ENTERTAINMENT

AUSTIN – Let's talk politics at the Texas Book Festival. Or maybe wife-swapping. Or how to oink in Russian.

It was all on the agenda this weekend, as roughly 40,000 people turned out to hear about 190 authors on the environs of the State Capitol for the 13th annual fest.

Let's start with politics, though, because a sampling of key events offered plenty. On Saturday, satirist Christopher Buckley, son of the late conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr., cheerfully explained his endorsement of Barack Obama – and drolly demolished the current White House occupant by surveying the state of the nation and asking, "Why wouldn't I vote for the Democrat?"

The crowd of nearly 800 ate it up. (Austin is, he noted, "a dot of blue in the great red sea of Texas.")

He was bipartisan in assessing which ticket might generate the most comedic material.

"My inner satirist somewhat yearns for a McCain-Palin administration. This would be truly a target-rich environment. However, do not neglect the potential of a Biden vice-presidency."

Politics also came up Sunday when a dapper Scott Simon of public radio fame enthralled more than 300 listeners by discussing his novel Windy City. There was a hint of awe in his voice as he spoke of the multicultural weave of American life and the power of democracy. Reading from his book, in the voice of a veteran Chicago alderman, he noted: "Hardly any of us wind up being Lincoln, Churchill or La Guardia. Most of us aren't even Hoover or Carter. But so far, no one here has been Pol Pot or Stalin."

Festival literary director Clay Smith acknowledged that some large-venue panels had been relatively lightly attended. But he said that was counterbalanced by overflow crowds in some smaller rooms.

Dallas authors James Donovan and Kathleen Kent, for example, each drew standing-room-only crowds of more than a hundred people each to discuss George Armstrong Custer and the Salem witch trials, respectively.

Big crowds were also reported for Alice Schroeder, biographer of Warren Buffett, and children's author R.L. Stine, among others.

And then there were public radio personalities Roy Blount Jr. and Peter Sagal, who filled the packed Senate chamber with pig sounds from around the world (that would be chrjo in Russia) and, for Mr. Sagal's The Book of Vice, a discussion of the porn star who can discuss Nietzsche and how a Republican in a wife-swapping scandal helped send Mr. Obama to the Senate.

But William Least Heat-Moon maybe captured the spirit of the event as he defined a "quoz" from his Roads to Quoz. A quoz, he said, is about "the fecundity of the unexpected" that can transform and connect us.

Kind of like a book festival.FOR MORE on the Texas Book Festival, visit GuideLive.com /texaspages.