Sunday, April 7, 2019

The Not-Quite-So-Annotated Boswell Bestsellers for the Week Ending April 6, 2019

Boswell's Not-Quite-So-Annotated Boswell Bestsellers for the Week Ending April 6, 2019

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
2. American Agent V15, by Jacqueline Windspear
3. The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell
4. Circe, by Madeline Miller
5. My Lovely Wife, by Samantha Downing (event Thu April 18, 7 pm, with Nick Petrie)
6. Tear It Down V4, by Nick Petrie
7. The Parade, by Dave Eggers
8. The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon
9. Tiamat's Wrath V8, by James S.A. Corey
10. Damascus Road, by Jay Parini

I just learned that the Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, wrote, with her husband, teh book Cry of the Kalahari, which we sold for years. Needless to say, this novel has migrated from bestsellerdom to phenomenon-dom.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Real Estate Titans, by Ezra Cohen
2. Educated, by Tara Westover
3. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics, by Leah Daughtry
4. Becoming, by Michelle Obama
5. The Rise of Yiddish Theater, by Alyssa Quint
6. Matriarch, by Susan Page (Barbara Rinella's Barbara Bush tribute is May 8 - tickets here)
7. Stony the Road, by Henry Louis Gates
8. Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou
9. I Miss You When I Blink, by Mary Philpott
10. Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, by John Gurda

Michael Schaub wrote about Henry Louis Gates's Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow on the NPR website: "Gates' book is a fascinating social and intellectual history of the time between Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow period of American history. It's an absorbing and necessary look at an era in which the hard-fought gains of African-Americans were rolled back by embittered Southern whites — an era that, in some ways, has never really ended."

Paperback Fiction:
1. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
2. The Tinderbox, by Beverly Lewis
3. The Careless Seamstress, by Tjawangwa Dema
4. The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles
5. Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum
6. The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin
7. Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan
8. The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea (event Mon May 6, 7 pm)
9. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (the latest Literary Journeys focus title)
10. The Coincidence of Coconut Cake, by Amy E Reichert

Fresh Air just re-aired Luis Alberto Urrea's interview with Terry Gross for The House of Broken Angels. The story is partly inspired by his brother Juan, "who was dying of cancer when Urrea's mother died"

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. On Heaven and Earth, by Jorge Mario Borgoglio (Pope Francis) and Rabbi Abram Skorka
2. Making All Black Lives Matter, by Barbara Ransby
3. The Dangerous Book of Girls, by Maya Rodale
4. The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
5. Story Genius, by Lisa Cron
6. Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron
7. The Emotion Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
8. Milwaukee Anthology, edited by Justin Kern (event Sun April 14, 3 pm)
9. The Negative Trait Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
10. The Positive Trait Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

As you can see, we sold books at the Write Right conference at the Hyatt on Saturday. We also had fiction works by the presenters and attendees but the how-to guides were the biggest hit. Maya Rodale's The Dangerous Book for Girls sold the most copies - the sales terms don't normally allow us to stock the title, but at least for the near future, we'll have some copies available for purchase.

Books for Kids:
1. The Easter Elf, by Rochelle Ann Groskreutz
2. God Awful Rebel V3, by S Acevedo
3. We Are Grateful, by Traci Sorell
4. Song for a Whale, by Lynne Kelly
5. Carl and the Meaning of Life, by Deborah Freedman
6. Perfect Horse, by Elizabeth Letts
7. Samantha Spinner and the Spectacular Specs V2, by Russell Ginns
8. Absolute Expert: Dinosaurs, by National Geographic
9. Max and the Midknights, by Lincoln Peirce
10. Then Everything Went Wrong V5, by Judd Winick

I still fondly remember our day with Lincoln Pierce, visiting schools and then appearing at a packed event at the Greenfield Public Library. Max and the Midknights is his new hit, and his fans are legion. Here's Booklist: "With tough, spunky female heroes and loads of derring-do, the concept is already a winner, but Peirce's cartooning—comics sequences intercut with occasional blocks of text á la Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid—is top notch. The charming characters, smooth visual flow. and snappy gags prove irresistible."

From the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins talks about The Milwaukee Anthology: "First, my disclaimers: I’m not a Milwaukee native, although I’ve lived here for more than 40 years now. Also, I’m skeptical about attempts to generalize or characterize a place this big. Happily, anthology editor Justin Kern and his contributors don’t offer a unifying theory of Milwaukee. Kern describes this collection of prose and a few poems aptly in his introduction as 'the lesser-heard, silent, and necessary stories from our city.'"

From Kendal Weaver, originally appearing in Associated Press: "A deadly school shooting serves as a pivotal event in Jennifer duBois’ The Spectators, a novel that revisits American cultural wars and crises in the last decades of the 20th century." Weaver notes that the story "often thrums with vibrancy and echoes divisive current events as it covers a timeline from the late 1960s to the early 1990s."

Matt McCarthy offers this take of An Elegant Defense (which I really enjoyed), originally from USA Today: "I was speaking with Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the provocative new book An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives. Richtel is not a doctor (nor does he pretend to be), but that hasn’t stopped him from tackling one of the most complicated and vexing topics in modern medicine: the human immune system."

I guess I annotated it after all.

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