Blogger Meet-up

One of my favorite bloggers, the Citizen Reader, happens to live in the same city that I do. Today we finally met for coffee. Despite our proximity, it has taken us years to get around to this. Why the delay? Well, neither of us gets out much, we observed. Too busy reading.

When I told my teenagers of my plan to meet her, they were horrified. “You can’t just go out with someone you met on the Internet! What if this person is a serial killer! If we did this you’d ground us forever!” Wow, turns out they’ve been listening to me after all. In the end I was able to dredge up the fact that Citizen Reader and I do have one actual live friend in common, (and a blogger, at that: Stephanie of Cooking with Two Dudes) She can attest that neither of us is a dangerous pervert. That seemed to satisfy them.

And what a delightful coffee date it was! We talked about books we were reading, about her new book (a guide to non-fiction, targeted at librarians), about whether or not to use the f*** word in blog posts (she does, I do not, though I certainly say it), about how much we hate Philip Roth and John Updike (but feel bad about admitting that second one, now that he’s dead), about the endlessly crappy choices on the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books, about working as freelance writers/editors/indexers, about publishers, about magazines, about libraries, about books for kids, The time flew by! It was great fun and I hope we do it again!

(A more organized blogger would have had a camera. Oh well. Imagine two bookish women in a coffee shop, laughing a lot.)