Sunday Salon: The BEA Book Box Arrived!

The Sunday Salon.com
There are other things I could write about today, but I don’t have a lot of time for writing this weekend, and you’re probably more interested in a book report anyway. (Yes, I know I said last week that books aren’t everything..and I stand by that, but seriously, how could there not be a post-BEA book report?)

I actually didn’t ship a lot of books back from BEA (relatively speaking) and I brought back part of the new stock in my luggage last week – I sent the box off on Thursday, so it didn’t include anything I got at the Atria Books event I attended on Thursday evening or my Book Blogger Con swag – but I wanted to wait until the whole crew was together again before posting about them.

But first…I also bought books in New York City! Visits to SoHo neighbors Housing Works Bookstore Cafe and McNally Jackson Books were absolutely in order.

This is a mix of new and (barely) used, and if you look closely, you may notice that the two on the far left are ARCs. Housing Works is a charity shop that sells donated books, and its location in the home base of the publishing industry means that the donations it receives include very recent new releases…and galleys.  They sell the galleys for $3 each. Because sales benefit their charitable work, I really didn’t hesitate about buying the two galleys I did. Laura Dave’s The First Husband: A Novel is already out (and has gotten some good reviews already), and Kwei Quartey’s Children of the Street: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery (July 2011 pub date) is the follow-up to his well-received Wife of the Gods.

Approximately half the books that came back from BEA and related events were advance copies. I have assembled them into a neat stack in order of publication date, but not before I took their picture.



Thanks to Kim’s able guidance through the booths of some of her favorite nonfiction publishers on the expo floor, I picked up a nice mix of nonfiction in both galley and finished form.


(OK,in the interest of disclosure, there is one work of fiction in this stack.)
The real treats for me are the signed books, including the two special ones I mentioned last Monday.
(See them right up in front?)
The biggest signed-book treat wasn’t for me, though. And the reception it got from its recipient makes me a very strong candidate for the World’s Best Stepmom prize, 2011.

Getting the next book in your favorite series is good. Getting a personally inscribed copy of the next book in your favorite series way before any of your friends…well, that’s all kinds of good.
Goliath is Spencer’s book, and I brought back a few other books to give away as well, so I have not entered those into my LibraryThing database. The rest of my BEA and BBC books are in their own collection – and for what it’s worth, they’ve brought my entire LT library listing to a full 1000 books. That’s not quite as horrifying as it sounds; the list includes books I’ve read, books I’ve yet to read, wishlist books, and books I’ve given away and no longer own. If that number were just the TBR collection, there would be reason to panic..but that’s not even at 400. That’s certainly enough to make me nervous, but nowhere near panic-provoking – yet, anyway.
Have you added anything exciting to your TBR lately?

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