Bookstore Event with Katharine Weber

Last month, saw a guest column by Katharine Weber in Christine Baker Kline's great blog A Writer's Life. The cover of Weber's recently published book with the candy bar in the center and the peppermint background was really eye catching; I'd already had her novel The Little Women, which takes place partly at Yale and in New Haven, on my list of books to read (but still haven't gotten to it).

I spontaneously decided to buy True Confections, also because Weber mentioned in her own blog that she included PEZ candy trivia in her book, and Michael and I had just gone to the PEZ museum in Burlingame. What a bizarre coincidence then when looking for the Amy Bloom event details last week to see Katharine Weber would be talking about True Confections at Kepler's this week!

How could I pass that up? Being in the same room as the author of the book I'd read less than two weeks before? So off I went to Kepler's last night at 7:15. Susan Karl, CEO of nearby Annabelle Candy Company in Hayward, was also with her, and the two of them discussed fact and fiction about candy making companies.

Weber wrote a jingle for her fictional Zip's Candy of New Haven, and you could win a neat True Confections T-shirt if you sang it, but I certainly couldn't do it in front of the group of about 100! A singer, who entered the video contest to sing the jingle on Weber's zipscandies.com website, then led us all in singing it. Anyone can enter the contest; maybe I'll see if the boys'll do it!

Since I had already bought True Confections elsewhere, I didn't stay to have it signed, but I did buy Nabokov's Speak, Memory. I kicked myself for forgetting to take the Annabelle candy samples for the boys on my way out. When I got home, Michael had been put to bed with a story, Patrick had prepared for his social studies test on Islam, and Nick was sketching with his gray-tone art markers.