A book day is a good day

In less than 24 hours, I have received three most splendid books in the mail, none of which I actually ordered. Do you even realize how genuinely happy this makes me? It’s like Christmas in July.

In order:

Quiet Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas. He writes an online column for McSweeney’s and I went to see him speak on a panel at ALA. At the signing afterwards, he quickly (I think they only had 15 copies available) ran out of books and his rep promised to send me a signed copy. Yeah, right I thought. The book arrived at work, pristine and signed, yesterday afternoon.

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading by Mikita Brottman. A gift from my father-in-law, Chris. He shares my love of books about books. I looked it over last night and it promises to be extremely interesting. And that cover! The book was on my front porch waiting for me when I got home yesterday afternoon.

Home by Marilynne Robinson. Gilead counts as the most moving and influential novel I have read as an adult and when I read that Marilynne Robinson was publishing a quasi-sequel in September, I accosted the publisher’s table (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) at ALA, hoping to score an ARC (advance reading copy). One was sitting *right there* but they had only one left. The pretentious rep said he would "see what he could do" but I was not even slightly hopeful (we order no fiction, our user group reads very little fiction). An ARC was in my box when I arrived to work this morning.