PLA Blog

Nancy Pearl introduced the second PLA Book Buzz program at 10:30 this morning with a contest. She asked the listeners to coin a new word for “the fear of being stuck somewhere without a book to read.” She told of recently getting onto a flight from Orlando to Seattle with only two books and quickly deciding that she liked neither. Trapped in a middle seat, she could not get into her bag in the overhead bin. It was a long flight. She asked people to turn in their words at HarperCollins, Macmillan, Random House, or Milkweed booths on the PLA exhibit floor.

After a brief story about author tour horrors, she turned the program over to representatives from all of the above mentioned publishers to highlight their new books. They were, of course, excited by all their new publications. Despite knowing that they have commercial interests in all the books they described, I was convinced that I should seek a few of them. The books that I have on my list follow:

• Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa, a novel reprint from Milkweed
• Rock Island Line and Driftless by David Rhodes, a former Iowa Workshop writer, again Milkweed
• The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, nonfiction from Random House
• Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost, a travel adventure from Random House
• science fiction novels by John Scalzi from Macmillan
• A Lion among Men by Gregory Maguire, to go along with Wicked from HarperCollins

I hope someone who knows more about fiction also reports on this presentation. I am more inclined toward nonfiction, so I was impressed how many of the Random House books profiled in this short session were nonfiction.

I enjoyed that Virginia Stanley of HarperCollins also told us some websites with useful book publishing and readers’ advisory information:

• Book Club Girl
• Blog Talk Radio: Category Books
• Early Word with forthcoming book information
• Olive TV, which are author interviews that can be seen on YouTube, such as Olive TV: Lou Bayard

Most of the publishers said that they have galleys of some of their books at their booths and urged everyone to come get them.