I survived!!! After three whirlwind days in NYC, I am now back home, safe and sound with a pile of new books. Ooo, boy, what a trip. The first thing, I should apologize for the total lack of pictures with this post. I bought a camera a few days before I left, but had to return it due to a complete lack of actual functioning. Sad Kellie.

I opted to skip the blogger con this year, so on Wednesday night I got on what would be an insanely long trip to New York from Toronto. I was really nervous about not getting enough sleep, because I felt insanely sick on my first day of BEA last year and already had a head-cold, but I survived. So, as soon as my bus pulled up in New York and I’d gathered up my stuff, it was off to the Javits Center. I checked my bag, did a quick lap around to get the lay of the land and then headed right for my first MUST HAVE book of the trip, Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreund. The line wasn’t too bad, and it was totally, totally worth it. I can’t wait to read that book!

The rest of day one was spent flitting around based on my schedule. I grabbed a lot of great books, and definitely missed a few too, but I was trying not to over think anything. Either way, I was leaving with free books, so I didn’t want to stress about the wheres and whens. If a line was too long (and there were some insane ones), I skipped it.

Other big finds from day one were The Returned, The Planet Thieves, You Look Different in Real Life, and Hostage Three.
My biggest miss was that I didn’t get Crown of Midnight (another must), but it would be dropping a few more times the next day, so I looked longingly at where the pile would have been and headed back to my hostel for a ten hour coma.

Friday! Right away, I knew I’d be passing up a couple of the items on my list. Both Kat Zhang and Richelle Mead were going to be no-go’s, although I did end up washing my hands in the bathroom beside Richelle Mead, but I was too much of a wimp to say hi.

On the bright side, I did get Crown of Midnight, Altered by Gennifer Albin and The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer, so my must have list was officially complete and I could go into day three feeling pretty good.

I stopped by the Spencer Hill Press booth a few times to say hello to all the wonderful people I work with their, and to put some names to faces as I hadn’t actually met anyone before. So that was pretty fantastic.

This is also probably the day where I had the most fun just chatting to people in lines. I know everyone says it, but you meet the coolest people in lines! Sometimes you can be in one lineup for over an hour, so it’s hard not to get to know the people around you, and there were fantastic bloggers all over the Javits center. Running into people I actually recognize and follow was so much fun, and I have every intention of twitter-stalking every person I met last week. Gotta love book people!

On Friday night, I made a trip over to visit Hayley’s (of Bookin’ It with Hayley G) hotel as she was going to be driving some of my books back to Canada for me. I cannot tell you what a huge life saver that was. I don’t have my grand total of books yet because I haven’t picked them up from Hayley, but I promise you there was no way I could have gotten those books back home on the Greyhound by myself. Hayley G is pretty much my hero.

After Hayley, it was off to central park for the book blogger picnic. The first person I saw was Kate Towrey of Midnight Book Girl, who was one of my roomates at BEA 2012 and it was fantastic to see her. I got to chat with a lot of INSANELY COOL book people, and I’m so glad I went. The weather for the entire trip was way hotter than I was expecting, so part of me just wanted to hide out in an air-conditioned building, but I eventually convinced myself that that would have been fully ridiculous!

Finally, day three! Saturday was easily the biggest surprise for me. It was power reader day (where the convention is opened up to the public) and while there were definitely swarms of crazy readers, the day went SO smoothly, and I actually got a lot more than I expected.

I think the key there was that I had given up on trying to spend time in the thick of things, pretty much entirely. I spent nearly all my time in lineups, just chatting away and waiting for the books I really wanted instead of the ones I was just mildly interested in. Some wins from Saturday were Reboot, Sylo, The Walking Dark and False Sight.

My final line of the day was for The Walking Dark, and I got a bit of a bonus in that one. I guess the people at Random House were looking to unload extra stock, so they were walking through the lineup just giving things away. I picked up a copy of The Beautiful and the Cursed, as well as Steelheart, which ended up being my first read post-BEA. Great book, so to have it just handed off to me like that will definitely be remembered as a big BEA win.

I had such a great time, and met so many great people… it’s really hard to put into words. Everything went surprisingly smoothly, and I walked away with little more than a cold and some stuff muscles. It was great, and I can’t wait to go back. Once I have all my books together, I’ll do a haul post to give everyone an idea of all the incredible books I’ll be reviewing in the next few months, but for now… happy reading!