In our opinion: Book Festival

Utah is blessed with rich cultural resources. Some, like the Utah Symphony or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, are iconic and prominent because of their quality, size and the extraordinary physical performance space they command.

But Utah's greatest cultural resource is the hearts and minds of its citizens ?— high in quality but vast, inchoate, dispersed and emergent.

Each year the Utah Humanities Council creates a way to bring the beautiful chaos of that precious cultural resource together in conversation by inviting all Utahns to a month-long book club.

The 14th annual Utah Book Festival is the book club of your dreams, putting readers in direct dialogue with authors. And the authors involved are exceptional, from local favorites like Brandon Mull and Gerald Lund to internationally recognized writers such as Marilynne Robinson and W.S. Merwin.

The festival launches this Friday with New York Times best-selling author Robert Fulghum at the Salt Lake Library. Then, throughout the month of October, the festival fans across the state, bringing authors together with readers to expand horizons and increase understanding.

A complete schedule of these free events is available at utahhumanities.org.

We invite our readers to take advantage of this exquisite opportunity to come together in thoughtful dialogue around the best literature of our time.