ALA Conference

My slightly modified badge.

Right now, in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States of America is the ALA conference!

I was lucky enough to attend the conference on Saturday, June 29, 2013 for the day and meet many authors, receive many advanced readers copies, and spend the day with my best book buddies!

I was able to tour the exhibits with the wonderful Lynn Rutan and amazing Cindy Dobrez of the Bookends blog on Booklist. They also happen to be my librarians from when I went through school. They also run a book club right now which they still refer to as BBYA (Best Books for Young Adults) for their students at West Ottawa which they graciously allow me to attend as an Alumni of the club. They're very wonderful people and they also mentioned me in a blog post on their blog which you can find here. For the record, sometimes the books need to be about thirty pages less. Haha!

Now you know where most of my books come from and where my love of books was nurtured.

BOOK LIFE.

At the conference, I was probably lugging around close to forty books that I managed to pick up and my shoulders suffered a bit for it. I discovered that a bag had actually left it's mark on my shoulder, pictured below. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

For most of the convention I was excited, met a bunch of authors, and maybe I met some of my viewers (hi!). I had a BLAST!!!

I've mentioned it to a few people who have asked, "Don't you have to be a librarian to attend?"

NOPE! Although I would incredibly love to be a librarian, but I am not right now! I was welcomed into the fold!

I purchased an exhibits only pass on the ALA website which let me tour the exhibits of the convention center. There are also presentations you can attend and a lot of other neat, field related events that take place. I was there for the exhibits because books, authors, publishers, and and, well if I did much more my shoulders probably would have committed mutiny on me.

A snapshot of the conference. :)

I currently have some family from across state visiting so I'm going to be a little slower in blogging this week, but I look forward to finish my current stack from the library and then embarking on all my goodies from ALA! As I process everything I got from ALA, I'm thinking of posting pictures of it as I start to conquer books from the conference. Be warned, I have at least seven books I'd like to read before beginning the conference books (potentially ten, but I might have grabbed a few unreadable books).

Happy reading!