In my French lessons, Sister Ursula, the nun who was my teacher, asked me what I wanted to do with my life when I grew up. Without hesitation, I answered her:  “To drown in a sea of books.”

I was ten years old then.  But it’s exactly what I’m doing now.  I’m attending, as an invited author, the twenty-fifth annual Miami Book Fair International.  It is a sea of books.

The invitation brought me great pleasure. The Miami Book Fair is the largest in the country, and attracts well-known authors from around the world and the thousands of bibliophiles who flock to hear them and sample their wares.  Though Greek literature is not only the foundation of Western culture but, because of the universal impact of the West, in some respects the starting-point of our global culture today, I was the only Greek invited to participate.

The Fair took place on November 15 and 16 on the Wolfson campus of Miami-Dade Community College, itself, as its president told me, the largest institution of higher education in the country.  I could well believe it.  The campus was a forest of skyscraper-like buildings, as intricately laid out as a labyrinth.  I arrived Sunday morning for my own reading with my colleague Peter Hargitai, himself a distinguished Hungarian-American novelist.  There were what seemed like hundreds of tents on the campus, like a nomad encampment, each setting out its precious treasures by author and publisher:  children’s books, cookbooks, books on dance, music, fine arts, photography, theater, therapy, self-help, spiritual exercise, all lined up for inspection, any and all of which could be yours for a plastic card or a few pieces of paper.  When the hunger for books was slaked and one’s tote bag was full, there was an equally generous sampling of the world’s cooking from the vendors in the food courts.

Then it was time to hear from the authors themselves. We entered a large and crowded ampitheater. Each reader wore an identifying name-tag with the magic name “Author” affixed to it that swayed above their bellies, marking them off from ordinary mortals.  In one area were the writers who were concerned with environmentalism and the well-being of the planet, seated with their works:  Will Bauer’s The War on Bugs; Gene Bauer’s Farm Sanctuary:  Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food; Mark Kurlansky’s The Last Fish Tale.  Next to this were the distinguished African-Americans Tavis Smiley and Cornel West; and beside them, the literature of the Americas, men such as the Nicaraguans Rubi Arana and Sergio Ramirez and the Cubans Jose Lorenzo Fuentes, Jose Abreu, and Raul Chao.  An Evening With Gore Vidal, the octogenarian American writer, was advertised beside one with Ishmael Beah, the African who, dragged into Sierra Leone’s civil war as a thirteen-year-old boy, had killed, as he said, “too many people to count.”  There were exile authors with unfamiliar names, and Nobel laureates such as Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott.

One recitation included the American poet laureates Billy Collins and Robert Hass, together with Mark Strand.  I found myself being photographed with Tom Hayden, of Chicago Eight fame.  In a packed hall, Salman Rushdie was reading, the man whose novel, The Satanic Verses, had put a price on his head. Writers from Egypt; writers from Brazil; from Norway and Spain and France and Argentina and Swaziland:  four hundred in all, and I, proudly representing Greece. Between the readings were offerings from opera and ballet, Fringe theater events, a feast for the eye and the ear all galvanized by the power of the written word. 

There are many book fairs, of course. But only in America, I thought, could there be something so free, so joyous, so diverse, so deeply hopeful. I’ve been a wanderer myself. But, amid the sea of books, I felt I had come home.

Author and actress Lili Bita is a regular contributor to Wild River Review.