PLA Conference

Leonora and I just got back from a whirlwind one-day visit to the PLA (Public Library Association) annual conference in Boston. We attended programs on readers’ advisory (what librarians call what they do when someone asks for a book suggestion), getting boys to read by offering them things they like (with Jon Sciesczka), the Google digitization project, New England mystery writers, design-build library building projects, censorship (with the publisher of MAD magazine), and designing and building early literacy areas in libraries.
We picked up a few books as well: Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose; Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young by Anya Kamenetz; two memoirs, Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres and Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni; and Douglas Preston’s Tyrannosaur Canyon (the only fiction one of the bunch).