Six Interesting Things About Today--Four of Them Involving Books.

1. We had a meeting at Discovery World about our upcoming Iron Cupcake event on February 12, in support of Karen Tack and Alan Richardson's wondrous new book, Cupcakes, Cookies, & Pie, Oh My! Yes, these are the Hello Cupcake folks. You can order a signed copy from us.

This event is absolutely sold out. There are no extra tickets at all for sales. However, we are giving away tickets at Boswell. Drop by and fill out a form. We'll also have a Facebook giveaway contest going. We'll give away five pairs of tickets in store and five more on Facebook.  Thanks to Sandy for helping make this work.

2. On our way back from the meeting, Stacie and I stopped at the Milwaukee Cupcake Company. I had a blood orange cupcake, which was super delicious. Halley and I have been debating for weeks about the merits of Milwaukee Cupcake vs. Honeypie/Comet. It's not a bad dilemma to have.

3. Our new cards from Rifle Paper came in. I had the order all put together when a customer asked if we had any packs of Valentine postcards for adults. Huh? And then it dawned on me that I had just seen some, so we ordered them in for the table. We'll see how it goes.

4. Perelman's Silence, by Pascal Mercier. Night Train to Lisbon was one of those books with great word of mouth. A lot of booksellers sold him to folks who like Carlos Ruiz Zafron. It's the story of a linguist (hooray for linguist protagonists) driven to desperate acts when he plagiarizes a colleague's work at a conference. Weekendavisen called Mercier an "excellent stylist" while Berlingske Tidende compares the book to Crime and Punishment. Yes, I get my kicks from quoting Danish newspapers.

5. Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, by John M. Barry. I'm sort of interested that this book plays off the themes of last week's history book by David Hackett Fischer (who looked at the diffrences between the cultures of the United States and New Zealand). In this book, Barry looks at how the rights of the individual versus that of the state, from the vantage point of Roger Williams, the scourge of Massachusetts, who went on to found Rhode Island.

6. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. This novel, set in 1920s Alaska, first came to Stacie and my attention when we had a drink with Robert Goolrick at the Pfister (I foget how he wound up there--it had nothing to do with an event at Boswell) and we asked him what he was reading. I don't remember what he said then, but here's what he said now:

"If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment--a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaska wilderness."

Plus I love the cover illustration by Alessandro Gottardo. I would totally buy his greeting cards. Sorry, that's the way I think nowadays.