Oh, do I have stories for you! And pictures! And words of adoration for people I met!

This past weekend was Book Expo America. While the event spanned four days, Thursday through Sunday, I was only there on Friday and Saturday.

I flew in to JFK on Thursday, and I arrived frazzled and frantic as I tried to figure out which terminal Jenn’s flight would be coming into. The New York humidity was making me sweat like a 14-year-old boy who just finished his first wrestling match. That was great. Jenn’s flight was only going to be delayed by 30 minutes, but then it was an hour, then two hours, then three hours, then FOUR HOURS after her flight was supposed arrive, it finally landed in JFK. At that point, I’d already missed having dinner with some bloggers and some folks from Hachette such as Miriam and Valerie (hi, Miriam! hi, Valerie!), but I was so happy to be at BEA that I didn’t mind. Besides, what can you do? Sometimes flights are delayed. C’est la vie!

When I was flying to JFK from California, I realized I’d left my business cards AT HOME. WHO DOES THAT? Apparently, ME! I could have forgotten my underwear, my deoderant, my shoes, anything but my business cards! Fortunately, my husband was able to overnight the cards so I could have them on Friday.

On Friday Jenn and I got up at dark o’clock in order to get a ticket to get a signed copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the sequel to The Hunger Games. That was totally worth it, so expect to see some good giveaways having to do with Catching Fire and The Hunger Games later this week or next week.

At lunch I went to meet Tyler from Scholastic. We’ve become friends on Twitter, so I’ll admit it’s a little nerve wracking to meet someone you only know online. Will you like them as much in person as you will online? Will they like you? Let me just say, I had a fantastic time with Tyler as he showed me around Scholastic, and if I lived in New York we’d totally be real life friends. I guess we’re real life friends now, but I won’t get to see him ’til next year! *sob* Tyler is one of the people who blog at On Our Minds @ Scholastic. Rumor has it that they will be giving away a copy of Catching Fire for people who didn’t get to attend BEA.

Unfortunately, my camera was a big FAIL at BEA, and some of my pictures are corrupted. A few survived, though:

This is part of the Scholastic library, where they keep a copy of all the books they’ve published. It’s very cool and run by an even cooler librarian.

Scholastic’s mission is written on the carpet of one of their hallways:

This is the view from the top of the Scholastic building. It was an awesome view! My pics do not do it justice:

This is a building on the roof of the Scholastic building. I just liked the color…it made me happy.

This is a fun…thing…in the Scholastic store:

Scholastic was a lot of fun, very colorful, with lots of Cliffords hanging around. Everyone I talked to was nice and I think I might ask Tyler for another tour next year. I loved it.

Also, you can see what I saw in this 105 second tour of Scholastic.

I got to meet Joyce Carol Oates and she even let me gush at her. I absolutely love her and can’t wait to read her newest book, Little Bird of Heaven.

Friday night was the BEAtweetup party where they were going to give away a Kindle 2. Well, Adaptive Glue was giving away a Kindle 2, which is super generous of them! I told Jenn that if I won I’d probably drop my drink, so when they announced my name, she grabbed my drink and pushed me forward. I seriously thought I might faint, because despite my post that I would NEVER WANT A KINDLE, I’ve since changed my mind (long before this drawing happened!) and must admit that Chartroose was right and I was wrong. *blech ech gag* (that was me eating my words…they don’t taste too good)

I’ll be posting about the Kindle as soon as I’ve had a chance to read a book on it. Promise!

After the BEAtweetup we went to a kidlit party where I had a great time with Lori the librarian. Seriously, she was a kick in the pants and me and Tyler think that the area surrounding the library she works at will be the most literate area in the country in about five years (due in large part to her enthusiasm about children’s, middle grade, and young adult books, and due in small part to the fact that she’s the cutest. thing. ever.).

On Saturday morning I had my “signing”. I want to thank NetGalley and Fran Toolan for doing an amazing job of organizing that! I had a great time chatting with publishers and authors!

Saturday afternoon was the book blogger panel, which seemed to go well. Publisher’s Weekly did a good summary of the book blogger panel.

Despite promising myself that I wouldn’t pick up too many books, I couldn’t help myself! There were a lot of young adult books that just sounded fabulous, so I grabbed them despite the fact that it meant checking my suitcase and piling more books into a reusable bag. Three books I’m looking forward to reading soon are:

• Lips Touch Three Times by Laini Taylor
• The Devil’s Kiss by Sarwat Chadda
• Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

On Saturday night I went out to dinner with Jenn from Jenn’s Bookshelf and Nicole from Linus’s Blanket. Nicole lives in Brooklyn, so we went to a restaurant that she recommended called Dos Caminos. They had the best Prickly Pear margarita I’ve ever had! We were bummed when their margarita machine broke, but it was probably for the best since that margarita was potent! We chatted for FOUR HOURS and were reluctant to leave even though it was 11:15pm and I had to catch a plane at 7am! We talked about absolutely everything, and I think it was very telling that our conversation was able to get away from just talking about books and blogging and get into other discussions. Not that I don’t like talking about blogging! I love talking about blogging and would talk about it for hours on end, but we really clicked and talked about lots of things that I’m still thinking about today.

BEA was an absolute blast! Hopefully later this week I’ll have a few more pictures for you. And don’t forget to stay tuned since I’ll be giving away two copies of Catching Fire, along with a copy of The Hunger Games to go with it, just in case you don’t follow my instructions and haven’t read it yet.

Quick highlights from BEA:

• Getting an ARC of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (sequel to The Hunger Games)
• Meeting Tyler from Scholastic
• Winning the Kindle
• Getting more books than I can list that have me thinking about calling in sick just so I can read them all
• Having dinner with Jenn and Nicole

You should plan on going next year…I already am!

If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know I went back and forth about whether to go to BEA. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the money, and since I’m married now, I actually have to behave like a responsible adult, since someone else is affected by my actions. BUT, I was able to fenagle enough money to go, so I booked a flight and have frantically been making plans ever since!

Blogger Meet and Greets!

I’m stoked to be one of the bloggers featured at the Firebrand Technologies booth #4077! I’ll be there on Saturday from 11:00am to Noon, and I’d love to meet you if you’ll be at BEA! Here’s a list of all the bloggers who will be doing meet and greets at book #4077.

BEA Updates!

Whether or not you’re going to BEA, I’ll be tweeting about what’s going on! You can subscribe to my Twitter updates by putting this link into your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter. If you Twitter about BEA, be sure to use the hashtag #BEA09.

BEAtweetup!

I’ll be at the BEAtweetup party and pretty much want to meet everyone. There’s over 400 people who’ve RSVP’d, so I *probably* won’t get to everyone. And I was not kidding when I said I’m introverted, but I will be donning my extroverted hat and having a good time! A drink in hand won’t hurt, I’m sure. And the fact that I’ll mostly be talking about books, blogging, and Twitter. Pretty much I could talk to a wall about those things and have a great conversation.

I’d love to meet you!

I’m only going to be in New York for Friday and Saturday (Thursday and Sunday are traveling days), but I’d love to meet you! I’m packing my schedule with as much as possible, because why waste a great opportunity? So if you’ll be at BEA and we haven’t already made plans (or if you know of a party I’m missing…) (I’m stoked I’ll be meeting Tyler from Scholastic and author Sarah Pekkanen), then shoot me an email at trish at heylady (dot net) and we’ll arrange something. Because is there anything better than connecting with people over books? I’m pretty sure: no.

Panels, vlogs, and me generally putting my foot in my mouth.

Whether or not you’re going to BEA, you can check out the book bloggers panel on Saturday at 2pm in room 1E15. It features Dawn from She is Too Fond of Books, Stephanie from The Written Word, Julie from Booking Mama, Beth from Beth Fish Reads, Amy from My Friend Amy and Natasha from Maw Books. The panel will discuss will discuss how booksellers, publishers and bloggers can combine forces to bring readers and authors together. If you’re not going to BEA, you can still call in to Blog TalkRadio at 347-945-614 on Saturday, May 30th at 2pm EST to listen live to the panel.

Also, prepare for a couple of vlogs from me this weekend that feature me sticking my foot in my mouth and/or gushing way too much. Example: I’ve met Luis Alberto Urrea, author of the new book Into the Beautiful North  at the LA Times Festival of Books, but instead of ME geeking out on HIM, HE geeked out on ME when I told him who I was and that we were friends on Twitter, so now it’s my turn to geek out on him.

ALSO! I will try try try not to mention to Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, how I want to have her book babies, but things sometimes just come out of my mouth unfiltered, so no guarantees that I won’t completely make a fool of myself.

So make sure you’re watching my blog for updates, because I would bet dollars to donuts that I will have a story that goes like this (which I just made up but would be the thing that would happen to me): “I was talking to this random person at BEA and I was like, ‘Do you know what book I hate? (fill in the blank)’ and then the person will be, ‘Oh, I’m the author of that book.’” ‘Cause that’s just how I roll, with both feet in my mouth.

Thirteen Reasons Why  by Jay Asher was picked by a new book club I’m in. Someone may need to tell me to “step away from the book clubs” because if I was asked to be in another book club (assuming they read books I was interested in), I would say yes. I can’t seem to help myself! Getting to discuss a book like Thirteen Reasons Why  with other people who’ve read the book is ridiculously addicting.

Thirteen Reasons Why  is about a girl, Hannah Baker, who recorded on cassette tapes the reasons she was killing herself, and then sent the tapes to the first person on her list who she mentioned in the tapes. After the person had listened to the tapes, they were to send the tapes to the next person on the list. The story is narrated by the ninth person on the list, Clay Jensen, while he listens to the tapes. The troubling thing about Clay is that he never did anything wrong to Hannah. Instead, he was there for her but she pushed him away. It’s hard to say why she may have sent the tapes to Clay, other than to finally tell him that she did like him and she knew he tried, but she was beyond saving.

The narration alternates between Hannah dictating her story and Clay trying to figure out how he ties into the story. Clay wanders around with a walkman, checking out the various places that Hannah mentions as she tells her story. It’s painful to see Hannah’s story through Clay’s eyes. Clay has a lot of guilt surrounding Hannah’s suicide and wonders what might have been. The narration was a little difficult to get used to, and in the beginning I was wondering how it could have been done different, but by the end I thought the narration was done the best way it could have been done: alternating Hannah’s story with Clay’s commentary.

Reading about suicide is very sobering. I think teenage years are so difficult and teenagers don’t have the perspective that adults have, shrinking their world and making acceptance extremely important. I don’t know any teenagers who’ve committed suicide, but I’ll admit that it crossed my mind a few times when I was 13 or 14. That’s what I find most difficult about this book: what makes Hannah different from me or any other teenager? Why does Hannah think killing herself solves her problems, when *most* people make it out of their teenage years alive?

Jay Asher brings up excellent issues related to suicide. Clay notes:

I would’ve answered any question, Hannah. But you never asked.

Hannah makes an observation that I try to remember daily:

No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.

Do we realize how much impact we can have on another human being? A kind word, an encouraging note, a listening ear…those things can make a difference in someone’s day, in someone’s life. Are we ultimately responsible for the actions (such as suicide) of others? Obviously not, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have the ability to lift someone up or bring someone down. Which will we choose today?

I thought this book was great and I loved that the path Hannah chose was clearly the wrong path. However, it wasn’t without its flaws. Hannah’s parents are noticably absent, but she glosses over this by saying they were working all the time. I was surprised that they factored in so little to Hannah’s life, though I know there are parents out there like that. Still, it was almost a too convenient and tidy part of the story to be believable, when the rest of Hannah’s life is filled with such drama.

Also, Hannah seemed a little too introspective full of insight for her age. I thought her voice was a little too  adult.

With all that said, I’d recommend not only that you read this book (yes, YOU!), but that you have any teenager in your life read this book. The one thing that Hannah didn’t do was discuss the word suicide with anyone. If she had, I believe she would have found another answer.

Rating: 90 out of 100

Buy Thirteen Reasons Why  from Powell’s | Buy Thirteen Reasons Why from Amazon

Watch the trailer for Thirteen Reasons Why  by Jay Asher:

Other reviews:

My Friend Amy

Write for a Reader

medieval bookworm

Booking Mama

The Sleepy Reader

Debbie’s World of Books

Biblibio

Books. Lists. Life.

S. Krishna’s Books

Fizzy Thoughts (Best. Review. Ever.)

Reading and Ruminations

Once Upon a Bookshelf

Bold. Blue. Adventure.

 A Striped Armchair

 Out of the Blue

So Many Books, So Little Time

This Book Is For You

 Reviewer X

 Ready When You Are, C. B.

 lit*chick

 My Own Little Reading Room

 Kristina’s Favorites

The Story Siren

 the hidden side of a leaf

Interpreter of Maladies  by Jhumpa Lahiri was chosen at the last minute for our April book club pick. This book has been on my radar and in my bookcase ever since I read about it over at Books on the Brain (hi, Lisa!), and a deadline for book club was just the impetus I needed to read this book.

The opening story in Interpreter of Maladies, “A Temporary Matter”, follows the married couple Shoba and Shukumar as they are finally able to come together when the power is shut off in the evening and they have to use candles as their source of light. A stillborn baby six months previous has caused a rift in their marriage, and it’s heartbreaking to see how much they’ve grown apart. Sadly, Shukumar is finding Shoba to be less and less beautiful, noting:

Each day…her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superflouous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

The darkness seems to provide them a safe haven where they can open up, though whether this is too little too late is rather ambiguous at the end.

Another favorite story of mine was “This Blessed House” about a couple who married rather quickly and when they move into a new house and Twinkles starts finding religious icons that were left, her husband, Sanjeev, finds her pleasure in the icons to be annoying and embarassing. This was a particularly fun and entertaining story, with the theme of loving someone you don’t know being particularly prominent (see below for explanation of a couple themes consistent in this book).

The last story, “The Third and Final Continent”, is about an arranged marriage and how the husband, an Indian man, rented a room for a short while from Mrs. Croft (who happened to be over 100 years old!). It was at Mrs. Croft’s house when the Indian man is introducing Mrs. Croft to his wife (after he’d moved out) that they (the husband and wife) had their first connection. After Mrs. Croft asks Mala, the wife, to stand up so she can scrutinize her in her sari with the “dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists”, she declares:

“She is a perfect lady!”

Now it was I who laughed. I did so quietly, and Mrs. Croft did not hear me. But Mala had heard, and, for the first time, we looked at each other and smiled.

I like to think of that moment in Mrs. Croft’s parlor as the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen. Although we were not yet fully in love, I like to think of the months that followed as a honeymoon of sorts.

Isn’t that just beautiful?

This collection of short stories ostensibly has the theme of the difficulty of communication running through the stories. However, in the story “Sexy”, about Miranda who’s having an affair with a married man, she talks to a boy at a house she’s staying at and when he says she’s sexy, she asks him what it means. The boy, having heard his mother lament the affairs of his father with sexy women, responds, “It means loving someone you don’t know.” That  is what Interpreter of Maladies  is about: loving someone you don’t know.

Lahiri makes no bones about dealing with the difficulties of being an immigrant, and there is an undercurrent of distaste for American consummerism. In fact, while I got a lot out of the stories about how difficult it can be to communicate, how much people want to be loved, and how an author can write very simply but with beauty and profoundness (in the May 19, 2008 issue of Time Magazine, Lahiri’s other book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is discussed and it’s noted that you will not find in Lahiri’s works “vocabulary above the 10th-grade level”), one of my book club members who couldn’t attend the meeting sent me this note:

Every story was so freakin depressing and had no resolution. They all just tapered off with a “big sigh, life’s a bitch, that’s the way it goes” kind of feeling. If the author wants to communicate to her audience that Indians in this country are miserable, confused, homesick square pegs in round holes, then she was successful. Now every time I see a person who looks Indian to me, I find myself thinking “Aw, that poor woman” when actually she may be quite happy with her life, thank you very much.

Lahiri doesn’t mean to say that life sucks for immigrants, but she is  saying that it’s hard, and really, are any of us that much different from those who come here looking for a new home?

Discussing short stories can be difficult with a book club, so we relied on Catherine Brady’s recommendation in her guest post on Caribousmom:

I would want to encourage book groups (and solo readers) to approach story collections in a very different way than they do novels.   It can easily take two or three hours just to hash over the possibilities thrown up by three or four stories in a book, and if you skimped on this and tried to touch on every story, you’d probably feel disappointed with the discussion.  It’s far more satisfying to single out three or four key stories—and usually the first and last stories in a book make a good choice—and first just discuss each on its own terms.  Looking so closely at some of the stories often illuminates how the writer works and what themes are central to the book, so that we begin to get a sense of the whole even if we haven’t discussed each story, in order, as if the book were a chopped-up version of a novel.  After looking closely at just a few stories, you usually can have a more general but more satisfying conversation about what a story collection might mean as a whole, which is different than what a novel means as a whole. Usually story collections are organized as variations on a theme, and we don’t have a single plot to help us see how this develops but have to think about comparing one story to another, one character’s predicament to another’s, in order to begin to get a sense of what concerns the writer and what we have discovered from the stories. If we might say of a novel that its plot is about finding hope after a tragedy, of a story collection we might have to say instead, well, the “plot” is about finding hope after a tragedy, but  . . . but . . . but, with the ellipses standing for the qualifications supplied by one story after another.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts if the story collection has been thoughtfully arranged.

Jhumpa Lahiri has set a new standard for short stories with Interpreter of Maladies. It is against Lahiri that all new short story authors will be compared.

If you’ve been thinking about buying this book, I’d highly recommend you click on one of these links below and buy it right now!

Buy Interpreter of Maladies from Powell’s | Buy Interpreter of Maladies from Amazon

Rating: 90 out of 100

Other reviews:

Age 30 – A Lifetime of Books

Care’s Online Book Club

The Book Lady’s Blog

Book Addiction

books i done read

Bold. Blue. Adventure.

things mean a lot

reading is my superpower

Books on the Brain

Musings

The winner of The 19th Wife is comment #47, Rebecca Cox! Congratulations, Rebecca! I’ll email you to get your mailing address. Thank you all for your great comments!

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff is an amazing story of polygamy in the 19th century in the LDS church, as well as a modern day murder mystery on a compound of fundamentalist LDS who practice plural marriage. Ebershoff is so deft at weaving fact and fiction that the lines blur and I was constantly wondering where fact ended and Ebershoff’s imagination began.

While there’s two stories going on in The 19th Wife, they compliment each other well. The bulk of the novel is a fictionalized version of Ann Eliza Young’s account of her marriage to Brigham Young, including how her mother came to be a part of the Latter-day Saints, Ann Eliza’s childhood, the history of the church, and how she eventually apostasized from the Latter-day Saints and went on a crusade to eliminate polygamy. Ann Eliza really did write an autobiography entitled Wife No. 19, and it is on this that Ebershoff bases his fictional autobiography.

I think Ebershoff may have missed his calling as a history teacher. He has a gift of telling history like a story, which is how I think the best history teachers teach. To this day, I remember stories one of my history teachers used to tell, and where these stories would be dry and dull with their mere facts, they come alive and become something I can remember more than 10 years later. In fact, it is because of one of my history teacher’s stories, the story of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria being assassinated, that I want to name my first daughter Sophia.

The second story in The 19th Wife is a modern day murder mystery. We find that Jordan’s mother is accused of killing her husband…who had scads of other wives, the number of which even Jordan’s mother isn’t sure. Jordan’s mother has been arrested and charged with the murder of her husband, but when she pleads with Jordan to believe that she’s innocent, he believes her because he knows she still believes in the religion, so why would she kill her husband? He sets out to help prove her innocence, because even though she abandoned him five years ago at age 16 on the side of the highway, he still loves her.

What works so well is the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes you understand why Mormon fundamentalists hold on with such tenacity to plural marriage. When Joseph Smith introduced the idea of plural marriage to the Latter-day Saints, he said that plural marriage was what God wanted, and to not do what God wanted would result in not getting their reward. Brigham Young kept up this mantra, telling people they were doing what God wanted. It was only when the United States started putting pressure on the LDS to end plural marriage that a decision was made in 1890 by the Mormon church to ban plural marriage.

A significant question this book tackles is why it’s okay for the United States to have laws against polygamy, when theoretically we allow people the freedom to do what they want. Ann Eliza Young has an excellent answer to why it is sometimes the responsibility of the government to step in.

This book, despite its 500+ pages, is a quick read. Is it a definitive history of Ann Eliza Young, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Lattter-day Saints (Mormons)? No. Is it an excellent book, based on history but embellished and stretched and fictionalized? Absolutely. You obviously can’t use this book as a basis for your knowledge, but I’d be willing to bet it will encourage you to do your research to find out what is truth and what is fiction.

Rating: 90 out of 100

I’ll be going to see David Ebershoff when he comes to my area on June 2nd. I’ll be sure to tell you all about it!

I want to thank Lisa and TLC Book Tours for allowing me to be part of this tour. You can follow along with this tour by checking out the tour schedule.

Additional links: David Ebershoff’s website | More information on Ann Eliza Young | Buy The 19th Wife from Powell’s | Buy The 19th Wife from Amazon (pre-order the paperback!)

I have one paperback copy of The 19th Wife to give away! How cool is David for providing this?! To enter, all you have to do is tell me who your favorite teacher in school was. If you want an extra entry, you can mention this giveaway on Twitter or Stumble this post, just come back and leave an extra comment leaving the link to your tweet or letting me know you stumbled this. This giveaway will be open through May 31st. Good luck!

Here’s a book trailer for The 19th Wife that is FANTASTIC. You know I don’t give my stamp of approval on book trailers easily, so please, watch this video.