Bookstore bingo, the best hotel ever, and a book and hotel related announcement

We are back from our holiday journey, with a little less money and quite a few more books. Our itineraries are strongly influenced by the locations of used bookstores, and today our path through Connecticut passed through two that were new to us. It's always so exciting to enter a new used bookstore, with hope-filled heart and eager eyes, although it's often a disappointment (like today was)--same old, same old. My sister and I once came up with "bookstore bingo," where each player's card features books to be found in almost any New England used bookstore (although I was surprised to see no copies of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch today).

Since our children came on the scene, used bookstore visiting became a heck of a lot more stressful. The worst public tantrum my eldest ever threw was on a sad day when he was two and became convinced that life would not be worth living without "Practice Your Way to SAT Success." I wasn't spending $10 on it, and we had to leave the bookstore before I finished browsing. Today my husband found himself forking over $5 for Blitz, by Hetty Burlingame Beatty, an oldish book (1961) about a mistreated horse that won the heart of my six year old. He will probably never read it, but at least it might hold its value.

Continuing the travel line of thought, here is a hotel that we did not stay in, but which sounds like a dream come true (although they probably don't have as many children's books as they should).



The next hotel I shall be visiting might not have an immense library of antiquarian books that can be taken back to your room, but it will be filled with kidlitosphere bloggers, which will probably be much more fun. It will be the Sheraton Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, site of the Third Annual Kidlitosphere Conference!!!!!

From the official announcement (where everything was much more nicely formated--sometimes blogger really peeves me):

The Kidlitosphere Conference is an annual gathering of the Society of Bloggers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. The 2009 conference will take place in Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 17th. While sessions are not scheduled for Friday, a Library of Congress visit is currently in the planning stages. An informal outing in DC will be scheduled for Sunday as well.

The sessions go from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday and will cover:

1. The Blog Within: An Interview With Your Inner Blogger
2. Building a Better Blog: Best Practices, Ideas, and Tips
3. Split Reviewer/Author Sessions:
It’s All About the Book: Better Book Reviews
It’s Not About Your Book: Writing Ideas for Blogging Authors
4. Split Reviewer/Author Sessions:
Social Networking for Fun (and Profit?)
5. Authors, Publishers, Reviewers (and ARCs): A Panel Conversation
6. Coming Together, Giving Back: Building Community, Literacy and the Reading Message (KidLitosphere Central/PBS/RIF/Literacy)
7. Meet the Authors

A pre-session meet-and-greet breakfast is offered from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. A fun dinner to mix and mingle is scheduled for 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. The registration fee for the conference — including the breakfast and dinner — is $100. The fee for dinner only (for spouses or guests) is $50.

I hope (a tad selfishly) that lots of people come! I was rather jealous the past two years, reading on everyone else's blog how much fun it all was.

Mother Reader has selflessly taken the lead on this (thanks Pam!), and you can read more about it here at her blog, and see who is committed to being there so far...