Phoenix Comicon 2014: The Haul

Hi all! Just here with a quick post about all the books that came to live with me in wake of this year’s comicon, to pass the time while I’m working away on the final panel report. I exhibited a fair amount of restraint with regards to book-buying, and lucky for me, even with that restraint I came home with lots and lots of reading material thanks to all the publisher giveaways and swag! Have a look:

These are the books I ponied up some cash and bought. The top four in the pile were acquired at a steep discount at the Angry Robot booth after I attended their panel. What can I say, cheap books are hard to turn down! I also couldn’t say no to the Rogues anthology when I saw that it was on sale early at a booth which shall not be named, especially considering the added opportunity of having three of the featured authors present at PHXCC to sign it! Nor could I pass up the chance to meet the author of a graphic novel I really liked last year, Monster on the Hill, and get him to sign/doodle a copy of it for me. Seriously y’all, you may not be convinced, but this stack was me being the very soul of restraint!

These are the books I already owned by authors attending the con, and I schlepped them around during the weekend to get them all autographed. (Am I crazy? When I read that typed out, I feel like I sound crazy. Like a book zealot of some sort.) Luckily we had a rolly suitcase to lighten the load. To anyone else in a situation where you need to haul books around for many hours, this is my advice to you: GET A ROLLY SUITCASE. You will not be sorry.

And THESE, my dears, are the free books I ended up with! Quite a tower, eh? My thanks go out to Del Rey and Tor for so graciously offering them to all book-nerd types in attendance at the con. So far I’ve read three of them (well, technically I read a library e-copy of Locke Lamora before the con, but I say that still counts), and look forward to trying out the rest!

Here are a couple samplers I got from the Del Rey booth. The big one has short snippets from books by many different Del Rey authors, and the smaller one is a nice-sized chunk of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, coming in June of next year.

Lastly, we have all the assorted swag accumulated over the weekend. There’s a Hellboy anniversary window cling from Dark Horse, along with various buttons and posters from them, some bags from Tor, some trading cards from the Monster on the Hill graphic novel, a keychain for John Scalzi’s upcoming novel Lock In, other posters, art from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic novels signed by Amber Benson…all kinds of cool stuff. I think my favorites are the Tor.com tote and the monster trading cards.

All in all, it was a weekend that ended up contributing to the ever-shrinking state of available real estate in my room for books and other things. I’m excited to read new books by authors I was heretofore unfamiliar with, and to catch up on the series of authors I already know and love.

Any of these books catch your eye? Any recommendations on where to start in my foray into the piles? Let me know down below!

Big Box o’ BEA

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled PHXCC coverage with this look at the box of awesomeness Susan sent my way after Book Expo America. It arrived in the middle of all the Phoenix Comicon fun, and between the two I find myself overwhelmed by books! A pleasant state, I do aver. So many great things to read—I’m going to have to fill a jar with the titles written on slips of paper and allow chance to guide my hand in choosing what next to read! But first—

Here is the leaning tower of books that emerged from the extraordinarily well-packed box S sent me. I’ve got them all arranged by release date, so there’s at least some semblance of organization in my read-and-review-all-the-ARCs plan.

This is the lovely collection of cookbook samplers S gathered at BEA. They all look great, but I’m especially excited about Will It Waffle? (a question I often ask myself) and Seriously Delish. Time to get cooking!

This is some of the random assorted swag that accompanied the books. I love the stuff related to Wonder, and the Hello Kitty poster is now hanging on my wall! How did it escape my notice that Hello Kitty Reading Day is a thing? There’s also a cool rhinestone tattoo thingy that S couldn’t remember what book it was a promotion for, but it occurs to me now that it would make sense if it had come with the ARC for The Jewel (which I think she did pick up).

Here are some of the ones I was SUPER anticipating that made their way into my hot little hands! Scalzi, Holly Black times two, Westerfeld, and CLARIEL!!!!!

I think this will be my first foray into the pile, though—it sounds really cute and whimsical, and it has a blurb from Norton freaking Juster on the cover! (I love The Phantom Tollbooth, so I’m willing to go with anything he recommends.) Here’s what it says on the back:

What if a riddle could save your life?

A tangle of ingenious riddles, a malevolent necklace called a torc, an array of menacing birds, and a writing desk that won’t reveal its contents: these are just some of the obstacles that stand between Gabriel and his father, who has vanished from their Brooklyn brownstone without a trace.

When Gabriel rescues an orphaned baby raven named Paladin, he discovers a valuable family secret that may ultimately lead him to his father. Along with Paladin and three valiant friends, Gabriel sets off to bring him home.

Here is an epic fantasy filled with unforgettable characters, seemingly unanswerable riddles, and astonishing bursts of magic at every turn.

What do you think?

And HERE we have the galley-est galley that every galley-ed! Or at least that’s what I’ve been calling it—Susan will vouch for that. (Really, I’m strangely fascinated by it.) I read the first book in this series earlier this year and I liked it, though it wasn’t as much as I’d hoped it to be. Still, when Sus called me from the Javits Center to ask if I wanted her to snatch this one up, I said YES because a) it’s about all-new characters, and b) another pretty cover. Also, it’s the roughest ARC/galley I’ve ever laid eyes or hands on, and I guess it’s not really either of those things because it says “bound manuscript” on the cover. You know what adds to the fun? THE FACT THAT I CAN’T USE IT FOR REVIEW PURPOSES. How amazing is that?! I feel like I’m getting a super special sneak preview. :D

And that, bookworms and moths, concludes this installment of “Fun Stuff in the Mail.” Heard of any of these upcoming books? Which ones look good to you? Let us know!

The Haul: VNSA Book Sale Treasures

I have already covered my children’s book rescues and my sci-fi/fantasy adoptions from this year’s VNSA book sale, so all that remains is what I unearthed in the rare and unusual books section. It’s like the Department of Mysteries, only BETTER! (No fragile prophecies lying around that I saw, anyway.) It’s the only part of the sale that isn’t half off on Sunday, and there is usually some pretty interesting and/or weird stuff lurking there. Last year we found a book from the ‘60s or ‘70s about playing tennis. Normal, right? NO. All the models demonstrating the strokes and movement were naked. Who comes up with this stuff?? Though I can think of many people in my life who would appreciate receiving such a book mailed to them in an anonymous, unmarked package, I did not purchase it. I did, however, find an autographed copy of a book by famed Japan scholar Donald Keene, along with a program sheet from a presentation he made at Columbia University tucked inside. Completely unexpected, but a very cool surprise!

I hoped to find some similarly unexpected treasures this year, and I was not disappointed. My first discovery was this cute little book from 1966:

The Haul: VNSA Book Sale, Part the Second

Ah, used books. Having already gleefully shown off my myriad discoveries in the Children’s Books section of Ye Olde VNSA Book Sale, it may surprise you to find out that that wasn’t even half of my overall take. Or maybe not. You may know me, and know I have a book problem.

A very big problem indeed.

After a thorough combing of the kids' section, I headed a couple tables over to the science fiction and fantasy area, where I scrounged up most of the contents of that there box. I think some old-school SFF geek must’ve cleaned out their stash this year, because there was a lot of really cool stuff—WAY more than I remember from my brief perusal of the section last year. Among all the books and authors I was unfamiliar with, I found quite a few keepers, such as this lovely collection of Douglas Adams books:

The Haul: VNSA Book Sale, Part the First

In Phoenix, on one weekend in February every year, the Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association has a huge book sale. There are drop boxes located around the city to collect donations of books for the sale throughout the year, and people can arrange to have donations picked up from their homes. The profits from the sale go to charities, so you can pick up a few new books and help out some worthy organizations at the same time! I’d heard about the sale a lot when I was growing up, but the timing was never right for me to attend until last year. Now that I’ve been, it will be something I always look forward to—used book heaven! The VNSA sale is truly massive (they hold it at the state fair grounds), and you never know what will turn up there. And if that’s not enough, it’s all dirt cheap! Like $.50 - $1 for paperbacks, $4 for hardbacks. VERY CHEAP. To sweeten the deal even further, on Sunday everything is half-price. Madness! The exhibition hall, still smelling faintly of farm animals from the fair, is full of tables labeled with any and all sorts of book topics, ranging from the general (“children”) to the strangely specific (“secret societies”). Last year I only managed to plumb the depths of the cookbook section before getting overloaded by all the books and people, but this year, I and my book-nerds-in-crime (my mom and a friend) had more strategy—we arrived right at the opening time of 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, hoping to beat the crowds and have a better selection, AND we brought a rolly cart for transporting our finds. Genius.

And boy did we adopt some homeless books! I didn’t spend much time in the cookbooks this year, as I’m still cooking my way through all the ones I picked up last year, but I did manage to trawl through WAY more sections than I did previously (but still probably not even 1/4 of what was on offer!). My mother and I have a bit of an obsession with old children’s books, so I spent an inordinate amount of time in that area. I love the funny titles, the cover design, the cool art inside…they just make me smile. Here are some of the ones we picked up as we burrowed through the kids’ book stacks this year:

Cute drawings!

In Which I Return from the BEA

Hello again, bookworms and moths! I’ve returned from the event of the season, Book Expo America, with a book haul to end all my previous presumptions of having impressive library hauls. Plus several new book blogging friends (Paper Reader, Girls in Capes, Dead Book Darling, and Headstrong-Tomgirl —all of them have much more established blogs with incisive reviews, so check them out!), and answers to most of my questions about American Girl books.

Anyway, for everyone as clueless as I was before I registered for this shindig, the BEA is to the publishing industry what NY Fashion Week is to the garment industry.

NYFW	BEA
Dress is extremely fashionable	Dress is power-lunch or power-walk
Runway shows with next season's clothing	Galley proof giveaways of next season's books
Stars are mobbed for autographs	Authors are mobbed for autographs
Editors spew theories about "upcoming trends"	Editors spew theories about "upcoming trends"

Totally the same thing! Except with people happily eating cupcakes at parties, and a focus on books instead of clothing...

Trend Report

YA Dystopian is Dead. Long Live YA Contemporary, Diversity, and Melded Genres

Editors from Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, Candlewick Press, The Atlantic, and Disney-Hyperion proclaimed that the YA Dystopian trend is over, but every few minutes they seemed to decide another buzzword was the future of the YA market. I can’t remember if different publishing houses were predicting different trends, but it seems like the YA book world could be spending the next season in transition before a new real trend emerges. Let’s face it, diversity and melded genres cannot be a fad the way that vampires/werewolves/angels/corrupt futuristic governments have been because something that’s offering novelty at every corner is not going to gain the trust of reluctant readers. (Unless you distill “diversity” into a trite common theme of “I’m different but I love myself for it!” which I very much hope doesn't happen.)

Based on the galleys I picked up and the books I heard about at the panel, transcending time is a theme, whether through literal time travel (the much-hyped All Our Yesterdays), genetic immortality (Wake Up Missing), or ghosts (Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer; Plague in the Mirror; Raven Boys quartet; These Broken Stars).

As for the editor-observed diversity theme, maybe there’s a Native American Indian moment coming this fall (Ghost Hawk, If I Ever Get out of Here, Sorrow’s Knot), but it looks like there’s a long way to go still.

Welcome Back, Stand Alone Novels!

The editors on the YA panel said that they are “weary” of the trilogy craze that has dominated the market for years. We can only hope that readers agree, and that John Green gets some healthy competition on the NYTimes YA Bestsellers list.

New Adult Fiction

This is the latest buzzword, and it seems to describe YA-like books with late teen / early twenties main characters who have more sex than normal YA characters. I think I picked up two that may qualify (Left Drowning and The Art of Falling). The only thing truly interesting about New Adult is that there’s no consensus on whether it exists.

I think it may work like imaginary numbers, so when a publisher has only one manuscript that seems like New Adult, it gets marketed as YA; but two manuscripts get farmed to genres, three claim a mature YA designation, and if there are four then the publisher can announce that New Adult is real. (Yes, the math on this is not just imaginary but wrong.)

American Girls Historical Book Questions

(because you know you had them too)

Why did Elizabeth Cole (Felicity books) become a blonde, and did someone simply Photoshop all the images of her to keep girls from learning she originally had beautiful dark brown hair?

At the time of the Elizabeth Cole BFF doll creation, American Girl determined that they had overrepresented brunettes, and for the sake of balance they needed another blonde. I really enjoyed talking to the American Girl editor, but it is INSANE that the American Girl/Mattel people thought that blondes should be 40% of their visual image.

As for how such hair changes are done, the illustrator was asked to rework some pictures. There may have also been some Photoshopping involved, but it was mostly done by hand.

Why wasn’t Ivy the main character of the Julie/Ivy 1970s pair? Did American Girl really need another blonde?

The process of making an American Girl historical character starts with brainstorming issues or events that the company would like to address, matching these to a time period, and fleshing out further themes for the series. The company then commissions an author, who develops the character’s personality and stories. After that, the company determines what the character looks like (by figuring out what color hair they need, as we saw above).

In the case of Julie/Ivy, author Megan McDonald wrote a draft of Meet Julie that described Ivy. The production team loved Ivy so much that they hired an additional author, Lisa Yee, to write a separate book about Ivy in time for the Julie launch.

I still think it’s weird that American Girl’s efforts towards showing the diversity of experiences and circumstances in American history, as well as the unity of family and friendship bonds, hasn’t led to an AAPI main character in the historical line. I can only guess that the story the editor told me about Ivy’s inception means that American Girl legitimately didn’t realize it was ignoring the AAPI community, and when they saw Ivy in the Julie draft, they decided to create an Ivy doll before drawing too much attention to their oversight.

Why did they stop giving all the books formulaic names beginning with Kaya?

Booksellers HATED that the titles for each girl were essentially the same. Family members who didn’t fully understand the concept of a series of different girls would get confused and buy the wrong books for presents. And the original Pleasant Company had never expected they would have so many characters that the repetitive titles would become a problem.

What’s up with new girls not having stories that take place during a year ending with 4 (earlier books were set in 1904, 1864, 1774, etc.)?

Pleasant Rowland, founder of the company, created the original characters as a way for girls to connect with history. Ms. Rowland had a background in education, and figured that by making all the years end with a 4, children would have an easier time remembering the century and decade. But in order for the 4 to fit all the later stories, some finagling on the part of the production team was necessary. The Julie books were intended to be about the bicentennial celebrations in 1976, but to keep the year 1974 the first book had to take place two years before the celebration book. When the company wanted to use the events of the 1853 New Orleans yellow fever epidemic, they decided it would be extremely confusing to talk about the year in the books but put 1854 on the covers. Thus, they freed themselves from their final digit restriction.

The Haul: Phoenix Comicon 2013

And now for a break from all my text-heavy posts with some pictures of pretty books I either acquired at PHXCC, or already owned and dragged along with me to get autographed there!

Library Haul Update: April

I can’t believe this, but a month has passed since I shared my library haul with you, and the books’ due date has come.

As you may remember, my haul separated into four general classes of books:

1. Cookbooks
2. Light Classics
3. YA Fiction
4. Audiobook Nonfiction

And my guess was that I would spend two months enjoying the food-porn, two months reading the light classics, one month speeding through the YAs, and listen to the nonfiction while jogging.

Progress Report:

Audiobook Nonfiction

The exercise thing hasn’t happened, so audiobook progress has been slower than hoped. To my credit, I did listen to some poems in The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Work.

My assessment so far is that hearing some poets reading can make a poem clearer. For example, one track is Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and I can only wish that the Matched author had listened to it. As much as the poem is saying to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Thomas does not read it with the violence you might expect. It’s not that Dylan Thomas can’t make an angry voice—his tone is very forceful as he reads “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” His reading instead draws attention to the grief of watching his father die.

Some other poets though can’t hide that their poems are not meant for oral reception as much as they’re meant for seeing on a page. Case in point, “The DNA Molecule” by May Swenson (1968). I listened to the poem a few times and it sounded too much like a science lecture for me to figure out what was going on. Reading it myself hasn’t necessarily resulted in my sudden comprehension of it, but seeing the undulating shape helps me not reject the whole thing as gibberish. The poem is interesting enough that I urge—no, beg—you to follow me to another post and chat about it.

Final thoughts on the Poetry Collection: Robert Graves has the exact dialect you would expect an English classicist to have; I would never have crossed paths with most of these poems if they weren’t in line on my playlist, and Carl Sandburg is too gravelly-voiced to make “Fog” sound like fun for children to read (which it totally is).

The Haul: April 14

The Haul: Library Edition

So I went to the library today, and unsurprisingly returned home with more books than I had originally intended. Behold the haul:

Okay, okay, so it's really not all that many...it's been worse in the past. Most of these are possibilities for the WordNerds book club May pick, and I just wanted to be sure to get my hands on them so I won't run into the problem of the one we decide on being (of course) checked out when May 1st hits. I do believe the current front-runner is Gail Carriger's Etiquette and Espionage, although the longer a specimen of steampunk sits in the corner of my room, the harder it will be for me to resist reading it early. My main interest in the Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight is that it was written by an alum of the university Susan and I (and most of our other book club members) attended. Out of the Easy has been tossed around by book club before and has gotten pretty solid reviews, and another book club member suggested How to Lead a Life of Crime. I WILL finish catching up on Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia series soon, thus A Conspiracy of Kings (I seriously think that one's been in my possession for nearly 4 months now, between renewals and quick-returning-it-to-the-library-and-poaching-it-again).

But the real prize this time is Catherynne Valente's Six-Gun Snow White. I was astounded that the library had it--I keyed it into the library's search engine last night just on a whim, and sure enough, it was supposedly sitting on the new shelf. This book was published by Subterranean Press, a small press publisher of genre fiction which releases lots of delicious collector's and limited editions. I don't think this one was even published with a trade edition available, just the autographed, numbered limited edition of 1000 produced. It was released at the end of February and I feel like it was $60 before they sold out? (I clearly stalk Subterranean a lot and drool over the awesome things they release.) Anyway, I was a little incredulous that my small local library had managed to get a hold of this one. But sure enough, when I visited today, it was indeed as the interwebs promised:

Like I mentioned, this is sold out. I wondered if maybe some librarian ordered it for the library, hoping that when it someday got weeded out they could take it home (this is probably what I would do if I were a librarian). I was so excited that I asked at the reference desk if there was some way to know when a book was getting removed from the shelves and headed for the Friends of the Library book sale, because I would be really really interested in giving this one a good home eventually, but she said sadly there was really no way to predict or track that. She also thought it was really unusual that the libes would get such a unique sort of book, and confirmed that it was from a vendor they don't use very much. But still, wow! I will have to keep my eye out to see if they get more Subterranean books on the shelves via this vendor, or if it was a one-off. Part of me wants to just never give this lovely little lady back... XD If you're interested in checking this one out and weren't lucky enough to order a hard copy before they sold out, I do believe there is an e-book version available here. Has anyone else picked these up yet?