Book Expo America: Day Two

In my Day One recap, I had said I suspected this post would be short (ha! I should know myself better than that by now) so I was going to write about a few other things. It appears I lied, so this will just be about day two and I'll discuss more about what I actually thought about it in a different post.

The morning of the second day at Book Expo America was another flurry of signings, although it was a bit rougher since I started the day much more exhausted than day one. The highlight was Deanna Raybourn - I haven't read her books yet but I keep hearing about them and she was just so friendly and nice and talked to everyone while signing their books.

Around 11:00 there wasn't much going on so I got a coffee cake and vanilla latte over at Starbucks (fortunately, the line was a bit more manageable than earlier - I got my tired self over there first thing when I got in but the line was as long as the one for some of the signings). I found a place to sit and read for a bit but was too wiped out to concentrate that well. And it's not like I wasn't reading a really good book because I was reading Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews, which was nothing short of awesome from beginning to end (so much so that I'm already reading Magic Bleeds).

Before hitting the afternoon signings, I decided to head over to the Orbit booth since they not only send me a lot of review copies but tend to be pretty good about randomly sending me books that I'm actually very interested in reading (and make me wish I could read faster). Plus I was curious about what they had coming out. While I was over there, the woman at the booth was very apologetic about not knowing much since she was "just the cover designer." Just the cover designer?! She was Lauren Panepinto, who designs some fantastic covers - I've looked through the list she has on Goodreads before (which includes The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, The Parasol Protectorates books by Gail Carriger, The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee and the new covers for Jo Graham's books). They had copies of Married with Zombies, which Lauren Panepinto described to me as zombie chick lit, and I was drooling over the poster for Surface Detail, the Culture novel by Iain M. Banks that is coming out in October.

Then it was back to the signing rush, which is all a blur other than wandering around for a while trying to find the one for Jeri Smith-Ready's book Shade. I thought I wasn't going to find it and then once I did the line was deceptive - it looked short but was actually quite long since it wrapped around the corner. But I got my book and Jeri Smith-Ready was also very friendly, even by the time she'd gotten to the end of the line.

After that, I spent some time at the very packed Book Blogger Convention reception. Janice from Janicu's Book Blog and I were looking for something to do between that and the evening's party hosted by The Book Smugglers, so we decided to take a cab over to the area of the party and find a coffee shop. Half an hour later we FINALLY got a cab and then the driver tried to tell us it was too hard to get to where we wanted to go! So we were going to have him drop us off at the nearest subway but then he'd changed his mind and decided it was fine. We were at least happy to find a Barnes and Noble with a Starbucks right there, although we made sure to let the man at the door know we came in with books - the last thing we needed was to be arrested for book theft after all that! It was fun to just hang out, not lug around books and chat about books with Janice for a while. She's another great book blogger I'm really glad I met.

The party was a good time, although very loud. The most fun I had there was conversing/yelling about The Queen of Attolia with Angie from Angieville. She is one of the people who convinced me to read this series, and I'm grateful she did since this book was fantastic. And it was wonderful to be able to talk to someone about it without worrying about spoilers.

Next up: Book Blogger Convention report (unless I finish the Magic Burns review first - I have been working on that this week too!).