wppl.org/bash
$100
Last year, in response to tech writer Farhad Manjoo’s article arguing against the continuing survival of indie bookstores (itself a response to novelist Richard Russo’s New York Times rant against Amazon.com), New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon threaded the needle between the anti-Amazon purists and the anti-indie-bookstore rationalists and came up with a third option: Save the public libraries, instead! “[Libraries] are truly public institutions just as capable of inviting authors and supporting literary culture [as independent bookstores, which Bazelon calls “fetishized”] and they’re free.” We’ll refrain from stepping into the reconsideration of independent sellers – that never goes well – and second Bazelon’s point. This week, the Winter Park Public Library makes it easy to support them with this fundraising bash styled after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age celebration/condemnation The Great Gatsby. OK, so the concept’s a little played-out and always seems slightly ghoulish – if we remember correctly, the book’s West Egg bashes were mere preludes to scandal, murder and suicide – but the $100 ticket price includes food and drink and, most importantly, will make you feel better about that next “one-click” Amazon binge. – Justin Strout
This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2012.