Sunday, January 27, 2019

Boswell bestsellers, week ending January 26, 2019

It's the Boswell bestsellers for the week ending January 26, 2019. Amie and I are back from Winter Institute in Albuquerque and here's what sold while we were gone.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Tear it Down V4, by Nick Petrie (Event Tue 1/29, 6:30 at Whitefish Bay Library)
2. The Current, by Tim Johnston (New time! Event is Monday, January 28, 2 pm)
3. There There, by Tommy Orange
4. The Red Address Book, by Sofia Lundberg
5. The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay
6. Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver
7. Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso
8. Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield
9. Map of Salt and Stars, by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
10. The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin

Jane is single-handedly getting The Red Address Book on our bestseller list. Quotes are from Fredrik Backman, Nina George, and this from Helen Simonson: "A sweet-tart Swedish romance steeped in memory and regret…The Red Address Book is just the sort of easy-reading tale that will inspire readers to pull up a comfy chair to the fire, grab a mug of cocoa and a box of tissues and get hygge with it.”

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Out of the Gobi, by Wijan Shan
2. The Poisoned City, by Anna Clark
3. Becoming, by Michelle Obama
4. America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook, from America's Test Kitchen
5. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat
6. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, by David Treuer
7. How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan
8. Maid, by Stephanie Land
9. You Can't Spell Truth without Ruth, edited by Mary Zaia
10. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff

Winner of the James Beard Award for best cookbook and several IACP cookbook awards, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking is also notorious by booksellers for being extremely difficult to source this holiday season. Here's the secret in a nutshell: "Master the use of just four elements - Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food—and anything you cook will be delicious."

Paperback Fiction:
1. Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
2. Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan (event Thu 1/31, 6:30 at Elm Grove Library)
3. The Drifter, by Nick Petrie
4. Best European Fiction 2018, edited by Alex Andriesse
5. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan
6. The Fifth Season V1: Broken Earth by NK Jemisin
7. Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson
8. Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (In-Store Lit Group discussion Mon 2/4, 7 pm)
9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
10. Misery, by Stephen King

We provide books for a few classes at UWM and you can see a little influence of that in this week's list - our #1 paperback fiction (Ishmael) and nonfiction (The Spell of the Sensuous) titles are course adoption. We're grateful to the professors and instructors who take the extra step of encouraging their students to visit a local bookstore. Best European Fiction 2018, with 30 entries from Iceland to Estonia, is also on a class list. Officially this is not the most recent anthology, only I did notice that 2019 did not arrive and it's no longer on order at our wholesaler. I have no idea what happened.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abrams
2. Call Them by Their True Names, by Rebecca Solnit
3. Inspiralized, by Ali Faffuci
4. Everything I Know I Learned from Baseball, by Phiip Theibert
5. The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein
6. The Baseball Codes, by Jason Turbow
7. I'm Not Here to Give a Speech, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. Healing the Human Body with God's Remedies, by Lester Carter
9. One Year Bible for Women, from Tyndale House
10. Mettle and Honor, by Mark Concannon

I sometimes take out the bulk sales orders on these lists, especially when they are older titles, but with a week in January when we had one storm and the aftermath of the other, I need to highlight every sale we get. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's recently released collection of nonfiction, I'm Not Here to Give a Speech, sold neither off our course adoption case nor our new paperback table, but off the impulse table at the front desk, where the most popular title of late has been the quotation book You Can't Spell Truth without Ruth.

Books for Kids:
1. Nevermoor V1: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, by Jessica Townsend (paperback)
2. Wundersmith V2: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, by Jessica Townsend
3. Nevermoor V1: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, by Jessica Townsend (hardcover)
4. A Place for Pluto, by Stef Wade, with illustrations by Manie Demmer
5. How to Properly Dispose of Planet Earth V2, by Paul Noth
6. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Barbara Joosse, with illustrations by Renée Graef
7. Dog Man V6: Brawl of the Wild, by Dav Pilkey
8. Love, Hate, and Other Filters, by Samira Ahmed
9. 42 Is Not Just a Number, by Doreen Rappaport
10. Ghost V1, by Jason Reynolds

It's rare that we book school visits eight months in advance, but that's what sort of happened with Jessica Townsend's Trials of Morrigan Crow series. The second book in the series, Wundersmith, was originally going to come out early enough for us to do schools in September and to do this, we booked them at the end of the 2017-2018 school year. The book was delayed and the tour was moved to January. Ruth Davis Konigsburg rounded up some sequels in The New York Times Book Review last November, writing: "Townsend’s skillful, suspense-filled storytelling in “Wundersmith” will keep readers entertained, as Morrigan and her eccentric classmates face a test of loyalty and bravery in what will surely be the first of many to come. After all, Morrigan’s got five more years of school ahead of her."

Over at the Journal Sentinel...

--Steph Cha of USA Today reviews The Dreamers, from Karen Thompson Walker: "Walker offers a novel bursting with ideas, probing the scary and tantalizing possibilities at the edges of our existence." We had a great read on this novel from our buyer Jason.

--Marion Winik from USA Today discusses Dani Shapiro's Inheritance: "When she receives the results of her genetic testing from Ancestry.com – done more or less on a lark – she learns she is only half Ashkenazi Jew; the rest a mix of French, Irish, English and German. And when she compares her results with those of her half sister Susie, it turns out they’re not even related. And since Susie looks exactly like their father ... well, Dani’s father has to be someone else."

--Hillel Italie in AP looks at immigration novels, focusing on upcoming titles like Samira Ahmed's Internment (due March 19 - she's on our bestseller list this week with Love, Hate, and Other Filters) and Nicole Dennis-Benn's Patsy (which I just finished and enjoyed - pub date is June 4).

Don't forget, we've moved our Monday event from 7 pm to 2 pm. More to come on this.

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