1. Funny Story, by Emily Henry
2. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
3. Table for Two, by Amor Towles
4. James, by Percival Everett
5. Real Americans, by Rachel Khong (Boswell event May 15)
6. Long Island, by Colm Tóibín
7. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
8. The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl
9. The Hunter, by Tana French
10. The Women, by Kristin Hannah
The May selections for the big national book clubs are well-represented on this week's top 10. Real Americans is the Read with Jenna/Today Show pick, Long Island is Oprah's Book Club pick, and Good Morning America selected The Ministry of Time. Kaliane Bradley's debut was also the #1 Indie Next Pick for May and it's got five raves on BookMarks. Ron Charles in The Washington Post writes: "In fact, if I could travel back in time, one of the things I’d do, after strangling baby Hitler and buying Apple stock, would be to tell younger me not to waste time reading so many novels about time travel. But Bradley has got me rethinking that prejudice. Her utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre."
1. Look Away, by Jacob Kushner (Boswell event May 16)
2. The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson
3. My Life in Seventeen Books, by Jon M Sweeney (signed copies)
4. Puerto Rico, by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (signed copies)
5. The Serial Killer's Apprentice, by Katherine Ramsland and Tracy Ullman
6. There Are Dad's Way Worse Than You, by Glenn Boozan
7. The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan
8. Dan County Farmers Market Cookbook, by Terese Allen (Boswell event June 6)
9. The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin
10. The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger
First week pop for The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It's got three raves (from the trades - Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist) plus a positive from Laura Miller in Slate: "Schlanger, who spends much of the book seeking confirmation from her scientist subjects that plants could be 'intelligent' and perhaps even possess 'consciousness.' The fact that there isn’t a scientific consensus on how to define either of those terms makes it especially difficult to pin them to an edge case like plants, which don’t have brains or nervous systems." The author is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Paperback Fiction:
1. Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Lit Group June pick)
2. Trust, by Hernan Diaz
3. Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, by J Ryan Stradal
4. Just for the Summer, by Abby Jimenez
5. I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
6. This Summer Will Be Different, by Carley Fortune
7. The Bodyguard, by Katherine Center
8. When in Rome, by Liam Callanan
9. Abyss, by Pilar Quintana
10. Penance, by Eliza Clark
Despite reviews being all over the place (3 raves, 5 positives, 2 mixed, 2 pans), Eliza Clark's Penance has a first-week paperback sale edges into the top ten. Clark broke out with her indie debut Boy Parts and has been named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023. One of the raves is from Matt Rowland Hill in The Guardian: "Any lingering suspicions that Clark is a mere provocateur will be banished by Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence."
1. Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, by Jim Higgins
2. Highly Irregular, by Arika Okrent
3. Puerto Rico (Spanish language edition), by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo
4. Milwaukee in Stone and Clay, by Raymond Wiggers
5. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
6. Fieldwork, by Iliana Regan
7. The Hundred Years War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi
8. Master Slave Husband Wife, by Ilyon Woo
9. The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk
10. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown
Arika Okrent appeared UWM for a talk on Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme - And Other Oddities of the English Language, the reprint of an Oxford book from 2021. From Choice: "In more than 40 brief, readable chapters, Okrent brings both erudition and wit to the history of English and the mechanisms of language change and all the quirky consequences. With illustrations by talented cartoonist Sean O'Neill (of Rocket Robinson fame) on almost every page, Highly Irregular is the sort of book that can be read either at a slow pace (a chapter a day) or straight through. Okrent organized the material into thematic sections around the quirks, such as the spelling of colonel and the illogic of parkway versus driveway; the influences of Scandinavian, French, and the printing press; and the roles of both snobbery and human creativity. Every language should have a book like this one."
1. The One and Only Family, by Katherine Applegate (Alas, this event is at capacity)
2. Things That Shimmer, by Deborah Lakritz
3. Summer Is Here, by Renée Watson, illustrations by Bea Jackson
4. Look How Much I've Grown in Kindergarten, by Vera Ahiyya, illustrations by Joey Chou
5. Tryouts, by Sara Sax
6. Buffalo Fluffalo, by Bess Kalb, illustrations by Erin Kraan
7. The Outdoor Scientist, by Temple Grandin
8. Dog Man V12: The Scarlet Shredder, by Dav Pilkey
9. May You Love and Be Loved, by Cleo Wade
10. Orris and Timble V1: The Beginning, by Kate DiCamillo, illustrations by Carmen Mok
Kate DiCamillo's new chapter book series features a friendship by a rat and an owl. From Kirkus on The Beginning: Orris and Timble V1: "Orris the rat seems quite comfortable nested amid his gathered treasures, which include a special marble, a cozy red velvet slipper, and a sardine can with the phrase 'Make the good and noble choice!!' That pesky moral imperative proves its worth when, after crawling out to investigate a cry for help, Orris finds himself, against his better judgment, negotiating with a trapped young owl named Timble by telling him part of the story of the Lion and the Mouse and then actually helping to free the owl's trapped claw."
