What's Selling This Week--It's a Lively Bestseller List This Week...for January.

It's the first week back for UWM after break. While we don't have the rush of the UWM Bookstore or Clark Graphics, you can see a bit of difference in traffic, and several professors suggest their students come by for certain trade titles featured in courses.

Paperback Fiction

1. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, by Chase Twitchell.

2. The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
3. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
4. Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare

5. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell

So is a course sale a bulk sale? I think not--the students are free to buy the books wherever they want, and we're grateful that some of them buy books from us.

Paperback Nonfiction:

1. Dispatches from the Classroom, by Dave Yost, Chris Drew, and Joseph Rein

2. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff

3. Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay Abaire

4. Bossypants, by Tina Fey

5. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

I've got nothing interesting to say about these books. Down at #7, we are selling The Business Wisdom of Steve Jobs. Yesterday we had one of those experiences where one customer bought the book and another customer saw it at the register and decided to get it too.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
2. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
3. How it All Began, by Penelope Lively
4. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
5. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

Jason maps out the Boswell Best pretty carefully in advance, but every so often, I get the right to add a book that I think could pop better with discounting. After Michiko Kakutani's "vital" review of How it All Began, I begged for Lively to get a shot, and here is the result. Lively is one of those authors where it is hard to gauge how her books will sell as she is subject to reviewer whims--in two weeks we've doubled hardcover sales of Family Album (that's 6, as opposed to 3, by the way).

And this is just the kind of book that I like--a chance encounter with a mugger has reverberations over the lives of several characters. How does the marketing info put it? Life has other plans for us. It does indeed.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. A Nation of Moochers, by Charles Sykes
2. The Art of Confession, by Paul Wilkes
3. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
4. Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
5. Republic Lost, by Lawrence Lessig

While one might connect mooching and confessing, the books are apparently not related.

Books for Kids:

1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. A Ball for Daisy, by Chris Raschka
3. Pat the Bunny Bunny Kisses, by Golden Books
4. I am a Bunny, by Ole Risom and Richard Scarry
5. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

We're out of Jack Gantos's Newberry Award-winning novel, but we're glad to say that Chris Raschka's Caldecott winner was in stock and we took advantage. Oh, and that Pat the Bunny heart-shaped book is a pretty clever idea.