Monday, May 31, 2010

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!

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