I’m on a short vacation right now, and if you could see the amount of reading material I brought with you, you might have a little laugh at my optimism. Never mind the pile of fashion and home décor magazines that I imagined I’d page through in leisurely moments. I’m just talking about the bags of books. Yes, that’s bags, plural.
One bag is full of manuscripts for books that will be published in 2018. These are books I’m to read for the American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce committee of which I am a member. I have about six or seven manuscripts in that bag, all of which I was hoping to read the first 50 pages of before our next conference call on Tuesday.
A second bag is full of ARCs (advance reader copies) for books that will be published in September though December of 2017. From these books I will choose the selections for my Fall Hot Off the Press class, in which we read one work of new fiction per month.
Then there is the novel I am currently reading, which is to be next month’s selection for our new book a month club, Booked Up.
I had another pile of new fiction I picked up from the library to check out to see if I wanted to add it to our Open Book Bookstore collection, but I left that at home. Even I have my limits.
I’ve been away so far for two days. You want to know how many of these books I’ve read so far, right? Um…. maybe tomorrow. Time for happy hour!