Boxes of Books, Restaurant Show, Email Newsletter, The Oatmeal.

The last few days, I've been double-checking stock for the Wisconsin Restaurant Expo, which runs next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We picked this up late, after another store pulled out, so I wasn't able to really go to publishers except for our two event authors (Andrew Zimmern on Monday and Tony and Kathy Mantuano on Tuesday). Oh, and from Wiley, since our rep Tom was so on the ball about this. He even gave me a suggested order. John, you've got competition for rep of the year!' If you haven't registered, here's a link to tickets.

I have now filled our receiving room with huge numbers of boxes. So normally I would not have been that upset when I created a Melissa and Doug 20-box order to ship April 1st that instead arrived March 10th. But I knew we'd have no room. So we carted off all those boxes to a storage area to clear space. Look for our new outdoor collection in early April. Oh, the bubbles of it all!

The spring event booking has slowed down, but we have plenty of follow-up to do on all the great things coming in April and May. Book ordering and outreach and partnerships and brainstorming and newsletters and signs and all of that. In fact, I was able to get out an email newsletter yesterday. Here's a link, just in case you don't subscribe.

One of my customers complained that the events never ended. No, they didn't, but I think that's a good thing. We recently had our first event where the authors didn't know they were speaking. A little panic, but we were able to pull it all together. Who knows what bodes for tomorrow's (Friday 3/18) event with Matthew Inman, Mr. Theoatmeal.com)? I've heard the events are much bigger than expected. I've already upped my book order three times.

It's a free event so get here early. And buy your book beforehand. I think we have a lot but we could run out. It sometimes happens.

Opening Day Awaits...New Baseball Books

We moved the baseball table to the front of the store, even though opening day is not for another few weeks. For one thing, we're trying to promote our event with Lawrence Baldassaro, author of Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball. There are a few releases that have come out already including:

Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella, by Neil Lanctot. The first African American catcher in the major leagues. Note--also qualifies for Baldassaro's book as his dad was Italian American.

Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, by James S. Hirsch. Now in paper!

But I think those came out early to take advantage of African American history promotions. Most of the other titles are not quite out yet, as the main market for these books turns out not to be opening day, but Father's Day. And for that, the books tend to arrive late April, early May.

Some of the titles we're looking forward to include:

Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game, by Dan Barry. The game was between the Pawtucket Rod Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, and took place in 1961.

Uppity: My Untold Story about the Games People Play, by Bill White with Gordon Dillow. An all-star first baseman who became a broadcasting leged.

Knuckler: My Life with Baseball's Most Confounding Pitch, by Tim Wakefield with Tony Massorati. How does a longtime Boston player stay sane with a pitch that drives baseball players crazy? And other questions.

The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter, by Ian O'Connor. How #2 became #1.

The House That Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the First Yankees Championship, and the Redemption of 1923, by Robert Weintraub
It tends to be the Yankees, the Red Sox, and then everyone else. The Red Sox books tended to come from Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), as they were based in Boston. Likely in the old days, that was also true of Little, Brown, but this Hachette imprint now tends to skew New Yorkish.

Stan Musial: An American Life, by George Vecsey

How could the man considered one of the greatest hitters of all time not make the cut as one of the top 25 baseball players of the 25th century? This is Jason's buyer's pick for the season.

And it turns out that Baldassaro's new release is just one of three notable baseball books coming from University of Nebraska Press:

Under Pallor, Under Shadow: The 1920 American League Pennant Race That Rattled and Rebuilt Baseball, by Bill Felber. When we last left baseball in 1919, it was the year of the Black Sox scandal!

Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League, by Aaron Pribble. There was an alleged terrorist attack on opening day.

Five Reasons Why I'm Thrilled That John Eklund is Sales Rep of the Year, Plus Three Books from Our Recently Published Section, Globally Speaking

1. He hired me. I wouldn't be in Milwaukee if it weren't for him.
2. He and Carol Grossmeyer pretty much created the bookstore that I own today.
3. He is my go-to source for obscure British and Canadian writers of a certain esthetic.
4. Massive amounts of invaluable advice.
5. He's a good customer.

Plus we talk almost every day. I felt that sort of disqualified me from nominating him, plus he said he wouldn't take the award unless the entire MIT/Yale/Harvard sales force shared the award. It's one of the few sales forces where I actually do know the entire sales force, so I can see why he wanted Adena and Patricia to share in the honors. But it turns out that there are enough booksellers with boundless enthusiasm for Eklund that he might have won the award even if I wrote a spirited argument against him. More on his blog.

In the spirit of this award, I start my roundup of world thought with Terry Eagleton's combative new book, Why Marx was Right, recently published by Yale, which recently hit the Boswell bestseller list. From Publishers Weekly: "Though he perhaps tries too hard toward the end to provide a foundational connection between Marxism and contemporary environmental concerns, Eagleton fluidly demonstrates the value of reappraising Marx in the current climate, offering a timely reminder that, despite the dominance of the free market, history is an ongoing process and that people still have the power to bend it toward justice." Now normally I would ask you to buy the book from me, but I think there is some sort of poetic justice in sending you to this website for the purchase.

From Dambisa Moyo comes How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly--And the Stark Choices Ahead. In this book, this Zambrian-bred economist argues that years of poor policy decisions by the United States have left us with a growing population of unskilled, unemployed and disaffected citizens. One of her arguments is the changing nature of fodder for magazines targeting young boys. Whereas fifty years ago the focus would have been on science and technology, today's kids are given sports and pop culture. Really? No Joe DiMaggio or Babe Ruth? Well, I haven't read it yet, but Moyo's argument is certainly provocative.

The world economy is also the focus of Dani Rodrik's The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. Whereas Moyo promotes internationalism, Rodrik challenges the conventional wisdom that portrays the advance of globalization as inevitable. His claim is that you can't have globalization, the democratic political process, or the nation state. We can have any two, but not all three. Alan Blinder calls Rodrik globalization's most prominent gadfly.

I think I'm also a gadfly, but I'm not sure of what. Off to sell books at Alverno for Louise Knight and her talk on Jane Addams. Meanwhile, read more about PW's rep of the year, plus our friends to the south, Anderson's were honored with bookseller of the year. Congrats to Naperville's finest. Also Downer's Grove's dreamiest. Or something like that.

What's Going on This Week? Women's History, Mideast History, Bowling History and More.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 15) we're co-sponsoring Louise Knight at Alverno College. Her biography of Jane Addams was published on the 150th anniversary of her birth. Here's what noted historian Douglas Brinkley had to say about the book:

“Only superlatives like excellent and elegant can do justice to Louise W. Knight’s fine Jane Addams. Whether Addams was grass-roots organizing, founding Hull House, or fighting for women’s suffrage, she was always an indefatigable warrior. If there was any real fairness in this troubled world Addams would have won three Nobel Peace Prizes instead of one. Highly recommended.”
--Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior.

The event is at Alverno's Wehr Hall. For more information about the book, visit the author's website.

On Wednesday, we have a double dose of Milwaukeeana at the store. Manya Kaczkowski appears for the release of Milwaukee's Historic Bowling Alleys while noted movie-theater-atician Larry Widen discusses Milwaukee Movie Theaters. Both books are recent publications by Arcadia Publishing.

The event is Wednesday, March 16, 7 PM, at Boswell Book Company. Roberta Wahlers notes that if you can "spare some time", this would be an interesting event to attend. More in the Journal Sentinel.

I've gotten early word on the crowds for Matthew Inman, mastermind of oatmeal.com, and they are enormous. Get hear early for his talk/slide show on Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth. I've already come up with a case-moving agenda. The talk starts Friday, March 18, 2011, at 7 PM.

Now you can find out:

--Five reasons why pigs are more awesome than you

--The Nine types of crappy handshakes

--How to use an apostrophe

--Five reasons to have rabies instead of babies.

Handy, no? More in the Journal Sentinel.

And finally, next Sunday we have Wisconsin Native Scott Korb, whose book Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine, has just come out in paperback. Here's an interesting piece from NPR that aired last year. And more in the Journal Sentinel.

Bestsellers, Achatz, Silverman, Lamott, Brooks, and a Little Stressing Out

I'm not used to having a 12-hour day on a Sunday, but when you have an event with Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas for Life, on the Line on a Sunday night, that's what happens.

The idea of doing it when most chefs are off has seemed to be a good move (that was John Wise's idea, not mine) and tickets are selling briskly, I had to learn how to process tix on our website, but since we're only hours away, that option is now closed. At this point, we're selling tix at the door. And after 6 pm, only the Starbucks door will be open.

We have a few more events with tickets:

March 27, Sarah Silverman at the Riverside:
We are the designated bookseller for the show, and will have available the paperback of The Bedwetter.

$32.50 gets you...a lot of laughs. Buy tix here.

Say hi to us in the lobby.

April 12, Anne Lamott at Alverno College:
For the paperback of Imperfect Birds.
$16 gets you a signed copy of the paperback plus a wonderful Lamott-style talk. A $10 gift card is available as an alternative.
Buy tix on the Alverno website. Our info should be up shortly. There is a ticketing fee per order at Alverno Presents.

May 12, Geraldine Brooks at Boswell:
For the new novel, Caleb's Crossing. I'm reading it now!
$5 gets you...an amazing event and light refreshments from Beans and Barley. The book is extra.

And now, on with the bestsellers:
fiction hardcover
1. Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss

2. A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson

4. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

5. The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht*

6. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell

7. Scared Stiff, by Annelise Ryan

8. Sing You Home, by Jodi Picout

9. Minding Frankie, by Maeve Binchy
10. When the Killing's Done, by T.C. Boyle

nonfiction hardcover

1. A Chance to Make History, by Wendy Kopp
2. The Crossley ID Guide, by Richard Crossley
3. Life, on the Line, by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas

4. A Widow's Story, by Joyce Carol Oates**

5. The Social Animal, by David Brooks

6. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff

7. The Information, by James Glieck

8. Swimming in the Daylight, by Lisa Paul

9. How to Write a Sentence, by Stanley Fish
10. At Home, by Bill Bryson

*The Tiger's Wife got dual raves of Michiko Kakukani in the daily New York Times and a front-page review from Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review. Plus Mike Fischer's review last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Today he ponders the wonder that is Jasper Fforde in One of Our Thursdays is Missing. It's a literary joy ride!

**When I spoke to Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio last Monday, she promised a great interview with Joyce Carol Oates for A Widow's Story. Apparently she kept her promise; folks have been coming in since raving about their talk. Listen here.

Regarding the stressing out, it's not worth talking about here!

Saturday Gift Post--New Stuff in the Store, Including Contorting Wooden Snakes and a Blank Book Display that Finally Has Wheels.

I hoped to attend the Minneapolis gift show this weekend, but wound up getting cold feet and staying home. I had the usual panic attack before leaving the store, combined with a "what exactly am I looking for if I spent the whole week receiving gift items?" moment.

On the kids side, we restocked our basics, as we were quite low on puzzles and craft kits. The Easter puppets came in from our favorite puppet vendor--we've put out a teaser table. One customer put in a special order on our notorious bendable robots. Since this was the second request in a short period of time, we restocked. I also brought in these animal whatzits (pictured.) The bendable pirates are on backorder, which is a bit sad, as we wanted them for our "pirate galley-on giveaway" next weekend. Note to publishers: old galleys, old ones. With the purchase of a book. More on that later.

On the adult side, we finally got the remaining pieces of our schmancy new spinner rack, meaning it is tall enough to not look like it belong's in the kids section, and it also has wheels. Our Tag Easter items came in. Last year was definitely rabbit-centric, but I seem to be moving in a more chick-friendly direction.

Tables are moving around a bit. Only a week left of our St. Patrick's display. We decided to go with Celtic cards, journals, and boxes, as they are suitably Irish and yet fit in with our everyday items. We got our first request for St. Patrick's Day cards. We were going to send this customer elsewhere, when he saw our boxed Celtic cards and bought them.

It's very important for us to repurpose our gift items into multiple displays because a) otherwise, we wouldn't know what to do with them and b) we don't have quite enough traffic to sell through everything super fast and I like to change displays relatively quickly, when possible. So the map-related items on the travel table (cards, paperweights, coasters) turn into items for the graduation table. Most of the spring items transition into Mother's Day. If we have a few rabbit puppets left after Easter, they go on the puppet rack.

Of course there's always a little to mark down. But we just took away our markdown table for a while, replacing it with a new home for our tee shirts. We have restocked book jacket tees with designs we sold best and added a few new designs--The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea. Should be coming in a few weeks. And we're also working on our spring special edition tee shirt. More on that later.

The Many Slaps of Christos Tsiolkas..or How Did Our Book Club Discussion Go?

Slap #1: What most people assume the author is referring to in The Slap takes place at an Australian barbecue. At this outing, a man (Harry) hits a kid (Hugo) who isn't his own. Sides are taken, the police are called, and Tsiolkas sets things up so that while we are incensed by the act, the parents (Rosie and Gary) are so unpleasant that it's hard to say who really is at fault.

Slap #2: This is what stopped one of our participants from reading the novel. Christos Tsiolkas assaults the reader from the first page. Hector, one of several narrators of the story, works his way through bodily functions, meditates on sex and uses enough naughty words to have the book banned in many a school district. It's a dare, really. Like a book with heavy dialect that by the middle seems to be a language that you've translated, the language becomes gentler as the book progresses, even when the narrator jumps at one point to the equally posturing Harry (Hector's cousin, the "slapper.")

Slap #3: It's a multicultural world out there; get used to it. To those folks in Australia (and by extension, the United States) who want to go back to a world where they could navigate their life avoiding Blacks (Aborigines here, but use your own substitute) and Asians and Muslims and gay men and lesbians, Tsiolkas seems to be saying that isn't really possible anymore. It's a development that tears at this Greek community in Melbourne, which of course is interesting, as one time they were the "Blacks."

Slap #4: It's all relative, in more ways than one. Yes, this is a novel about family ties. Is Aisha, Hector's wife, more loyal to her friends or her husband's family, particularly his father Manolis? But more than that, Tsiolkas mines the changing perspectives of the novel particularly well. An unlikeable character becomes likable. Someone we've gotten to know well grows more distant as we read the book through other's eyes. These ties become the key to the truest slap, which winds up directed against Rosie. And by the way, we all liked the way Tsiolkas moved the plot along with each character, with almost no doubling back to revisit events.

Slap #5: Sex and drugs, but not so much rock and roll. It's going to be tough for some people, particularly when seemingly balanced teenagers Connie and Richie are popping pills and shooting up. Remind yourself it's a novel. But boy, you need to be prepared for that.

One of our new participants (we had three--I'm psyched!), who was really the only person who attending who read the book and didn't like it, wondered what we thought of the writing, which she thought was a little flat. There was some agreement, but it's my contention that there is more to a great book than the purpleness of the prose. I should have made her pick up Tinkers then and there; beautifully written with an intricate structure, but not the most complicated of plots. It's always something!

I started this novel, thinking "Boy, there must be some amazing Greek community in Australia." I had seen a novel some years ago about this gay man feeling hemmed in by the traditional community. Of course it turned out to be "Head On", based on Tsiolkas's first novel, Loaded.

So let folks know that this book is an assault on several levels, except, oddly enough, in terms of violence. It's almost prissy in its lack of blood. But if they can handle it, The Slap is a really great novel and a wonderful book club selection. For more, read this Washington Post review or maybe this interview in the Times (UK).

Coming Up:

Monday, April 4: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrow

Monday, May 2: People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Monday, June 6: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.

Winner of The Premio Strega for The Solitude of Prime Numbers is Coming from Italy to Read at Boswell on April 6...in Italian.

One of the things I’ve noticed about our event planning is that themed events will converge together periodically. For example, I noticed that in late March/early April, we had three Italian-themed events. On March 31 at Boswell, 7 pm, we’re hosting Lawrence Baldassaro, author of Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball. On April 5, the guest speaker at Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library Literary Luncheon at the Woman's Club of Wisconsin (which we co-sponsor, and note that this event is ticketed) is Donna Leon, author of the beloved Venice-set mysteries, the newest of which is Drawing Conclusions. And on April 6, we’re hosting Paolo Giordano for the paperback release of The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers is not just any Italian novel. It won the Strega Prize (Premio Strega), the most prestigious award in Italy, awarded since 1947. Sadly, many of these novels are not well known to Americans. In fact, I think you’d be hard pressed to name many Italian authors of the last century beyond Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. In fact, several Italian authors have won the Nobel prize, most recently Dario Fo in 1997.

I was intrigued by the book, which I meant to read in hardcover (sigh). There were comparisons to Mark Haddon and that intrigued me. I think back on the book as a fascinating story told through the eyes of an autistic child, but when prompted, remembered that one of the things about the book that first hooked me was that the chapters were in Fibonacci sequence.

And what mathematical metaphor is more appropriate for sad and lonely people than prime numbers, divisible only by one and themselves? Alice Della Rocha and Mattia Balossini in Giordano’s novel are twin primes, pairs of primes that are only two apart (like 17 and 19), with just an even number between them. Like primes, they become increasingly rare, but also like primes, it is conjectured that there is an infinite number of them*

Alice is crippled by a childhood accident, and her body image issues have led to serious eating disorders. Mattia has a childhood secret regarding his twin sister, and this has led him to be unable to excel in anything except his studies. Both characters are quite memorable and the story is filled with sparkling moments. I don’t exactly know what this means, but it seems to have a modern Italian esthetic about it.

And I know you’re asking, and yes, now that I've read and enjoyed Giordano's novel, I would absolutely recommend it to readers of The Elegance of a Hedgehog.

So I was speaking to Sonya at Penguin, and she told me that while the author is well-versed in English and would love to take questions, he prefers to read in Italian. Well, I saw this an opportunity. I’d already been talking to Paul Salsini and Bobby Tanzilo (the latter of OnMilwaukee.com) about co-sponsoring the event with the Italian Film Festival, and I thought they’d be able to find the English reader (which I thought would be Bobby or Paul). But no! They led me to writer Angela Damiani, a Milwaukee writer and blogger.

Mr. Tanzilo has informed me that there is a pent-up demand for readings in Italian by Italian natives. Hope we’re able to get the word out to this group hungry for the native tongue. I fondly remember the talk for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie, where the author read in French. I also believe we had at least one speaker who read in Spanish. I’m guessing it was Arturo Perez-Reverte. Feel free to correct me.

So you ask, what about this Italian Film Festival? It’s a national program run out of Saint Louis with ten stops, starting with Minneapolis on March 25th, and moving through Memphis, Denver, and beyond. Get all the details on their website.

I had made a suggestion to show the film version of The Solitude of Prime Numbers, but any project with a film component has been very difficult for me to put together. I also wanted to somehow show a film in collaboration with Robert Elder’s The Film That Changed My Life, to no avail. And then there is Patrick McGilligan’s upcoming biography of Nicholas Ray. And last fall we had Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops. Honestly, I’ve hit a brick wall here. Help me out!

I guess reviewers were quite mixed on this film, which did the round of film festivals. But in The Back Row blog of Toronto Film Festival, Tom Hall champions this film: “It is heartening to see a filmmaker in his early 30’s taking on big ideas with delicious visual bravura that still makes way for powerful performances.” Read the rest of his piece here.

So to sum up, Paolo Giordano appears on Wednesday, April 6, 7 pm, reading in Italian from his novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, with an English reading by Angela Damiani, with a discussion and signing, and all co-sponsored by the the Milwaukee run of Italian Film Festival. The paperback comes out on March 29th, but that's only a week before our event, so I decided to get this post out early and make sure that every Italo-phile in the metro area knows about this very, very special event. Did I mention that Mr. Giordano is also a physicist?

*One of the few proofs I am still able to do is prove that there are an infinite number of primes. My only regret with The Solitude of Prime Numbers was that, with the promise of the title, that there wasn’t a wee bit more number theory. I was happy that Mattia sorted out the issue of zeros in the Riemann zeta function, however.