I have so many books added to my list from publisher catalogs, reader advisory meetings, the Best Of sessions, and best of all: freebies! I think I did really well on grabbing free books considering it was my first ALA, so go me. I'm not going to bother listing everything I nabbed here in the blog post, but if you're curious, go to my Goodreads account and click on the ALA-2010 tag (or click here). At the moment I don't have the ARCs and freebies that I grabbed on the list because that would involve unpacking and repacking my suitcase. But I will end up having about 200 books to-read and/or To Read.* The only thing that could make this better is if someone magically paid my way to go to BEA next year.
I want to tell you about everything I did, but I get the feeling you don't read my blog for my personal experiences so much as my thoughts and reflections, so I'll just tell you a couple of the highlights.
Speakers I went to included the fabulous and amazing Toni Morrison; Nancy Pearl's tear jerking interview with Mary McDonagh, who is writing about and filming and documentary about To Kill a Mockingbird; Dave Isay talked about Story Corps, which made my nerdy historian heart beat a little faster. Sadly I missed Sir Salman Rushdie in favor of going to a session on the future of book reviewing. This made me sad because the session couldn't have possibly been as good as Rushdie, and I had read articles regarding book reviewing that pretty much said the same thing as the guest panel. Sad face. I was trying to be a good blogger, and this is what it got me.
I went to quite a few different Book sessions about upcoming stuff that deserves Some Attention. Topics included a nomination process for YALSA's Best of Young Adult Fiction (I was fascinated by the process and how they talked about the books), the Best of University Press (it was taped by CSPAN, so I might've shown up on TV!), and editors'/publishers' favorite upcoming books (hosted by Nancy Pearl.
Speaking of Nancy Pearl, it seems like I couldn't get away from the woman at the conference. Not that she is a person anyone would want to get away from. She is seriously the nicest person I have ever met and ever so deserving to become an action figure. She also happened to show up at the Unshelved booth while I was there, so I got my picture taken with Gene Ambaum, Bill Barnes, AND Nancy Pearl. It totally made my conference, here's the picture:
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| From A Librarian's Life in Books |
I have to admit, we are incredibly adorable in this picture, all of us. And this came at a point where I very much needed a boost in energy... Shortly after that I also got my picture taken with a Storm Trooper, a very short Darth Maul, Empire officers, and other Empire bads. This was taken with someone else's camera and he said he'd let me know when it's ready. I went total fan-girl...it was slightly embarassing...there may have been a little bit of Derp-ing going on. Yeah, not even I knew I was that big of a geek until that moment, and I could.not.stop.myself.
There was some good eating when I was able to escape the programming early enough in the evening. I went to a Dim Sum place called Ping Pong, there was the Korean place Mandu's, and uh, an Indian restaurant in Chinatown that I was too damned tired to remember the name of.
Also...I joined Twitter. Finally. It's all Gene Ambaum's fault when he said he was going to Tweet our photo and he linked to my blog! See! Librarians=awesome. Anyway, I'm @libs_lib. Get it? I'm a librarian's librarian, but it's also Lib(rarian')s L(ife) I(n) B(ooks). Shut up, I'm clever. Now to get back to recovering and normally blog posty things.
*As in actual copies of the books.
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