My second day at the festival also happened to be the second day of the festival. The plan for this day was meet a friend for lunch, have a wander around the bookshop at the festival (possibly buy some books) then go see Matt Haig give the Siobhan Dowd lecture.

We started out by going to the new Yo Sushi for lunch. This is right on Princess Street and if you managed to get a table by the windows you get a lovely view looking out onto the castle.

The bookshop was huge and fantastical and I wanted to take all of the books home with me however, it was so busy. Particularly on this day but also in general, it was super busy. Like I’m not even joking on this day you literally couldn’t get moved in the bookshop because there was so many people (I realise the shop doesn’t look particularly busy in this photo and that is because it was taken late at night).

This was my first purchase of the festival (I went on to buy another 5 books but you’ll see them in Sunday’s post) and I totally just bought it because of the title. Even the cashier in the shop agreed with me that it sounded really interesting.

MEETING MATT HAIG

And finally I went to see Matt Haigs lecture for the Siobhan Dowd Trust. This is a UK charity set up in memory of the author Siobhan Dowd who died in 2007. The trust uses the royalties from her books to “bring the joy of reading and books to children and young people deprived of access to books and of the opportunity to read“.

As a way to remember Siobhan the trust set up a lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival where authors could talk about what books meant to them. In 2014 Patrick Ness gave the first lecture and this year it was the turn of Matt Haig who spoke about (and I totally stole this quote from the Siobhan Dowd Trust website) how books can save your life.

He concluded “Books are for all of us, and for every stage of our life. We should be faithful to them. In sickness and in health, because they will always be there when we really need them. They are the still centre in the whirlwind of modern existence. They can help us and they can change us and make us better people.
They help raise us.
They sort us out.
They can become our friends.
They can be our medicine.
They might, one day, even save our lives.”

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