Sunday, October 3, 2010

Sunday Salon: BusyBusyBusy

This has been one crazy week!

Tuesday I went to the wonderful Brookline Booksmith for a great event with Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a novel I really want to read. I really enjoyed the reading and discussion and look forward to dipping into his book.

Thursday was the 20th 1st annual IgNobel Prize Award Ceremony, held at Sanders Theater in Harvard Square. The Igs are given to real scientific research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. It's a project of the Annals of Improbable Research and I had the honor of leading a delegation of librarians to the event. Awardees included researchers in such areas as "perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter" (Engineering) and "discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride" (Medicine). These are real scientists doing real research, and they are presented with their awards by real Nobel Laureates who come from area institutions like Harvard and MIT to participate.

The most famous participant this year was author Neil Gaiman, who came to deliver what's called a "24/7 Lecture." The 24/7 Lecture is a series of talks by luminaries in different areas where the speaker gives an overview lasting 24 seconds, then summarizes the topic in 7 words. Gaiman's topic was distinguishing between a writer and a bacterium.

The picture shows my friends Amanda and Andy dressed as librarians; Amanda is actually a librarian in a local system and she hand-sewed catalog cards to her skirt to make her costume. So cool.

(Andy and Amanda have a great movie review blog at A and A's Movie A Day; if you like film blogs check it out.)

Then on Friday I went to my first NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) meeting, held in Providence, Rhode Island. I went with Dawn of She Is Too Fond of Books and I'll have a full post about it on Tuesday.

And today I'm home and reading The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer, a long book I'm 3/4 of the way through. Tomorrow begins a new experiment for me where I'm going to do themes for the rest of the year, in an effort to reach parts of my TBR pile that seem to be sadly neglected. First up is hardcovers, mostly recent-ish books that I really need to get to. I've put a temporary halt to review pitches in an effort to get my library under control and read some of the books I've been stacking on my floor, on my shelves and anywhere else they'll fit. We'll see how it goes!

What are you up to this Sunday? More Sunday Salon here.

8 comments:

bermudaonion said...

You have been busy! I hope you'll write a recap of NEIBA!

Frances said...

Your bookish life is so completely enviable! And nodding my head at getting the library under control thing. Such a kid in the candy store problem. I also need to purge pre-holidays here in order to make room for the things I want to keep. And share the rest.

gautami tripathy said...

Have a great Sunday!

Here is my Sunday Salon post!

Harvee said...

You have such a great job! Enjoy reading the TBR books! Here's my Sunday Salon

Anonymous said...

I was a little disappointed in The Invisible Bridge so I look forward to your thoughts.

PB

Alayne said...

Hope you're enjoying this beautiful Sunday New England weather! Will you be at the Boston Book Fesival on the 16th? I'm volunteering, so maybe I'll see you there. Have a lovely afternoon!
Alayne - The Crowded Leaf

Zibilee said...

Wow! It sounds like you had a really packed weekend, and like it was a lot of fun. I am also looking forward to your post about NEIBA. I also really think it's cool that you are going to be doing some themed reading. It will be nice to see how that plays out!

Kathleen said...

You had some wonderfully bookish events going on!