Our goal when talking to Nancy onstage at BEA has been to give everyone a glimpse behind the mighty Oz’s curtain. (Which isn’t to say Nancy isn’t magic — she is — but she’s much different in person than you might think.) She was kind enough to humor us again this year, and her husband Joe even pitched in to help make a teaser trailer.

Last year our rule was that she couldn’t talk about books. This year we tried the opposite tack: she was required to reference a book when answering a question. Her penalty for failing to do so was to talk about a topic she never discusses: books she didn’t like. She named names.

After a spontaneous introduction by Marcia Purcell, Head of Library and Academic Marketing at Random House, Nancy compared her daughters to characters in A Game of Thrones, talked about a recent incident when she was a near victim of road rage, shocked the audience with revelations about a famous book it took her three tries to enjoy. She also compared her first intimate moment with Joe to a book, talked about her worst worst author experience, and told us about the craziest library patron she ever encountered. Please listen to the hour-long conversation if you’re a fan or just looking for new gossip.

As I promised the audience, here’s a list of the titles and authors mentioned:

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Best Friends by ________
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
The Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Tickets to the Devil by Richard Powell
The Philadelphian by Richard Powell
The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
Dewey Death by Charity Blackstock
The Foggy Foggy Dew by Charity Blackstock
Hansel and Gretel
Dorothy Dunnett’s books
Fifteen by Beverly Cleary
Elswyth Thane’s novels
Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
Philip Levine (poet)
Anil’s Ghost: A Novel by Michael Ondaatje
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Terry Pratchett
Robopocalypse: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
World War Z by Max Brooks
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes
Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
The Lotus Eaters: A Novel by Tatjana Soli
*The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
The Snake Stone: A Novel by Jason Goodwin
Deadwood by Pete Dexter
The Pelican Brief: A Novel by John Grisham
M.K. Wren’s Conan Flag series
John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway “Bookman” series
Ilium by Dan Simmons
The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason
The Odyssey graphic novel adaptation by Gareth Hinds
Queen of Kings by Maria Dahvana Headley
Being Dead: A Novel by Jim Crace
Sex by Madonna