“I’m so excited I feel like I’m going to explode,” a girl who looked to be about 15 said to her friends as they skipped toward the entrance of the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Saturday morning. “I can’t believe we actually just saw him!” The “him” in question wasn’t a member of the band One Direction or similar teen star. It was the bespectacled, 38-year-old author John Green, whose acclaimed YA (Young Adult) novel, “The Fault in Our Stars” was adapted to film last year. Consider that only the second sign that entering BookCon — a new, Comic-Con-style fan gathering for book lovers — is a bit like jumping to an alternate universe.

Hoards of young, diverse readers descended on a new Comic-Con-style fan convention for book lovers