They literally FORCE you to take free books. I’m so not kidding. I came home with 4 bulging bags of ARC’s and actual books–including hardcovers of The Raw Shark Texts and Austenland. Yay!

I am scouting books for potential adaptation in advance of a trip to LA this coming week, so I’ll be skimming a bunch of these books over the next 2 days. I’ll put up a BEA roundup post with these reviews, rather than doing them one by one, since I won’t actually finish many of these books. I’m fast, but I don’t want to mislead you.

Cool BEA highlight of today was walking past Libba Bray, author of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels. She was standing by herself, so I just stopped in my tracks and said, “I love your books.” She was nicer than nice, and now I’m even more excited to read the third, A Sweet Far Thing, which comes out in December.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Alex Sokoloff, a writer I know online but hadn’t yet met in person. She is at BEA promoting her first novel, The Harrowing. We had a good chat and I got a signed copy of her book.

And lastly, I enjoyed coffee with Melody Carlson, the extremely prolific author who wrote Finding Alice, a book I’m a very big fan of. She is an amazing person with an incredible life story, and I was honored to get to spend time with her.

Am heading back over there today to schmooze and make connections…