The American Library Association meeting was a successful one, both from a work perspective and a personal one.

On the work front, I found this to be the first national conference we’ve attended where librarians en masse seemed excited about our consumer health materials. Whether that was due to overwhelming attendance (and thus merely a larger version of the core audience who had always appreciated our free materials) or to a shift in professional perspective on the topic, I cannot say. But I can say it was very exciting to have to return to the office three times in order to retrieve more material. I hope the books come in use to library communities.

On a personal front, the grand total for the weekend book acquisitions ended up at 21 (including gifts). I paid a whopping $9 to purchase three of the books I wanted for gifts, but otherwise everything was free. I’ve started one of my new books already, but probably won’t get to finish it until next month, so look for a review of it and others at the end of July. (I currently have four other books I’m currently in the middle of reading…)

I also got to have dinner with Bill and Jana of Unshelved. It was a nice, laid-back evening of conversation and Ethiopian food and I came away after dinner feeling more relaxed than I have in a while. (So relaxed, in fact, that I dozed off in front of Trader Joe’s while reading my book after I stopped to buy milk and bread.) As always, I’m impressed by what nice people Bill and Gene know and look forward to meeting Jana, their store manager, again.

The only regret of the weekend is that I missed meeting Maggie, who is hosting the Southern Reading Challenge, which I’m taking part in this summer. Hopefully, I’ll get to catch up with her at some future conference.

I’ll be working this weekend, but I’ll also be collecting some new books at this weekend’s ALA convention in D.C. If you are a librarian and are coming, be sure to stop by my booth (4055) and say hi.

If you’re local and just want access to free books and gichgaws, come to the convention center this weekend. This link might get you free registration; otherwise it only costs $25 to get into the exhibit hall and you’ll come away with an armload of new or upcoming books that more than covers the price of admission.

Authors have been announced for this fall’s National Book Festival. This event is always a lot of fun and well worth a day in the city.

Thanks to Book Moot for the tip that the list was out!

You wouldn’t know it from this list, but I really have been reading some books aimed at adults (and books outside the fantasy genre). They will feature in June’s Into the Stacks, however, because I’m not done with them. Patience, people. Patience… (more…)

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll probably have noticed that my monthly book summaries ceased when the calendar switched years. It wasn’t done on purpose. I wanted to hold off in January because I was behind in mailing out Christmas packages. And I just never quite got my act together to get it out in any of the subsequent months.

And, yes, I realize this is a particularly paltry sum of books to have read since the start of the year. I started many more books than this, but either I was really on a run of sub-par books that just didn’t merit finishing or the depression really bit into my desire to read.

Earlier this week, Grey Kitten pointed out that I’ve not posted about books in forever and that he missed seeing what I was reading. That encouraged me to take out this post and dust off the moth balls that had lingered on it for some time.

The good news is that I’m currently working on several books that I do enjoy and that I will resume regular summaries at the end of the month. In the meantime, I offer you the books I finished between January and April, in no particular order:

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If you do not want to know what the American cover of the final Harry Potter book looks like you should not click here.