Sunday, October 1, 2023

Boswell bestsellers, week ending September 30, 2023

Boswell bestsellers, week ending September 30, 2023

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
2. The Fraud, by Zadie Smith
3. Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
4. The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger
5. The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese
6. Wellness, by Nathan Hill (register for October 23 Boswell event)
7. The Last Devil to Die V4, by Richard Osman
8. Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
9. The Running Grave V7, by Robert Galbraith
10. The Fragile Threads of Power V1 by VE Schwab

I am amused that when our wholesaler links to Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, it offers other translations of the book, but not all other translations, just a few. So here is the long-awaited translation of The Iliad, and being that it's also $39.95 pre-discount, there's an expectation (certainly from us) that this book will continue to sell thorugh the holidays. From the Hamilton Cain rave (per BookMarks) in The Boston Globe: " Whips and crackles beneath the familiar meter of loose iambic pentameter. Wilson tells it all in plain English, to elegant effect ... She deftly coaxes the original’s Dactylic hexameters into our own accentual tongue. We feel her joy, birthed by hard labor."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Run to Win, by Jerry Kramer with Bob Fox
2. Dream Big and Win, by Liz Elting
3. Democracy Awakening, by Heather Cox Richardson
4. Enough, by Cassidy Hutchinson
5. The Book of (More) Delights, by Ross Gay (Register for October 4 Boswell event)
6. While You Were Out, by Meg Kissinger
7. The Deadline, by Jill Lepore
8. Wisconsin Field to Fork, by Lori Fredrich (Register for October 3 Boswell event)
9. The Death of Public School by Cara Fitzpatrick (Register for October 20 Marquette Law hybrid event - this will hit capacity soon)
10. Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

There are many ways to make a bestseller. You can buy a whole bunch of books from a whole bunch of stores. You can use social media to convince your loyal fan base to buy books from stores. Or you can have a book blow up the old fashioned way, through media saturation. One book that saw a lot of attention in this last way was Michael Wolff's The Fall, which had the gift of coming out the week that Rupert Murdoch handed over the reins of Fox and News Corp to his son Lachlan. Didn't matter - we sold zero. But Enough, by Cassidy Hutchinson, the former special assistant to President Trump, struck a chord. We sold out and continued to get customer holds for the book.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Dry Land, by B Pladek
2. All This Could Be Different, by Sarah Thankam Mathews
3. A Death in Door County, by Annelise Ryan (Register for December 14 Boswell event)
4. A World of Curiosities V18, by Louise Penny
5. The Golden Enclaves V3 by Naomi Novik
6. The Christmas Orphans Club, by Becca Freidman
7. Trust, by Hernan Diaz
8. A Court of Wings and Ruin V3, by Sarah J Maas
9. The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune
10. The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

Did a Christmas-themed novel really hit our top ten in September? Becca Freeman, author of 
The Christmas Orphans Club, is a bookfluencer and host of the Bad on Paper podcast. And while I should be too sophisticated to fall for author blurbs, I am sort of a Jennifer Close groupie, so when she says, "I'm completely in love with this book!...Becca Freeman's debut is witty, heartwarming, and hilarious and the most delightful thing you'll read all year," I feel compelled to reprint it.


Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Holy Food, by Christina Ward
2. A Different Trek, by David K Seitz
3. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
4. A Philosophy of Walking, by Frédéric Gros
5. Peace is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh
6. The Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen
7. Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke
8. Murdle V1, by GT Karber
9. The Complete Slow Cooker, by America's Test Kitchen
10. American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Wisconsin, by Charles Hagner

Christina Ward has a bounty's worth of events coming up for Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat - An American History . If you missed her at Boswell, she'll be at Milwaukee Public Library's Good Hope branch on October 21 and at Bay View's Lion's Tooth on October 22. Plus programs in Seattle, Portland, and Chicago. More here.

Books for Kids:
1. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods V6, by Rick Riordan
2. Gertie the Darling Duck of World War II, by Shari Swanson, illustrations by Renée Graef
3. Autumn Peltier, Water Warrior, by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Bridget George
4. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Barbara Joosse, illustrated by Renée Graef
5. We Are Water Protectors, by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Michael Goade
6. InvestiGators: All Tide Up V7 by John Patrick Green (Register for October 1 - today's - 2pm event)
7. The Marvellers V1, by Dhonielle Clayton
8. Lulu and Rocky in Rocky Mountain National Park, by Barbara Joosse, illustrations by Renée Graef
9. Peekaboo Pumpkin, by Camilla Reid, illustrations by Ingela P Arrhenius
10. Wrecker, by Carl Hiaasen

School visit season is in full swing, but one new release tops them all - The Chalice of the Gods, the latest Percy Jackson novel from Rick Riordan. I can not remember the last time a kids book had a 20+ first week with us when there was no event involved. From the publisher: "The original heroes from The Lightning Thief are reunited for their biggest challenge yet: getting Percy to college when the gods are standing in his way."

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