Three Things You May Not Know About Taping the Summer Reads from Booksellers Segment on NPR

1. You work with one group of people for the taped segment, and a different set of folks for the online portion.

2. Each bookseller submits four or five titles. You discuss some, but not all of them in the taped segment.

3. A number of folks have asked me what it's like to talk to Ms. Stamberg. As you might expect, she is knowledgeable on all sorts of topics. Several times I froze during the taping and couldn't remember basic facts about the books!

My apologies for including a book (Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.) in my roundup that isn't quite out yet. I tried to balance fiction and nonfiction, but a lot of the nonfiction I read is so narrowly focused. I mean really--who's going to be interested in Ten Nine Eight: The Glory Days of Buffalo Shopping?

So now I've got a reading list too, with suggestions from Lucia Silver and Rona Brinlee. Our buyer Jason seconds Brinlee's enthusiasm for Alice I Have Been and The Kingdom of Ohio.

Thank you to everyone at NPR who kept me on deadline.

Here's the segment!