Even the most bookish of my friends was sceptical about the Vintage Classics Day, held at Foyles in London last weekend. Finding companions for author readings is difficult enough, but this was an even tougher sell - six and a half hours of author waffle beginning at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. Dutifully I asked around, hoping someone might be persuaded to meet the likes of Salman Rushdie, AS Byatt and Louis de Bernières, but my enquiries were met with little more than bafflement. "I mean, I do like going to readings," one said, shaking his head, "but a whole day of them?"
At their best, author events are entertainingly indiscreet about the processes behind a novel; at worst they can poison you towards an author for life. I can, for example, trace back my antipathy towards Ian McEwan's recent work to a theatre in south London; similarly my admiration of Richard Ford bloomed into devotion after hearing him read from The Lay of the Land.
They're also fraught with nightmares for organisers. Even the biggest authors are embarrassed by how few people often turn up for their events. On one occasion I had to ask friends to pretend to be customers. Another event ended abruptly after Spike Milligan swore at someone. And of course there's those who ask obscure and irrelevant questions. In a packed London auditorium, one participant's nonsensical question rambled on for so long the author tried to interrupt, 'Shut up, I'll tell you when I've finished,' she shouted to an alarmed Don DeLillo.
So why do it? It's the intimacy of even the biggest event that gives readings their power. Michel Faber once read a new story, then set light to it, the tale existing only in the collective memory. It's moments like that which makes seeing an author an important part of enjoying and enriching your understanding of a novel.
Certainly many of the people attending the Vintage Classics Day were there for that reason, but there was another reason: they were writing a book. During the initial discussion about future classics, many of the overwhelmingly female crowd (there were fewer than 10 males in the audience, two of whom looked strangely like Richard Yates) began taking furious notes, only pausing when Marie Phillips - author of God's Behaving Badly - described her publishing fairytale. They listened in reverence: all, no doubt, imagining making the same speech in future years.
The next few hours went by in a blur of wagging jaws. Louis de Bernières got big laughs from small jokes and affected a voice not unlike Rabbi Lionel Blue to represent a female character, while AS Byatt, Tessa Hadley and Adam Thirwell later played who-knows-the-most-about-Henry-James in a discussion of literary heroines.
Having asked a couple of questions, met a bored looking Salman Rushdie and given away the ending to a popular film, I decided to skip Debbie Moggach's discussion of filming the classics and start de Bernières A Partisan's Daughter instead. After all, a good event should always send you back to the books.
