ALA Annual Convention 2024: Highlights!

While we are both currently out of the library field, one way that we like to stay in contact with the field is to attend the annual convention for the American Library Association. This year’s convention was in San Diego, CA, so we hopped on a plane and spent a long weekend immersing ourselves in all things libraries and books! Here are a few highlights from our time!

Exhibition Hall

We, of course, spent a huge amount of our time in the exhibition hall itself! It’s always overwhelming just how many booths and exhibits there are to explore, and even after several days, we always leave feeling like we must have missed something! There were opportunities to hear from and speak to many publishers about their upcoming fall and winter catalogs, so our TBR lists have grown exponentially. As you may have seen on our Instagram page, we also picked up a ton of new ARCs that we’re excited to read and review here on the blog (though this might have been an “our eyes are bigger than our…reading abilities” situation, and we likely won’t be able to review them all here fully!)

We also got to meet a lot of great authors, both some we had read before and some exciting debut authors! Serena was particularly excited to get a signed copy of “When Among Crows” by Veronica Roth as well as Mary E. Pearson for “The Courting of Bristol Keats.” For Kate the highlights included seeing Stephen Graham Jones as he signed copies of both “The Angel of Indian Lake” and “I Was A Teenage Slasher”, and meeting Hayley Dennings as she signed copies of “This Ravenous Fate” (vampires are so hot right now. Heck, even standing in line with fellow fans was a treat, as Kate had some lovely conversations with other book enthusiasts as she stood in line waiting ever so patiently for the book signing to commence.

Panels

There were also several excellent panels that we checked out! Serena was particularly interested in a mystery panel titled “Writing Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century.” Not only was the topic right up her alley, but Laurie R. King was one of the featured panelists and her “Mary Russell” series is one of the first adaptations of Holmes that Serena read and loved! Kate had three panels in particular that she found particularly fascinating. The first was a panel on Indigenous Representation in Children’s and YA Literature and how it has changed and grown over the years, and how more Native voices have started to come through.

The second was a author talk from a few horror and thriller authors that all have books coming out this fall and into the winter. And the final one was about Genre Fiction and how ir can reflect certain aspects of society, with authors who all work through indie presses talking about their inspirations and what it is like working with indie presses as opposed to larger publishing companies. There were certainly a few titles from these panels that Kate cannot wait to check out.

San Diego

We also had a lot of fun exploring San Diego! We both went down and ventured around the marina at various points (while we weren’t stuck waiting for various freight trains to move along the tracks and allow pedestrians to cross out of the convention hall!). We also ate at several nice restaurants, with live music and even belly dancing! On our last night, we ventured up to the rooftop bar at our hotel and got to hear the opening part of the Blink 182 concert that was playing at the stadium next to us! Luckily, they have a hard cutoff time of 11 pm for concerts since we’re now old ladies who need our sleep!

It’s also always nice being so close to the ocean, and while we didn’t get TOO close, we could see it from the convention center and could see various boats, as well as a view of Coronado Island. And given that it was generally sunny and bright while we were there while back home in Minnesota it was pretty rainy (as it par for the course this summer), it was nice being out and about and not having to carry around an umbrella.

Overall it was a very successful conference. We feel like we learned a lot, we got a lot of exciting new books that we can’t wait to dive into, and having a fun break in routine together was a pleasure. Next year the conference is going to be in Philadelphia, and we are hoping that we will be able to go and report back from there as well. Until then, thanks ALAAC24!! We had a great time!