Going to BEA is near the top of my bucket list. I dream big?!
Since I can’t do anything but hobble around these days, I decided to
participate in Armchair BEA. Armchairs I’m good at.
“Any good event requires introducing yourself and getting to
know your fellow attendees. Instead of NYC, we may be in our armchairs and
pajamas this week, but that does not mean we cannot network right along side
those heading to the Javits Center...This year's theme is all about community, and our main goal
is to encourage visiting and getting to know the vast number of
bloggers/participants. In order to do so, we decided to shake things up a bit
with our interviews.” --
THE ARMCHAIR BEA BLOG TEAM
So here goes…
1. Please
tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been
blogging? Why did you get into blogging?
Who am I? I am the BookBitch. The first question I’m usually
asked is how I came up with that name, which ties into the rest of the question
so here’s the story.
I used to be a bookseller for Borders. Remember Borders? Big
bookstore chain, then the CEO, Rich Flanagan retired, and everything went to
hell. Now they are just a footnote in the decline of the book business.
Anyway, I started there when my daughter started kindergarden, back in
1997. I worked these crazy hours around my kids’ schedules – one of the only benefits
of working retail is flexibility in scheduling. I worked my 40 hours in four
days, including Friday and Saturday nights, the busiest times in the store. Booksellers
literally ran for their eight hour shift, from one end of the store to the
other, nonstop. If a customer had to wait more than a minute at the Information
Desk for me to get back from helping my last customer, and if heaven forbid we
didn’t have the book they waited ALL THAT TIME for, well, let’s just say I was
called a bitch more than once. If you
want to learn about human nature, work retail. Or in the food industry.
Spring forward a year or so and the Internet starts getting
more interesting. There were companies offering free web space for anyone who
wanted it, with cool little programs that helped you create a website – think
apps, before there was such a thing. I
embraced the bookselling world with arms wide open, and devoured as many books
as I could, reading late into the night, usually a book a day. But there were
so many more books I wanted to read!
I decided to sign up for one of the free websites, that way
I could keep track of the books I read and better yet, I could keep track of
the books I wanted to read. So I did it, using Geocities, a behemoth in the
free web golden days, now long since forgotten.
It was fun! I loved it. I even made a website for my Borders, Store 13
in Boca Raton. I posted pictures of all the staff. I did a photo journal of a
day in the life of a bookseller. It was awesome. Unfortunately, Geocities shut
down with little fanfare and those pages are gone forever. Even the Wayback
Machine can’t find them.
But I digress. There were book
websites springing up and I wanted something that would stand out from the
crowd and be memorable. Another crazy weekend at the store, another pissed off
customer calling me a bitch because I wouldn’t let her darling child color in
the coloring books we had for sale unless she actually bought one. And in that moment, it hit me – I would be
the BookBitch! Later that year my husband bought me the domain name, where I've been happily parked ever since.
2. What are
you currently reading, or what is your favorite book you have read so far in
2012?
I read several books at a time. I’m reading a fabulous
manuscript, a thriller set in Chicago, for an author friend.
Once We Were Brothers by Ronald Balson, a
self published Holocaust legal story which was recommended by some of my
favorite library patrons.
Calling
Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray, because she is one of my favorite authors, but I’m having a hard time getting into this one.
Don’t
Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman, humorous suspense featuring an
octogenarian Holocaust survivor ex-cop that I thought would probably appeal to
my patrons. I just started
The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman, because
I kept having to place reserves on it so I got curious. And I’m always looking
at cook books, and if you don’t think that is reading let me correct you right
now. A lot of the new cookbooks that have been coming out over the past year or
two are filled with stories alongside the recipes, but I read the recipes
too. Right now I have
Brunetti’s Cookbook by Roberta Pianaro,
which is based on Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries. I’m also
reading
Cooking Without Borders by
Anita Lo, a chef I’ve come to like and respect after seeing her on several
cooking competitions, both as contestant and judge, and I’m happy to say that
this book is definitely for home cooks like me.
My favorite book so far this year is probably Defending Jacob by William Landay.
3. Tell us
one non-book-related thing that everyone reading your blog may not know about
you.
I ‘m a foodie.
4. What is
your favorite feature on your blog (i.e. author interviews, memes, something
specific to your blog)?
My favorite feature is definitely the book giveaways. When I
first started working at Borders and found out that we got advance reader
copies of books for free, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! Shortly after
I started my website, I was contacted by a publicist at the former incantation
of Hachette Books, asking me if I’d like to give away some of their books to my
readers. I figured if I liked getting free books, other readers would like that
too and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve never stopped to count but I bet
I’ve given away thousands of books by now.
5. Where do
you see your blog in five years?
I debated whether to answer this one because I am in
the midst of planning some big changes, but here goes.
For the past several years I’ve been extremely busy. I work
full time, was very involved in my kids' activities, sports, marching band, etc. I
was in school. It took me over 30 years to earn my Bachelor’s degree in English
Literature, then close to five years to earn my Masters in Library and
Information Science. I toyed with the idea of going for my doctorate in either
library science or literature, but put that off, at least for now. I’ve been working
on my website and the blog, and writing reviews for Library Journal as well.
My kids are all grown up. I’m done with
school, at least for now. That leaves me with a bit of free time that I will be devoting to my website and blog, incorporating the two
entities into one, with a new, more mainstream name. I’ve hired a web designer
and she is so fabulous that I know she will come through for me, despite my
procrastinating in making design decisions.
One of my main goals is to create a searchable database of
all the reviews now on the site. It has become too unwieldy, and needs a better
layout and organization. It may take me five years to incorporate all the
changes I want to make, but I promise, it will be worth it!
I am thrilled to offer a free copy of Chris Hayes’
upcoming book, TWILIGHT OF THE ELITES.
In TWILIGHT
OF THE ELITES: America After Meritocracy (on sale June 12,
2012), MSNBC host and The Nation editor-at-large Chris
Hayes rethinks some of the fundamental ideas about the way our society
works, offering an original theory about how we have gotten here. He
persuasively concludes that the meritocratic system upon which we depend to
select the country’s best and brightest is fatally flawed, creating a ruling
elite that is no longer functional. Provocative and forcefully written, TWILIGHT
OF THE ELITES maps out how the crisis of authority came to define our
public life, our political debates, and our understanding of our trajectory as
a society. Employing original reporting and social science, Hayes moves beyond
the standard explanations of our post-bailout society and introduces new ways
of understanding the anger, frustration, and bewilderment that accelerating
inequality has produced. TWILIGHT OF THE ELITES challenges us
to imagine a different social order, to construct coalitions, institutions, and
constituencies that militate not only against the status quo, but for equality.
“This is the cycle of a dynamic society,” Hayes writes.
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