Reading the back of the bottle

On Saturday I went to an event associated with Lit Crawl NYC, a bar-reading series that started a few years ago.

I was only able to make it to one reading but I enjoyed it a lot despite the informality of the proceedings. Our host was La Casita, a yarn store and wine bar, and all of the authors' pieces dealt directly with knitting. Perri Klass read an essay about making a vest for her mother, who was in attendance and happy to show off; Beth Hahn writes Victorian mysteries paired with knitting patterns and showed off her own work, which was incredible; and Elinor Lipman read a poem about knitting. (Lipman I was familiar with before, but she's also writing a political poem a day on Twitter, which is swell.)

The Lit Crawl organizers were all decked out in matching A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN T-shirts (I want one!) and buzzed in and out taking pictures and introducing the writers as they came up. There was one patron who wandered in looking for help with yarn and she went away disappointed, but it was such a small store that there was really no place where she could have discussed her potential purchase with one of the store managers. She was a regular, though, so hopefully she'll be back.

Last year's Lit Crawl coincided with the Brooklyn Book Festival but featured bars in the East Village and SoHo; this year, it's been broken out into a Brooklyn edition in May and a Manhattan one in September. My one suggestion would be to spread the readings out over a longer time; in the two hours of Lit Crawl I had a staggering 13 choices and would loved to have seen more. What if the crawl started an hour or two earlier, with fewer events at each time? I'd drink to that.