New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams attended ALA Midwinter as one of our guests this year, signing copies of A Certain Age ARE (on sale June 28, 2016) and generally charming everyone she met. Some passages of her new novel, A Certain Age, are excerpts from a 1920’s gossip column, recounting a scandalous murder trial. We asked Ms. Williams to channel that gossip columnist when she sat down to write her report of this year’s Midwinter ALA. We think Ms. Williams is the Bees Knees, so without further ado, we cede the blog to her.
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Ladies and gentlemen, your faithful correspondent has sometimes heard it said—now, don’t be amazed—that librarians are a conservative lot on the whole, and not much given to games of hazard. To those ignorant observers I submit the following counter-evidence: the American Library Association recently held its Midwinter conference in Boston, Massachusetts.
Let me repeat myself, for those of you reading this column before breakfast. The great librarian pooh-bahs decided it would be a splendid idea to schedule a wintertime gathering of thousands within the limits of a city that received a hundred and eight inches of snow during the course of the previous winter, and in consequence, thousands of librarians duly reserved non-refundable tickets on their airlines of choice—to Beantown, mind you, not South Florida—and packed their trunks with woolly sweaters and optimism.
This, my friends, represents a gamble of the highest degree.
And yet—proving, perhaps, that the old saw that Our Lord watches over drunks, children, and librarians—the entire affair went off without a hitch. Imagine! Precipitation arrived in the form of rain, instead of what a certain Southern acquaintance of mine is pleased to call the Devil’s Dandruff. Cheerful smiles greeted your correspondent at every corner. When I arrived at the HarperCollins booth, dampened and breathless from navigating a veritable maze of exhibits, I found a crowd of improbably lively conference-goers who, having already run the gauntlet of presentations and seminars and author signings, were yet eager to discover what lay waiting in the pages of my latest novel. In the evening, at a dinner hosted by my publisher, a well-chosen cadre of thoughtful, vibrant, and terribly amusing authors and librarians kept the bookish conversation flowing without end.
And while the queue for an evening taxi stretched almost as long as the queue for a morning caramel macchiato, nobody seemed to mind, for we all had Books To Read, ladies and gentlemen, piles and piles of glorious books! Suitcases packed with them, arms made weary by them, noses twitching at the new-book scent of them—and all of these volumes ready to be opened and embraced as the friends one hasn’t yet met.
Which, I suppose, explains the apparent contradiction laid open at the beginning of this column: When the reward is sufficient, any amount of risk will seem perfectly reasonable.
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Get an egalley of A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams here!