I went to #bea16: Adult Author Breakfast and Buzz Panel!

My last BEA post, I promise (what? I'm still excited).

I got up early Thursday to catch the shuttle to McCormick for the Adult Author Breakfast. The food was convention-standard continental breakfast - rolls, muffins, fruit, coffee that could strip the paint off a car - but the entertainment was stellar.  After several industry awards were given out, the audience got to hear from four authors.  Host Faith Salie - whose new book Approval Junkie came out in April - warmed up the room with some jokes about things she had heard about BEA in the 1980s.  Then Colson Whitehead spoke about his upcoming book, The Underground Railroad, that I have had on my must-read-when-I-get-my-hands-on-it list since it was announced - I am fully ready to have my mind fucking blown with a genre-bending, historical novel about a black woman's dangerous journey to escape the slave-holding South via an actual underground railroad (out September 2016).  Louise Penny spoke eloquently about her development of Inspector Gamache, who was modeled on her husband, Michael - there wasn't a dry eye in the room when she related Michael's struggle with dementia, one that he is losing (A Great Reckoning is out August 30).  Sebastian Junger finished up the presentations with his book Tribe, about how we as humans seek companionship and how sometimes those who have undergone a collective bonding experience, like combat veterans, find it hard to adjust to our current society that also places emphasis on individualism (out Tuesday, May 24).

Now, this is the craziest panel I attended - the BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panel on Wednesday night.  On Jenn's advice (and previous experience), Jenn, Michelle, and I were already planning to attend and then Riverhead tweeted out that they would have matching tote bags for Brit Bennett's book at the panel.  And we knew we had to get there early (we did - we sat down front on the end near a book table).

So, books.  EVERYTHING at this panel sounds amazing.

1) Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge, out October 25, 2016.  This is a history of a single day in America - November 23, 2013 - and chronicles the lives of the ten children who were killed on that day by guns (on average, seven children per day are killed by guns).  A necessary and heartbreaking title.
2) Darktown by Thomas Mullen, out September 13, 2016.  A historical novel set in 1948 Atlanta when the police department is ordered to hire black police officers - who are not allowed to arrest a white person, drive a squad car, or set foot inside police headquarters.  When a black woman last seen with a white man turns up dead, the two black officers suspect a cover-up by white officers.  Recommended as a Walter Mosley readalike.  (I believe this is also based in historical fact regarding the police integration - or lack thereof - in Atlanta.)
3) History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, tentatively scheduled for release in January 2017.  A fourteen-year-old girl, who lives in what is the last vestiges of a hippie commune in northern Minnesota, becomes entangled in a family's life by becoming the babysitter to their young son.  And then shit goes sideways (basically - that's not what the rep said in the pitch, but that's what happens).
4) Little Deaths by Emma Flint, out January 17, 2017.  A true crime aficionado has written a historical whodunit set in 1960s Queens based on the real-life tale of a recently divorced mom, the murder of her two children, and the media storm that ensued during the trial.  Yes, will read, thank you.
5) The Mothers by Brit Bennett, out October 11, 2016.  Look at this gorgeous cover and matching tote bag.  The Mothers is a debut novel set in a contemporary black community in Southern California and follows grief-stricken teen Nadia and what happens after she makes a fateful decision.  This is narrated by a Greek-chorus of moms and aunties, from what I've heard, and it sounds so amazing.
6) The Nix by Nathan Hill, out August 30, 2016. A big, juicy debut with political overtones about a man who finds out that his estranged mother may not be the woman he thought she was with a hidden life.  This is set in Iowa (holla!) and Hill is an Iowan as well (double holla!).

And that's it for BEA 2016!  It was great and I really hope to go again in the future.

I went to #bea16: I found some comics!

I made sure to visit "comics row" (I think that's the official term for it) - Image, Valiant, IDW, and other independent comics publishers were grouped in a row together.  Weirdly, Boom! was down on the end of a different row next to Moleskine (eh?).


I picked up some singles from Image (I had been interested in Black Science but hadn't picked it up, yet) and their "Firsts" books (which I think I'll take to the store to share once I finish reading through them).  I chatted with the Valiant rep for a bit - mostly about how much I love Faith and the upcoming trade and (squee!) ongoing series - and about some other trades.  He recommended The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage and I think I'll really like it.

When I dropped by the Boom! booth I got lucky - the creator of Goldie Vance, Hope Larson, was signing issue one of the series.  Goldie is a sixteen-year-old living with her dad at a Florida resort in the 1960s - she really wants to be a detective and so when the real resort detective has a case he can't solve Goldie steps in.  Hope says this will appeal to fans of Lumberjanes (awww, yiss) but there are 100% less lake monsters and supernatural foxes (rats).  The trade will be available in October.

And finally, I'll just leave this here.  Berkeley Breathed, y'all.  New Bloom County.  What is life, even?

I went to #bea16: Middle grade and YA books!

The hottest category of books at BEA seemed to be YA/teen fantasy and middle grade.  I didn't brave the in-booth lines for Victoria Roth, Melissa de la Cruz, Leigh Bardugo, Kendare Blake, Sabaa Tahir (which was crazy), and Tahereh Mafi (which was completely bonkers, yikes).  But I did have tickets for some signings in the autograph area (and found a few surprises).

High on my list of middle grade books coming out this fall was Raina Telgemeier's Ghosts.  I loved her memoirs Smile and Sisters and the novel Drama.  Ghosts follows a tween after her family's move to the California coast for her little sister's health (she has cystic fibrosis and the coastal air will be better for her lungs) and the possibility that her new town might be haunted.  It comes out September 13, 2016 - I paged through it briefly and the colors are just gorgeous.  (There were some super-cute #goraina totebags in the Scholastic booth later on, but I didn't manage to snag one.)



I got to meet one of my literary idols at BEA - Ann Martin.  ANN freaking MARTIN.  She of the BSC and so many other books. I almost cried on her.  Ann (I'm just going to call her Ann) was there promoting her reboot of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series that follows Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's niece, Missy Piggle-Wiggle.  So I got to tell her how much I loved the BSC, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, AND that my nickname was "Missy" until college.  My Venn diagram is basically a circle for this book. *muppet-arms* Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Whatever Cure will be out on September 6, 2016.  (When Ann asked if I wanted it inscribed, I just blubbered that I couldn't decide if I would like it inscribed to my nieces, who are ten, or to myself, because she's ANN MARTIN and I lurrrve her - so she just wrote "Happy Reading!" *dies*)

I used my front-of-the-line pass at the Marissa Meyer signing (which meant I got to be about number 25 in line because a lot of us saved our passes for that one). This one was important to me because not only do I love the Lunar Chronicles series, I wanted to tell her how much teens and parents at my store love her books.  The heroines of the Lunar Chronicles are all smart and strong girls - they're mechanics and farmers and hackers first and fairy-tale heroines second and everyone loves to read about them and root for them.  So much.  Marissa was signing ARCs of her new standalone, Heartless, which is a backstory for the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, and that will publish on November 8, 2016.  (Gorgeous ARC production)

I lucked into this next book.  Shannon Hale tweeted about Squirrel Girl ARCs so I pottered on over to the Disney booth to ask if they were doing a galley drop.  It turns out that's what Shannon and Dean Hale would be signing that day!  So I hopped in the line (there were about 20-25 people already there) which led to the weirdest signing line wait.  The people who got in line behind me immediately started complaining about the wait (eh? it wasn't bad or long, so I don't know who peed in their Wheaties that morning), then they started complaining they didn't know what the line was for, and then after I explained 1) who Shannon Hale was and 2) what Squirrel Girl was they said it sounded dumb and then stayed in the line.  WTF? I got busy reading American Gods on my nook before I tried to strangle them.  (Also, at the same time, there was a thriller writer at a small press hawking her book to those of us in the signing line and a self-help publisher trying to interest us in a book about conflict resolution in marriage...probably not much overlap with Squirrel Girl fans.)  But then I got to the front of the line and geeked out with Dean Hale about the issue of SG where she convinces Galactus not to eat the Earth and *high-fived* and got super-cute squirrel ears.  The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl: Squirrel Meets World is scheduled to publish on February 7, 2017 (*sad trombone*) but it looks adorable and I can't wait to read it.

And this last one was truly a surprise - on Friday, I was taking a break to have a bit of caffeine intake and a scone and people-watch when I saw a few familiar faces heading to a little out-of-the-way table in the autograph area.  Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton and a rep with a stack of books. Eeek, I thought I had missed their signing.  So I quick gathered up my stuff and scampered on over to the table to be nosy - turns out that they were finishing their signing and had moved out of the booth area because of someone else's signing (Leigh Bardugo's?) being sort of nuts.  So I got completely lucky and got a signed copy of Tiny Pretty Things (and a pin!) and got to chat with two awesome authors that I tweet with online (spoiler: they liked my twitter handle).  The next book in their series, Shiny Broken Pieces, publishes on July 6, 2016.

Next post: comics!

I went to #bea16: Books that found me there

So one of the crazier things about BEA - that I knew in theory but was still unprepared for the magnitude - was the number of books that I hadn't heard of that either crossed my path or were shoved into my hands by reps and publicists.

Books.  They just find me, you know?

My first surprise came in the form of a Shirley Jackson biography I practically stumbled over while asking about Bolshoi Confidential at Liveright.  Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin is scheduled to come out in September 2016.  From the blurb, it seems to be more of a biography of the work and how Jackson uses domestic horror (which may be why she doesn't seem to be in the "canon" unlike Hawthorne and Poe).  I love me some Shirley Jackson, so this is going in the stack.  (Interestingly enough, Ruth Franklin wrote the forward to Penguin Classics 2013 re-release of Jackson's The Road Through the Wall.)


Another biography that found me was Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird.  I happened to be wandering past the Penguin Random House booth when the galley drop happened - the rep thrust it at me with the line "This has never-before-seen information about Victoria's private life."  I have no idea how she knew I liked Victorian history - the last time we talked was during the George Saunders signing - but I was like SOLD.  This is going to be a good, juicy biography for those cold winter months.  It releases November 29, 2016.  (This better have a glossy photo insert in the finished copies.)


Another book I nearly stumbled over was Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King.  Monet painted the Water Lilies near the end of his life when his sight was failing and he had suffered personal disappointments (World War I was fast approaching, too).  They are beautiful canvases - I had seen the Monets at the Art Institute a few days before so this was clearly meant to be.  I always mean to read more art history and just never get around to it.  This will be out from Bloomsbury on September 6, 2016.  (This is also one I hope that will have a nice photo insert.)

When I stopped by the Graywolf booth on day one, Marisa told me I had to come back the next day for Belle Boggs's signing of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood.  I had completely missed this on my galley schedule (it was there - I went back and checked and I just hadn't noticed).  I loved Bogg's writing in Orion and this is a collection/expansion on her writing about (what the subtitle says) fertility and motherhood.  Even though I'm unlikely to sprog anytime soon (for both personal and practical reasons), I am interested in the experiences of women who want children and experience heartbreak and hardship during their journey.  Also, this is Graywolf and they've never steered me wrong on a book.  This will publish on September 6, 2016.  (Boggs was putting pressed four-leaf clovers in the books as she signed them which was an unexpectedly sweet gesture during a crazy book conference.)

On Friday I went to the Book Club Speed Dating event.  This was really cool - you got assigned a table and publicists went around and rapid-fire pitched books that would be good for book clubs.  I picked up several things (mysteries/thrillers) I thought might work for the book club at the store but what really caught my eye were the books from Other Press.  The two reps there - Mona (she of the French accent) and Christie [Edit: Other Press got me her name - I'm so sorry I didn't get your card!] - just sold the heck out of their three books.  The first one, Among the Living by Jonathan Rabb, they unfortunately didn't have any spare copies to give out but it does sound interesting (a Holocaust survivor joins the established Jewish community in Savannah, GA, in the 1940s and attempts to make a "normal" life) - out October 4, 2016.  Then they pitched the novel The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith.  This is out now (May 3) so you can pick this up immediately.  Smith chose for her topic George Eliot's late-life marriage to John Walter Cross in 1880, who was twenty years her junior (Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes, but they were never able to marry, until his death in 1878).  Smith set her novel during the honeymoon Eliot and Cross took in Venice and examines Eliot's thoughts about aging and grief.  This might as well have "MELISSA'S WHEELHOUSE" stamped on the cover.

And then Mona pitched Constellation by Adrien Bosc (translated by Willard Wood).  This is a historical novel about the famous 1949 crash of the maiden voyage of the Constellation airplane (among the thirty-eight passengers was Edith Piaf's lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan).  Bosc tries to piece together why the plane crashed (could it have been avoided?) and the lives of all its passengers.  I almost crawled over the table to rip it out of her hands.  My father was a systems engineer with Rockwell so I grew up hearing about engineering and aviation history + debut novel + novel in translation = I need it in my eyeballs now.  WHEELHOUSE.  This also won the Grand Prix du roman de l’academie francaise.  (I was prepared to throw elbows for this one.)  Constellation released on May 10, so if you are into this you can get it immediately.

Now, this next one I wasn't able to get at BEA.  They didn't have galleys available but I got on the galley list with the publisher.  I was walking past the Norton booth when I did a one-eighty and made a beeline to a poster.  They have a book about Zika virus coming out in July.  My epidemiology senses were tingling.  Yes, yes, yes I will read a book about this - it's by Donald McNeil so I'm thinking it will have good reporting.  Norton also put out one of my favorites in the genre - Spillover by David Quammen (the Norton rep and I geeked out over it) - so I have high hopes.



Those were my surprise book finds at BEA (the adult ones anyway, I'll have one when I do the kids' books).  I was talking with Michelle and Jenn about things we were surprised we didn't find and Michelle mentioned a lack of science fiction.  I have to agree.  We saw a lot of fantasy (particularly for the YA audience) but we didn't see a lot of hard-core SF.  There was the new Cronin zombie book and Blake Crouch's book but nothing like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch or a William Gibson or an Andy Weir.  Maybe we missed it?

I went to #bea16: Books on my radar (adults)

Before driving off to Chicago for a week of books and more books, I knew that I would have to plan out what books I wanted to look for.

I hadn't the foggiest idea how to go about that.  Edelweiss still had (has) a tab for "BEA 2015" so that went nowhere.  An article listed out the top ten galleys at BEA, but I knew there were more than ten galleys in the whole of the show (come on, I've seen the haul videos).  Conveniently, roommate Jenn came to the rescue with a link to the Library Journal Galley and Signing Guide.  I was at least able to make a schedule of where I needed to be when if there was something I was looking for.

At the very top of my list was Bolshoi Confidential by Simon Morrison, out from Liveright (Norton) in October 2016.  For some reason I thought this was a novel initially but heck no, it's an exposé of the Russian ballet company the Bolshoi culminating in the 2011 acid attack on the artistic director.  Of course I have to read this.  It was the first galley I picked up (I got caught in a scrum at the junction of the Hachette and Scholastic booths immediately after the exhibit hall opened on Wednesday so after extracting myself I headed for the relatively calmer waters of the literary presses).  When "balletbookworm" is on your business cards, no one can argue with that.



Along the same lines, I stopped by Overlook Press to pick up Florence Foster Jenkins: The Life of the World's Worst Opera Singer by Darryl W. Bullock, out June 7, 2016.  My voice teacher used to bring up how popular Florence Foster Jenkins was as a singer even though she was a dreadful because she was an entertainer.  This book sounds so fascinating - a batty socialite who bankrolls her own opera career which is a critical bomb but plays to packed houses?  Yes, please.  There is apparently a competing title about Florence coming out a bit later that's the tie-in for a movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep (say what?) but this is the book I was looking for.



Graywolf Press is high on my list of publishers who consistently put out amazing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  Eula Biss's On Immunity, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass.  Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy, out September 6, 2016, is going to be their next big hit, in my opinion.  It was longlisted for the Booker last year and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.  The novel concerns a trip taken by three elderly women to a religious seaside town and their interactions with a young documentary filmmaker, Nomi.  The action takes place over five days and I've recently been interested in novels that have compressed timelines.



When Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing won the Bailey's Prize in 2014 I immediately hopped on the library online catalog I placed it on hold.  It was such a mind-bending book, with an interesting change in the voice as the narrator grew from infant to young woman.  Crown had galleys of her next book, The Lesser Bohemians, out September 2016, available on Friday.  Oh, I can't wait to read it and the rep said this voice is just as good - this one is a coming of age novel that follows a young Irish woman who arrives in mid-1990s London for drama school and falls for an older actor.  I have high hopes for this.




Yes, I couldn't pass up Alan Moore's Jerusalem.  This enormous, 1200-page behemoth will be out September 2016 - Liveright is publishing it as both a hardcover and a three-volume paperback set with slipcase (like 2666 and Skippy Dies) so readers can pick their poison.  If you fall asleep reading often, I wouldn't pick the hardcover.  Clearly, this isn't the final cover art.  It looks completely batshit insane and the back cover is mostly a picture of Moore's face which was on a giant banner by the escalators, too.  Getting this galley was made all the more fun in that the Norton people told me I had to promise to wear a button to get the galley - the button had a "happy penis" on it, which is clearly appropriate to the book but not much of a challenge, in my opinion (I just can't put it on my lanyard at the store, drat).  My response - hand 'em over, the book and the button both.


Last, but certainly not least, I braved one in-booth signing line at the Penguin Random House booth to get a galley of George Saunders's first-ever novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.  It comes out February 14, 2017 (2017!!!!) and I've already started reading it.  It's so, so, so good, beautiful structure and interesting concept.  Essentially, the story concerns the night after the internment of Willie Lincoln (who died of typhoid during Lincoln's presidency) and is told through a combination of quotes from historical sources and a conversation-like narrative from the spirits that inhabit the graveyard.  It is amazing.


And I'm so stoked that I stood in line and got it signed (I had a conversation with Saunders - he asked where my town was and I said near Iowa City and he said he ate at Pagliai's on the way through IC while helping his daughter move to California, eeeee!).  Once I finish reading it, it's never leaving my house again.   Ok, but seriously, mark your calendars for February 14, 2017.  You will want to read this.  (This was also that signing where people were going up to the rep opening the books for Saunders and asking if they could just have one and getting real snotty about things like tickets and waiting in line.)

And that's my highlights for adult galleys I was planning to look out for at BEA 2016.  I'll have surprises, kids/teens highlights, and more to come.

I went to #bea16: Tales from a newbie

After years of seeing pictures and hearing stories about Book Expo America - the big industry trade show for publishing - I decided that I should try to go in 2016.  It would be moving back to Chicago for the first time in something like ten years meaning I could easily drive there.  So I'd just have to find a hotel and pony up the greenbacks for registration.

So I did.  Conveniently, Jenn of Jenn's Bookshelves and Michelle of That's What She Read had room for a tribute volunteer to crash on the hide-a-bed in their room.  So that's the hotel sorted.  And I used a Christmas gift to register for BEA.  My registration came out to over $300 because not only did I get the three-day pass but registered for BloggerCon (a same-site concurrent event for book bloggers) and the Adult Author Breakfast and ten ticketed signings (go big or go home, right?).  I passed on BookCon, that was going to be too many people in the convention center for my taste.

I had so much fun.  We wound up miscalculating on days and got an extra day in Chicago on Tuesday so we went to the Art Institute (I snagged some more prints for my rotating gallery).  We got real Chicago-style pizza.  We went to a party hosted by a literary agency at the Arts Building - in a beautiful interior courtyard - and another the next night at 360 Chicago at the top of the John Hancock Building hosted by Sourcebooks (that was wild).  And then we got to take the scenic route from McCormick Place to O'Hare because the freeway was completely backed up due to an accident - we got to see a part of south Chicago I'd never been in before, I'll say that much.

I bet you're still reading to hear about the books, right?  Well, I think for this post I'll stick primarily to what I saw or did at BEA.  I'll do another post highlighting books I'd been looking for at BEA and another about surprise books I hadn't expected to find.  Otherwise, this post is going to be hella long.

First off, I got to see so many of my favorite people who I only ever talk to online!  Meeting my roomies Jenn and Michelle only confirmed how awesome and lovely they are.  I kept (conveniently, because it was such a treat) running into Liberty who is always a sweetheart and also Rachel Manwill who got a tattoo at BEA (ok, not at BEA, she went to a tattoo artist elsewhere, but still, pretty rad).  I also got to chat with Rebecca, Amanda, Jeff, Yan, Clint, Jenn, Jessica, Kim, and Cassandra from my most favorite of bookternet sites, Book Riot - usually when we were all running from one place to another, of course, but I plan on seeing them all again at Book Riot Live.  I got to meet Candace (Beth Fish Reads) FINALLY! I ran across Kevin Smokler and I'm so excited for his new book, Brat Pack America, out this fall.  I finally got to meet Nathan Dunbar, who is quite a bit taller than I expected and that helped when we were tweeting in order to locate each other (congrats on the new gig), and Eric Smith, who was wearing his hat which helped me recognize him (because he didn't have a corgi on his person and that would have been weird but adorable).  And I finally, at the very end of the show, found the booksellers from Prairie Lights (my local indie), who I knew were there but hadn't come across them - I found them in the signing line for Berkeley Breathed at the Image booth because of course all the Iowa booksellers will all be there.

Second, I got to meet so many of the publicists and marketing staff that I email and tweet with about books and advance buzz and galleys.  This was really worth the price of the registration.  Getting to meet the Graywolf staff in person (Hi, Marisa!), seeing Pam Jafee from HarperCollins/Avon/whatever publisher hat she happens to be wearing at the time, meeting the Liveright people at Norton, and making friends with Mona from Other Press (and does she has a yummy French accent) - that was so, so awesome.  I sat down with the rep from Chooseco to talk about how much the kids at my store love Choose-Your-Own Adventure books.  I even managed to track down the elusive Erika Barmash - "elusive" because she had done a few huge events with Bloomsbury that week and I got lucky in that I finally wandered by the booth when she wasn't mobbed.

For my part, I should have made a Bloggess-style cutout of my Twitter avatar on a stick.  No one knows what I look like but they sure know who my cats are, particularly the stripy one napping on my knitting.

So that's the people I know...and there were A LOT of people in McCormick for BEA.  I was hearing from BEA alumni that there were fewer people present this year but that there was more space at McCormick than Javits in New York City.  This is insane to me!  There were so many people at this thing and then you stuff more of them (and more publisher/exhibitor booths since there were fewer of them this year, too) into a smaller space that is not as new...yikes!  If I go to BEA at Javits in NYC (and I'd like to, if only just to see what that's like) I'll definitely have to pack the hand sanitizer.  Eek!

I managed to catch a few panels.  I'll go into the Adult Author Breakfast and BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panels in a later post but suffice to say they had fantastic selections.  The What's New In YA? Panel was a gem - Lauren Oliver, Allyson Noel, Kendare Blake, and Melissa de la Cruz moderated by Veronica Roth.  Absolutely a scream and Kendare Blake's new book, Three Dark Crowns, sounds completely amazeballs.

I got pitched a variety of random books by authors, both on the fly and while stuck in a signing line.  A very nice lady caught Nathan and me and asked about getting her STEM book published (I wish her luck, she's got a lot of enthusiasm and STEM is big right now).  An odd person cornered me and kept trying figure out what kind of books I sold then walked off when I told him which bookstore I worked for (um, ok?).  I wound up with a postcard for some completely cracked-out sounding book about [insert slur here] shamans talking to a white lady in the desert (it's "true", apparently) - that wound up in the hotel garbage.  People will just walk down signing lines and pitch their book to anyone who can't get away.  You do you, but I would think that perhaps for the money one spends to get a pass to BEA one might be a tad more professional?  It just strikes me as odd.

The one thing that I was seemingly not prepared for, even though I'd heard stories, was how unbelievably rude attendees were to the reps and publishing staff.  I always tried to lead with a handshake, introduce myself, and then my twitter handle/blog (see above for why), and then ask politely after whatever galley or information I was trying to find.  I was registered as a bookseller so I always tried to be professional.  But the number of times I saw people try to take things that were marked "For Display Only" or "Do Not Take" or grabbed entire stacks of the same book or (and this was my favorite) tried to tell a rep in the middle of an author signing that they should just be able to "get" a galley without waiting in line....wow.  It wasn't even one type of attendee - I saw booksellers, bloggers, people with press passes, authors all doing it.  At the speed-dating event I attended (which was a pretty cool event), a woman at my table interrupted every rep during their pitch to ask how she could get free books from them.  Holy cow, so rude.  And I'll admit my eyes got a bit bigger than my brain and I grabbed stuff in passing but only if it was set out as an obvious galley drop.  (Ok, fine, I did beeline it to the galley table at the BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panel - I'll get to that in a subsequent post - but I only snagged one copy of each.)  Teen/YA Fantasy galley drops and in-booth signings were particularly insane.  I thought I was going to get murdered by a few YA bloggers because I was trying to get past the Bloomsbury booth during the run-up to the Sarah J. Maas cover reveal and all I wanted was to get to the Graywolf booth.  Yikes!  I had been hoping to snag a few titles for our kids' leads at the store but nope.

Overall, though, I had such a great time at BEA.  Most of it was exactly as I expected - which was a big, crazy industry show.  I definitely want to go again.  Unfortunately, not BloggerCon, which was a bust for me - not my blogging tribe.  But a repeat BEA trip is definitely in my future!

(And "First BEA Hoarding Compulsion" should be in the DSM-V - I took a picture of everything I came home with unpacked onto the couch and it's never going on the Internet because it makes me look completely insane.)

Happy Birthday, Georgette Heyer! (why, yes, Sourcebooks has a sale)

In honor of Georgette Heyer's 110th birthday Sourcebooks is offering fifty-two Heyer ebooks (and the companion volume, Georgette Heyer's Regency World) for $2.99 - 8/14 - 8/20 (Heyer's actual birthday is the16th)!  Heyer is considered the creator of the Regency Romance as we know it today (I recommend the Avon/Taverner series that runs These Old Shades, Devil's Cub, Regency Buck, and ending with the well-researched An Infamous Army).

Historical romance:
April Lady
Arabella
Bath Tangle
Beauvallet
The Black Moth
Black Sheep
Charity Girl
A Civil Contract
Convenient Marriage
The Corinthian
Cotillion
Cousin Kate
Devil's Cub
False Colours
Faro's Daughter
The Foundling
Frederica
Friday's Child
The Grand Sophy
Lady of Quality
The Masqueraders
The Nonesuch
Pistols for Two
Powder and Patch
The Quiet Gentleman
Regency Buck
The Reluctant Widow
Sprig Muslin
Sylvester (or, the Wicked Uncle)
The Talisman Ring
These Old Shades
The Toll-Gate
The Unknown Ajax
Venetia

Historical Fiction:
The Conqueror
An Infamous Army
My Lord John
Royal Escape
Simon the Coldheart
Spanish Bride

Mystery:
Behold, Here's Poison
A Blunt Instrument
Death in the Stocks
Detection Unlimited
Duplicate Death
Envious Casca
Footsteps in the Dark
No Wind of Blame
Penhallow
They Found Him Dead
Unfinished Clue
Why Shoot a Butler?

(Let's just say that I maybe bought too many all at once....)


So, I won some books...

Quite a while ago. I completely forgot to post about them and thank the very lovely person/people who sent them.  (And then they got put under my desk for "safekeeping" - my office is a mess.)

Back during the Spring Bloggiesta bloggers who signed up were entered to win either of two grand prize packs (of books, obviously). Me being me, I forgot about it completely. I was having fun with Bloggiesta and was getting a lot accomplished. Go figure.

And then Danielle emailed me to tell me I won the Walden Pond Press pack.

Color me surprised!!  Thank you so, so much!

These are all really popular/well-written MG/YA books that I've considering reading.

I have no choice now!  And I can't wait until I can share them with my nieces (they're six, and they can read, so they're getting sooooo close.

In order top to bottom the books are:

• The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy (this has since come out in hardcover and looks so wonderfully funny)
• Juniper Berry by MP Kozlowsky
• Neversink by Barry Wolverton
• The Fourth Stall Part II by Chris Rylander
• The Fourth Stall by Chris Rylander
• Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu (which has so many good reviews I'm surprised I didn't already own it)

Thanks so much again to Danielle and Walden Pond Press!!



One of Our Thursdays is Missing

Thursday Next is one of my most favorite literary characters, making Jasper Fforde a favored author.  Very favored.  There was a great deal of gleeful hopping up and down when I bought my copy.  One of Our Thursdays is Missing is the sixth book in the Thursday Next series and I was a bit apprehensive when starting - it's not narrated by Thursday.

Not the real Thursday, anyway, but Thursday5 who has taken over narration of the revamped TN series since the erasure of Thursday1-4 (and The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco) at the end of First Amongst Sequels.  All the other books in the series are narrated in the first person by Thursday, only switching narrators briefly when necessary (like when Thursday was in a coma in Something Rotten and Landen received a visit from Commander Bradshaw, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and Emperor Zhark - Landen narrated that chapter) so an entire book from a slightly different viewpoint....  I was a bit guarded for the first chapter but then I got lost in the plot and rich stock of book jokes and puns.  I love it.  Written Thursday is just as wonderful a narrator as real Thursday - it gives a slightly different perspective on the BookWorld and what a BookWorld it is.  The BookWorld is a major part of what makes the TN series so terribly much fun and it undergoes a major reorganization at the beginning of OoOTiM - from an amorphous Nothing to a Fiction Island in a sphere.  The World consists of text description, therefore it can be rewritten and rearranged. 

The rearrangement suits the plot of OoOTiM far better because Thursday5 (who really isn't called that anymore, she's simply called Thursday so I probably better get used to it) now helps out with the Jurisfiction version of the NTSB when she's not busy with her series.  Thursday is ordered to whip up a report (read: overlook the real cause) about an odd chunk of book that has crash landed in the middle of the island.  On her way to the accident site, she is accosted by an odd red-haired book character who intimates that all is not right in the BookWorld: the real Thursday Next has gone missing!  In the company of a clockwork robot named Sprockett and a malfunctioning Mrs. Malaprop, Thursday begins her own covert investigation into the real cause of the accident and the real Thursday's disappearance.  Written Thursday must confront the dangers of the Outland (the Real World) and Vanity publishing to save real Thursday and Fiction Island.

Fforde introduces new bits and bobs to the BookWorld with characters old and new.  Written Thursday visits the Lady of Shallott, the possessor of a very special mirror.  The Thursday character understudy has a prediliction for goblins, something of which the written Pickwick has an outspoken dislike.  The Council of Genres is worried that the rising level of e-books will drain the Text Sea.  Fforde even thinks up a "feedback loop" where readers inprint their own thoughts and impressions back onto the fictional character, not without issue: Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe. (p 69)

I can't recommend the Thursday Next series enough.  They are silly, absurd, thrilling, hilarious, literary, and unputdownable.  If you've never read any Thursday books, start with The Eyre Affair; if you've kept up with Thursday, what are you waiting for??  Read this book!  (I'm waiting very impatiently for the OoOTiM release on audiobook so Thursday can keep me company in the car, just like the previous volumes).

Two loves, one stone: knitting and new books

I love knitting and I love new books so a new knitting book totally hits both happy spots.  Behold what arrived:

This is really fun.  It's organized like an encyclopedia and has an entry for just about everything.  Techniques, equipment, fibers, designers, styles, and even important knitting locations like the Faroe Islands.  ust open it up to find anything you want to know (and it's got a blue dust jacket, pretty).

What I'm really hoping for is a reprint of The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt; it is amazing but used copies (sold by anyone with even half an idea of how in-demand that book is) are selling for $200+.  Do you hear me Simon and Schuster??  There are a lot of knitters who would be willing to buy a $35-$45 hardcover if you reprint it! (It's always been a rumor that the reprint is coming out "next year").

You know you're a foodie when...

...you're geeking out at your new cookbooks.

I ditched a whole box of old cookbooks I didn't use/had nasty recipes/had actually never opened before I moved.  I've been eating much better since I moved (odd how not being depressed by your house and its crappy level of hard water can affect your desire to cook and eat at home) so last weekend I wanted to get a couple of new cookbooks about decently-easy-to-make healthy food.

I like the recipes from Whole Living magazine, just not enough to buy the magazine regularly, so the power foods cookbook is perfect.  Martha Stewart isn't a massive favorite of mine, but I know the Everyday Food magazine always has easy-to-prepare meals (and the pictures look yummy).

And then, last night, I scored a fantastic deal.  There were cookbook box sets - like gift sets - at the store that got really discounted.  As in "about 75% off" discounted.  These are fancy cookbooks, great for reference or have AMAZING recipes (also with ingredients I'm pretty sure I never heard of).  I actually had been considering buying one or the other of these sets but just couldn't justify the expense before.  I'm so excited about this one:

Can you guess what it is?

 It's the deluxe set, Volumes I and II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in a beautiful blue cloth box.  Love.

And then there's this one, which makes me do a little "sqeeee":

The Essential Thomas Keller box set - French Laundry and ad hoc at home.  I may never make it to the restaurant in Napa but I can attempt to make things served there.  Keller notes in the introduction that the chef is the soul of the recipe; you can make a "perfect" dish, but if you didn't feel the passion while making that dish then it wasn't perfect for you.

 

It even comes with a facsimile copy of the opening-night French Laundry menu, signed by Keller.  Wheee!


I had a gift card left to use so I only had to fork over 7 dollars cash for those two sets.  Seriously geeking out and drooling all over that French Laundry cookbook.  Now I just need Bouchon for yummy bistro cooking.

The Orchid Affair

Of course, timing is everything.  Right after I create and post about my anti-HEA book display I go and read a HEA book.  Hahaha.

The Orchid Affair is the newest Lauren Willig "Pink Carnation" novel and there's no way I could pass it up.  I read it in under three hours and I have a pretty signed bookplate from Lauren.  Fangirl, yes?

The new heroine in The Orchid Affair is not so new to us.  Back in The Masque of the Black Tulip we were introduced to some trainee spies at Richard and Amy's spy school, one of them being a rather prim governess by the name of Miss Grey.  Fresh from training, Miss Laura Grey has been inserted by the Pink Carnation into the household of one Andre Jaouen, cousin of Fouche and employed by the Prefecture de Paris, as Mlle Laure Griscogne, governess to Jaouen's two children.  Laura has her own history in France, Paris in particular, and what seems like a simple assignment - observe and report on Jaouen's activities, particularly those relating to Bonaparte, Delaroche, Fouche, etc. - becomes far more complicated and dangerous than Laura expected.

Lauren excels at making her heroines different from one another and Laura is no exception.  She is the oldest Pink Carnation heroine at 32 (I believe Mary was previously the eldest at about 23 or 24) and the most educated and worldly.  She is also the heroine who, if thrown out into the world, could survive easily by her wits and intelligence making her an excellent agent for the Pink Carnation and a heroine you really want to root for.  Once the major action of the Regency plot heats up, you really, really want Laura to succeed in her mission and have a good ending (being a Pink Carnation book, you do have some idea of how the book will end right from the beginning, but you still want it to happen and would be disappointed if Laura didn't get her man).  Jaouen is a great addition to Lauren's heroes: a father, serious, educated, haunted, and he has his own secrets.

While some of the earlier Pink books felt more like Regency Romps, there is more urgency to the plotline of The Orchid Affair and, Augustus Whittlesby and his terrible, overblown poetry aside, it is a darker book.  Lauren doesn't skimp on the realities of torture in post-Revolutionary France and, while dead bodies have shown up in previous books, the violence is more nuanced and necessary to the action of the book.  There is more at stake in the denouement than just information, state secrets, and international espionage with masks and flowers.

I find myself far more interested in the Regency spy plots than in the framing story of modern-day PhD candidate Eloise, although it is through Eloise that we access the Regency plots.  I think this is because we only see bits and pieces of the Eloise-and-Colin-have-a-relationship development even thought the framing story usually ties in thematically with part of the book; in book 3, The Deception of the Emerald Ring, Geoff and Letty wind up married as part of a mistaken-identity-botched-elopement and have to learn to overcome one anothers' prejudices and assumptions, while Eloise has to overcome some of her assumptions about Colin in order for their relationship to move forward.  In the The Orchid Affair, Eloise gets to spend a little more time with Colin's air-head mother and decidedly sleazy step-father/cousin.  I actually got to like Colin a little more in this book, probably because of his rotten family (family is a large part of the Regency plot).

The Orchid Affair was, as expected, as very fun book to read.  Coming off a very hectic and disorganized three weeks of moving, not being able to find things, writing very large checks, and heaps of stress it was nice to curl up with a spandy new book, a pot of tea, and the cats to read the evening and night away with characters old and new, flowery spies, and dastardly villains.  I can't wait until next January for a new installment!

Pink Carnation Heroine Standings:

Laura and Letty are having a face-off over who is the best Pink heroine; Laura is pretty clever but Letty is really stubborn and can create excellent distractions. Arabella is looking on to see if she can capitalize on the disagreement (if Pen doesn't beat her to the punchline). Mary thinks she is better than all this, Charlotte is reading a book, Hen is practicing her scales (and making sure Miles doesn't eat all the ginger biscuits), and Amy is far too busy training new spies to notice.

The Pink Carnation is, of course, observing the whole thing.  Silently taking notes.

Lazy Saturdays are necessary!

I had a lazy (but busy!) Saturday morning.  The weather is all sorts of Iowa crazy - humid with pop-up thunderstorms, tornado watches, and flood watches - so that means it must be time for the Iowa Arts Fest!  There seemed to be more booths this year than previous and any sort of art or handcraft you can think of was represented.  Painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, metalsmithing, jewelery, basket-weaveing, furniture-making, stained-glass, someone who "paints" with thread, and the guy who makes wind-chimes out of found objects (I can't decide if it was kitchy or just junk).  I've never been able to afford anything I like at the Arts Fest in previous years but I found something I wanted this year:

Aren't they cool?  A guy in Kalona, IA, makes trays, lazy Susans, salt-and-pepper shakers, trivets, etc., with this inlaid wood technique.  These were noted to be trivets but they're a little small, in my opinion, so I want to use them as oversize coasters.  I really liked the irregular chevron pattern and the little bits of reddish wood that pop.  Additionally, they were affordable.  Yay!

On the way back to the car I stopped at Dick Blick (to indulge my love of colored pens and pencils) then swung by the yarn store to pick up the Addi turbo needle I ordered (I needed a 32-inch #7US circular).

Then I hit the library.  I checked out books:

All kids' books this time around.  Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of the few Beverly Cleary books I never read - it also won the Newbery so it's for my Newbery Project as well as A Gathering of Days.  I've been thinking about reading the "Series of Unfortunate Events" so I picked up The Bad Beginning.

And then in the library basement they were having the Friends of the Library sale.  Now, Day 1 of the library sale is ALWAYS on a Friday so if there was anything super good I certainly missed it since I, and a good portion of the adult population, was working.  Day 2 is not without its merits, however, because all adult books are half off.  Check it:

The Life of Pi, Empire Falls, House of Sand and Fog, and Sula all for TWO DOLLARS.  Yup, adult paperbacks are fifty cents each on the second day of the sale.  So it's worth missing out on the first choice stuff on Friday.  The Life of Pi is a deaccessioned library book (from the library itself) and the library stickers are under the plastic covering the book; I don't think I'll be able to get them off.

It's also extra-discount week at the bookstore so I made a small, preliminary purchase (technically last night) to get me started:

The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip are the next two JG Farrell books I need to read (I'm reading Troubles right now); Siege will also count toward my Booker Project and Challenge.  I also got the very pretty two-volume Rabbit novels (one and two) set.  I've only ever read Rabbit, Run - and it wasn't so pleasant since it was for high school English - so the four-books-in-two looked appealing.

I was also conned into buying by the merch manager seduced by this ridiculously cute, and very true to life, Cat Companion Journal by Jeffrey Brown.  The front and back illustrations are reproduced in color and there are more cartoons throughout.  For the record, my cats have done probably everything depicted in the cartoons.

Hooray for new books!

PS: The Iowa Arts Fest thoughts remind me that I will miss the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival in Adel, IA, next weekend because it's my niece's baptism.  I'd love to be able to visit a fiber festival just once although it does sound like a hay fever festival for the sinuses but I'd be willing to deal for some good wool.

PPS edit: I just had an exhausting shift at the bookstore.  So much for my lazy Saturday.

April is National Poetry Month!

In honor of National Poetry Month I purchased two new volumes of poetry.  Penguin Classics just released new editions of Jorge Luis Borges's poetry.

 Poems of the Night is a collection of poems about night and darkness, dreams and nightmare.  Borges lost his eyesight late in 1955 but these poems are drawn from the entire span of his career.  Included is the luminous "Poem of the Gifts" - a poem composed when Borges was named director of the Argentine National Library after his sight had gone.

The Sonnets is the volume I am most excited to read.  This volume is the first time all of Borges's sonnets appear together in one volume.  Sonnets are my favorite poetic forms and they come in different kinds.








Both of these volumes are parallel-text editions - the original Spanish is on the left page and the English translation is on the right page; I don't speak Spanish but, thanks to a lot of voice training, I can pronounce it and sometimes you just have to read something aloud in its original language.  The are many translators associated with these poems - including WS Merwin and John Updike - so these will be fun to read.

I also have to bust out my Shel Silverstein for Poetry Month - "I cannot go to school today!"