Boswell's Annotated Bestsellers for the Week Ending November 14, 2015

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. The Bassoon King, by Rainn Wilson
2. My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem
3. Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, by John Gurda (event 12/2)
4. Destiny and Power, by Jon Meacham
5. The Food Lab, by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
6. The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page
7. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell
8. The White Road, by Edmund De Waal
9. Knitting Pearls, edited by Ann Hood
10. Black Earth, by Timothy Snyder
11. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein
12. Beyond Measure, by Vicki Abeles
13. Dear Mr. You, by Mary-Louise Parker
14. M Train, by Patti Smith
15. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Folks who loved The Hare With Amber Eyes has now published The White Road: Journey Into an Obsession, a history of porcelain. Bill Marvel of The Dallas Morning News wrote: "It comes as no surprise that a potter obsessed with the beauty and utility of his work would make something extraordinary of such a tale. In prose as shapely and well-turned as any cup or urn, de Waal follows the quest for the secrets of porcelain to the court of the Sun King at Versailles, to the kilns of Quaker entrepreneurs in England, to the hills of the Cherokee Nation, to the workshops of post-Mao China, and finally to the Dachau work camp where slave laborers fashion plates and cups for SS units."

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
2. The Slow Regard of Silent Things, by Patrick Rothfuss
3. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff
4. The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
5. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
6. Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
7. The Promise, by Robert Crais
8. The Muralist, by B.A. Shapiro (event 12/1 at Boswell)
9. Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal
10. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore

The newest novel from Robert Crais is The Promise, featuring Elvis Cole, Joe Pike, and Maggie the police dog - it's a collision of characters from different series who collide together in this story of of a killer with enough explosives to destroy Echo Park. Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union has a nice review from C.S. Foster: "Crais, a master of fast-paced patter, keeps the pages turning with short chapters from the various character’s viewpoints; the most appealing coming from Maggie."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Sacred Ground, by Eboo Patel
2. Acts of Faith, by Eboo Patel
3. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, by Gina Athena Ulysse
4. Soulpancake, by Rainn Wilson
5. First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, by Jessica Hopper
6. Milwaukee Food, by Lori Friedrich (event 11/24)
7. How to Sit, by Thich Nhat Hanh
8. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
9. The Great Escape, by Angus Deaton
10. Yes, Please, by Amy Poehler

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality is the book from Angus Deaton, this year's Nobel Prize winner in economics, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. The book originally came out in 2013, but the paperback dd not come out until 2015. David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Economic nostalgia can have a strong appeal, especially following more than five years of a financial crisis and its aftermath. In the United States, people talk longingly of the mid-20th century, when the middle class was growing and upward mobility was the norm. In Europe and Japan, many hark back to the 1980s, before the euro was born and the Japanese bubble burst. Even in China and India, two of the world’s more dynamic economies, some like to celebrate a time when life did not revolve around breakneck growth. The biggest accomplishment of Angus Deaton’s Great Escape is to bring perspective to all this wistfulness."

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
2. A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
3. Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
4. The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
5. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
6. Washing the Dead, by Michelle Brafman (event today at 4 pm at the JCC)
7. Julia's Daughters, by Colleen Faulkner
8. Saga V5, by Brian K Vaughan
9. Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Joe Hill
10. Shady Hollow, by Juneau Black

Sharon Nagel and Jocelyn Koehler's Shady Hollow series had a nice write up in the Milwaukee Record. Here's Koehler describing the book: "I think the main audience is people who do love cozy mystery or just quirky little books. So we’re aiming it at adults, since we include some rather adult themes (murder, adultery, SO much coffee…). But it’s also very much in the vein of Agatha Christie, where the emphasis is on the sleuthing and the characters, not buckets of blood. The only grit is at the bottom of the coffee mugs. Did I mention coffee is a major element? True." And people have been asking if kids can read the books, and I have to mention that I was reading Agatha Christie by the time I was 12, and I'm sure I was in good company.

Books for Kids:
1. Hello?, by Liza Wiemer
2. Old School V10 by Jeff Kinney
3. The Day the Crayons Came Home, by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
4. Whisper, by Pamela Zagarenski
5. Princess in Black and The Perfect Princess Party, by Shannon Hale
6. The Marvels, by Brian Selznick
7. Winter, by Marissa Meyer
8. The Sword of Summer, by Rick Riordan
9. I Really Like Slop, by Mo Willems
10. Princess in Black, by Shannon Hale

Boswellian Todd has a very nice rec for Pamela Zagarenski's The Whisper. Kirkus offered a starred review, which calls it "a magical book on loan from her teacher loses its words on the trip home, so a little girl spins her own stories for each enchanting picture...Surreal, staggering mixed-media paintings make traveling across such beautifully varied and bizarre storyscapes exhilarating"

I'm planning to link to the Journal Sentinel reviews, but that blog will post separately. I'm thrown off by closing on Saturday so that I could move another person to close Thursday so we could have an extra pair of hands at Rainn Wilson's event at the Pabst.