Reading for a living

I started a new job last month, and it's more or less something I've been looking for for a long while. For as long as I can remember, I'd always dreamed of reading books for a living. I may have made career choices that led to that. Well now, the new job is sort of like that in what may be the best place possible: Penguin Random House. Yup, I now work as part of the international sales team of Penguin Random House US. 

If you're a person who reads book blogs, I don't have to tell you that this is an awesome job. And though I also tell friends that I worked for it, I think a large part of it, too, was luck. Perhaps being in the right place at the right time, and maybe even doing the right things. Whatever it is, it's hard to look a gift-horse in the mouth, you know?

The lobby uptown

In any case, this great opportunity is still a job: a job I seem to be willing to spend hours and hours in. There's still a lot of stuff to learn (and unlearn) and, of course, a lot of books to get to know. And by a lot, I mean A LOT. Like, hundreds of books. 

So, this is one irony of the new job: I get as many books as I want to read. I don't realistically have time to read all of them. But it would be fun trying. 

Anyway, we had to go to New York for the yearly sales conference last March, and it was so fascinating to meet the rest of the international sales team. I was stoked to be in a group of individuals from something like 20 different countries, maybe more. And you know what else was amazing? These people knew books. Knew the stories, knew authors' back lists , knew what formats titles came out in. And they talk about it and they read. 

In fact, one of the best things I remember from the sales conference wasn't the meetings with Parag Khanna or Arianna Huffington (though those were awesome, too!), or the team cocktail, dinners, or fun nights (equally awesome), or listening in to the publishers' presentations (I had to stifle a giggle while watching the Penguin Classics publisher presenting). 

Parag Khanna, author of Connectography, at our welcome dinner. (Forgive the awful pic. I was at the other end of the table.)

The Penguin Galaxy series! I love them. Aren't the covers beautiful?

With some members of the international team and Arianna Huffington. Wheee! She is a FANTASTIC speaker. And I love what she talks about in her new book, The Sleep Revolution.

All those things were like a dream, but the best thing that I remember is our team ending the training early one day, and--since we had to wait for the other team to finish their sessions--we stuck around our training room, took out our gadgets, and then started reading manuscripts. So, there we were: six people in a quiet room, all of us reading. I looked up and realized that was what we were doing, and thought, "This is beautiful." 

The Penguin Random House US International Sales team

So, this is the team I'm now part of. They're a pretty awesome bunch. I'm a pretty lucky gal, even if I don't spend the whole day reading (unless you count emails and websites). Because whatever we talk about, it is always about books, and I do live to read.