The annual American Library Association conference was in Anaheim this year. The weather was beautiful, but it feels a bit odd to leave your family at home to go to Disneyland. Not that I actually entered the park. What’s the point?
Actually, the price of admission might have been worth it just to take a shortcut. Instead I had to hike however many miles around it to get between the conference center and my hotel. But that’s not why ALA sucks for librarians.
No, the problem is I spent most of my time on panels or in committee meetings. You know, stuff I have to do for my job. Work. Librarianship, not books. Meanwhile, I missed cool programming, like the luncheon where Orson Scott Card received the Margaret A. Edwards award for his lifetime contribution to teen lit (amidst some controversy over whether his personal beliefs should disqualify his work from such recognition, which I’m sure amused him greatly if he noticed it). Or the panel with Cory Doctorow, Verner Vinge, Brandon Sanderson, and Eric Flint.
On the plus side, I did get to say hi to Brandon before his book signing, and I got to tell Neal Shusterman that I consider Everlost the gold standard of middle-grade spec-fi. I also picked up an ARC of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I made great strides in my efforts to be selective in the exhibits hall and not come home with my luggage stuffed with dozens of ARCs I may or may not ever read. But with one 900-page book Stephenson covered the spread.
I did pick up several graphic novels for young readers, the best of which is David Petersen’s Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. It’s like Brian Jacques’s Redwall, except the mice are hard-bitten. Cute, but dangerous. More like The Secret of NIMH in the sense that you enjoy the story but you wouldn’t really want to live it. It has a dark mood that I quite like, and that makes it feel more grown-up, though I have no qualms about letting my kids (all under eight) read it.
So I suppose the weekend wasn’t a total loss. But it would have been a lot more fun without so much library stuff getting in the way.
“But it would have been a lot more fun without so much library stuff getting in the way.”
I wonder what http://www.librarystuff.net/ will say about “library stuff getting in the way”!
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“Instead I had to hike however many miles around it to get between the conference center and my hotel.”
..?!? Walking..?? in LA..?? Are you nuts..?!? I thought no one walked in California..??
Yeah, sucks when work gets in the way of living. We feel your pain.
…tom…
(and why no preview on wordpress..?? Or acknowledgment that one can use HTML in a comment..?? And I thought blogger sucked… )
Hey Tom,
Probably not your era, but you got me singing that Missing Persons song now.