You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
Erma Bombeck
Happy Independence Day!
Our Mom is visiting me in Brooklyn this weekend. When she comes I always look for things that we haven’t done before so when I finally realized that BookCon was going to be at the Javits Center while she was going to be here we decided to go. Both of our parents inspired our love for reading. Mom has already 81 books in 2017. Putting my 25 books to shame. She’s never been to anything like this before and my only convention experience was at BookRiot Live. Which was tiny compared to this. The Javits Center is huge. Not surprising since this is also the home to New York Comic Con. We decided first to explore the vendors as we got our bearings. Pretty much every major publisher was there with a mini store and most a signing area. Now there were signing areas that you had to sign up for ahead of time and then smaller ones that you had to line up for. It was kind of confusing what was what. Also, we seemed to always miss all the free giveaways the publishers were handing out but that’s ok. I’ll live. After we had a quick bite to eat we headed to hear Rainbow Rowell talk. I’ve read all of her books but Mom hasn’t. Before the talk began, Mom asked if any of her books would make her cry and I was like yes but I’ll lend her Attachments because of all Rainbow’s books that seems to have the less tears. I think. She was just a delightful as I imagined her to be but the one comment that stuck me was talking about Eleanor and Park and sad it is that having a fat female protagonist was somehow revolutionary. We all know someone who is overweight. We have seen them in relationships, married and have kids so why wouldn’t they have their own love stories? After Rainbow, we went back to the vendor floor. We each bought a few books, tote bags and shirts before heading down to hear Jeffery Tambor. The Arrested Development star has a new memoir coming out and after seeing him I want to read it. He was funny, smart and completely honest. We then went to our final panel of the day with Maggie Stiefvater, Kami Garcia, Laini Taylor and Marissa Meyer about Magic and World Building moderated by Daniel Jose Older. I adore all these authors books (Mr. Older’s book are on my to read list) so it was interesting to hear how they all go about crafting their stories. The most interesting part was talking about you are always building a world no matter if you are making a world from scratch or drawing from the real world. I’ve never thought of that. Maggie said that authors talk about how if they were to assign each of them to write about this room they would all write it differently because they are writing from their perspective their view and how that is reality but not completely real. It was an interesting talk. It was then that we decided to leave as it was a full day of books and fun. I’m glad we did it because it was something new and different. My one complaint was that it would have been better if they had clearer signage of where things were because it was kind of hard to figure out where things were. We had to wander around to find things. Either then that it was a fun day.
Kate and I named our blog Stacks Exceed Life Expectancy because our to-read list so many books that we know we will never be able to read them all. Literacy has always been important in our family. It was our mother who taught us to never leave the house without a book. She once came to visit me for a weekend and brought 8 books with her, you know so she had options. I believe she read through half of them while she was here. I thing about our parents is that when ever they aren’t doing something, they are reading. When they get up in the morning and before they go to bed. They even bring a book with them to the bar. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that our house is filled with books. They are literally everywhere. When I was home last month to visit, I did a snapchat tour of my Mom’s books. Her books monopolize our family room, with some in the kitchen and on the stairs. Now these are not all of her books. Only a taste. Maybe next time I go home, I’ll do a tour of our dad’s.
2 Women, So Many Books 