What Sold Last Week? Film Stuff, Plus a Few New Releases That Were Upcoming Events.

Oops! Folks who got an email with the rank list had Readme several slots higher than it was supposed to be. When I was creating the list, I sorted the categories wrong and Readme wound up in nonfiction, leaving me to add it back in incorrectly. It actually should have been #7.

Am curious about folks who put Goodnight iPad in nonfiction when it's not by mistake due to problematic category sorting, which happens to us all the time. Do you think this book actually happened?

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
2. American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar
3. Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droyd
4. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami
5. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Alas, Journal Sentinel reivewer Mike Fischer didn't like American Dervish as much as Adam Langer in The New York Times did. I'm hoping to have a friendly debate with him at one point, but I will just say that if my customers, many of them as eruidite as book reviewers, had their way, many review-proof titles, from A Visit from the Goon Squad to The Art of Fielding to The Tiger's Wife would have gotten slammed somewhere. Interestingly enough, I haven't gotten anyone complaining to me about The Sense of an Ending yet. It's coming, don't worry.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. A Little History of Philosophy, by Nigel Warburton
2. The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt
3. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson
4. The Journal of Best Practices, by David Finch
5. Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is also featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review  today so based on our sales patterns, you should see Pity the Billionaire on next week's bestseller list as well. Regarding Nigel Warburton's late sales pop, he was helped along by one particularly enthusiastic customer buying late holiday gifts.

David Finch, author of The Journal of Best Practices, is coming to Boswell Tuesday, January 17. I just got another read on the book from Mel. I'm hoping to have a nice blog post about the book this week. Did you ever have a dream where you thought you wrote something but maybe you didn't?

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
3. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell
4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by John Le Carre
5. The Girl who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson

Still a lot of filmy stuff on the lists. And so many editions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in our system, and that's excluding second hand copies. We had the previous edition from Scribner, the new Penguin edition, and the even-newer Penguin tie-in edition. As is our wont, we sell the non-tie-in cover better (pictured), but we wind up bringing in the tie-in just in case the publisher lets reprints go on the original. It happens!

Further down, Rosamund Lupton's Sister is selling pretty well off the front tables. We're up to 9 copies sold, which I was impressed with, until I saw that the hardcover, which came out last June (another speed up), sold 6 copies. I guess this seems like a good reason to speed things up--our sale after the initial pop was minimum, so I suspect what's really going on here is not a question of making sure readers are still aware of the title, but of earning back the advance faster. Needless to say, with the rise of ebook sales, which we don't even track when we sell the book, we're more out of the loop than ever while publishers have better than ever sales info.

In short, I'm happy to sell the 9, as long as at the cycle isn't speeded up so much that I'm no longer selling the 6. We'll see how it goes. Oh, and we also had a sales pop on Leigh Stein's The Fallback Plan (event is Wednesday, January 11) and Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (event for new story collection in February).

Paperback Nonfiction"
1. Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes
2. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
3. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Ingrid Wilkerson
4. The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal
5. The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin

Our #1 book was partly a bulk sale, but since it has some individual sales too and was brand new, we included it. This Science magazine contributor whose work has appeared in Best American Science Writing looks at diet theory from the last century, and comes down hard on the calories in, calories out model.

Books for Kids:
1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
3. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
4. Mouse and Lion, by Rand and Nancy Burkert
5. The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg and Friends

When does that film come out again? March 23.

Saturday Gift Post--No New Gifts!

January is the month when most new gift catalogs come out. While a few vendors have two catalogs per year, most of them only do one, with an occasional supplement in summer. Though several of our vendors have moved to web-only sales, we're still getting approximately one catalog a day from our regular vendors.

I've got a long way to go, and this time of year, you don't want to load up too much. I've got basics coming in right away, but several vendors have spaced out orders coming in February, March, and April. And just because I did let a few things run down too far this past December, I've got a few orders placed for next fall. It's all mapped out on a planner, to prevent me from going overboard.

So yes, this mini-plush wind-up penguin won't show up till October.

We are the Stories We Tell, North Korean Style (A Post About The Orphan Master's Son Event is 1/23).

I told you we had several major events scheduled for January. In our Boswellian trip around the world, we touch down in North Korea with Adam Johnson. The book lands next Tuesday. Here we go!

Every book we read is implicitly about storytelling.

Sometimes the story is straightforward--a history, a chase, a great love affair. And though some stories do not make themselves apparent as well as others, it seems like the ones that do are also most appropriate in book form. Those that are more fractured, like dictionaries and used car guides, seem now better suited for other structures.

Sometimes the storytelling aspect of a book is more explicit. I was recently chatting with a customer about Mary Helen Stefaniak's recently-in-paperback novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, noting that the novel blends a traditional Southern storytelling novel with a traditional Middle Eastern one, sort of like The Help meets Tales of the Arabian Nights. And then there is Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which uses the structure of the stories to play on the plot, character and themes of the novel.

Cultural identity is all about storytelling too, and sometimes a novel reflects that. But note that in many countries, the story is about the country's leader, and in North Korea, that leader has woven quite the story. The problem for readers is that there are very few stories that make it out of that country and into our novels and memoirs. My former colleague Jane and I used to discuss this all the time when looking for book club picks; where is the story that sheds light on the North Korean experience, the way writers have mined Vietnam and China and Cuba and the Balkan nations? When you search North Korea on the Ingram (one of our wholesalers) database and select fiction, only 16 titles appear. One of them, Jia, written by Hyejin Kim, was in fact on one season of our book club selections. Nice going, Cleis Press!

But all this changed when I read The Orphan Master's Son, a tour-de-force novel set inside North Korea. Pak Jun Do is a low-level operative, charged with kidnapping Japanese and South Korean folks for intelligence tasks. But a chain of events leads to him impersonating Commander Ga, in charge of the prison mines and married to the beloved actress Sun Moon. Like many novels I love, the story is told from several perspectives--from Jun Do/Ga, from his interrogator, and from the official loudspeaker chronicling the Best North Korean story of the year.

But Adam Johnson plays with the storytelling narrative by subverting the idea of genre altogether. As Richard Powers notes in a conversation chronicled in the advance copy, Johnson collides "bildungsroman, prison narrative, sea story, romantic drama, escape thriller, comic picaresque, and heroic opera", not to mention social realist drama and a wee bit of satire.

Per Johnson, in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or DPRK, for short), you are your story, or more interestingly, the story is you. If everyone is starving but the government says you live in a land of plenty, you are in the land of plenty. If the retired folks are respected and are sent off to a wonderful retirement resort where they sip drinks while lounging at the beach, that is the case, even if they were more likely shipped off to prison mines.

In a sense, they are all Sun Moon, actors and actresses living a part that calls for duty above all. If you are, say, the wife of the head of a farm collective and your husband is wonderful but not meeting the collective quota, what do you do if your husband is burned beyond recognition on a mission and when he returns he is an ogre and possibly not even the same person, but runs the collective better? In North Korea, it wouldn't even be an issue, but it might be the plot of a popular film, possibly written by Kim Jong Il himself.

The no-name interrogator, writing the stories of the doomed, and then administering the Autopilot (it was said to be more effective than lobotomies), is in some sense the most brutal and yet sympathetic of the characters. He cares for his blind, aging parents in a high rise without a working elevator (so that they don't escape). He's insistent on doing things this new-fangled way, as opposed to the old-fashioned torture/killing of the Pubyok. Despite having a decent job, he never knows when he'll be swept up to do some harvesting in the fields. (Yes, even the ice cream truck is a ruse to catch children for hard labor).

And his parents cower in the apartment, panicked about American attacks, listening to the official loudspeaker, which yes, pipes into the apartment. His parents always give every indication that they believe everything on the loudspeaker as the truth. Because when it comes to these swiftly-changing stories, trust becomes something truly rare. As in many regimes of this sort, anyone can turn on you: your neighbor, your friend, your student, your child, or yes, your parent. Someone who might say, "I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state." But then there is this memory of something once said by his father:

"See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you,  know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it's not really you.  That's inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands."

Oh, that left me a little shaken, and so did The Orphan Master's Son. What a novel! It's not anything you've read before but if you're a reader who's excited by innovation...Richard Powers or David Mitchell or William T. Vollman or...well anyone who is writing at the forefront of fiction, playing with character and structure and plot and language, but turns the whole, not into a mishmash, but a towering achievement. (Is that too over the top? Should I find some women writers to compare him to? I'll work on that.)

I'm so excited (did you notice?) to say that we are hosting Adam Johnson on Monday, January 23, 7 pm. Come to see a novelist who will likely get numerous accolades in 2012. Or just come to hear the story of someone who actually went to North Korea to do research. Either way, it should be an event you won't forget.

More on Ayad Akhtar from an Early Reader, A Note on Journal Sentinel Links, Stacie's Interview with Cedar Block Gallery's Brent Gohde on His Upcoming Show at the Turner Hall Ballroom on February 18.

1. Here's a little more on Ayad Akhtar (event is now Friday, January 13, 7 pm). While I think this event is of interest to all kinds of people, I wanted to get a few reads from my Muslim customers. Little, Brown was gracious enough to send me an extra advance copy of American Dervish for this purpose. I asked our friend Bara if she might be interested in trying it. Here's what she thought:

"Eloquently written, American Dervish invites us into the life of a young boy, Hayat Shah, who is caught between two different worlds, but wants nothing more than to be happy. He recounts the events in his life as they relate to his Aunt Mina who has taken her young son and left Pakistan to stay with Hayat’s family. Struggling to find happiness at home, Mina introduces Hayat to the beauty of Islam and the power of the Quran, which stirs a sense of joy in his mother and infuriates his father, forever changing him. Other events lead him to the local Muslim community and its anti-Semitism.

"Ayad Akhtar brings to light a new Muslim-American perspective of growing up in 1980’s Wisconsin. In this post-9/11 world, so many misconceptions and different interpretations of Islam exist. Yet even within Islam and its many cultures, individuals chose their own interpretations, as we witness when Hayat remembers the same verses of the Quran at the beginning and end of the story, each time with different interpretations."

Thanks, Bara! Mr. Akhtar was also on NPR's All Things Considered this morning.

2. Like The New York Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has gone to a paywall. You can read up to a decent number of articles per month before subscribing. As soon as I can link my print subscription to my website, I can start not worrying about using up my limit. And speaking of which, we'll have a small ad in the Journal Sentinel this Sunday for three upcoming events. A few others are being underwritten on Wisconsin Public Radio. Hope these efforts convince a few more folks each time to come out for some great event programming we have this winter.

I'm not quite out of links yet, so here's Jim Higgins's take on Smut, Alan Bennett's new collection of novellas, where he notes, "Bennett makes witty comedy of these tales, which are nowhere near as prurient as the cheeky title suggests." Read the entire review here.

3. Stacie and I were chatting about Brent Gohde's Cedar Block Gallery show at Turner Hall Ballroom on February 18, entitled "Results: Cedar Block's Dig for the Higgs and how the Quest Was Won" and in an instant, she had interviewed Brent for The Boswellians. Gohde talks about the intersections of art and science and how some key bookselling events influenced the creation of this show, most notably:
--Three years as a Harry W. Schwartz Bookseller (at the Downer Avenue location)
--An author visit from Leonard Sclain, author of Art & Physics
--A copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a subsequent visit to Brookfield to see Douglas Adams.

Hey, I worked that event. I wonder if Brent brought a towel to be signed? Read the entire interview here. And buy tickets here to this show, co-sponsored by Alverno Presents and WMSE radio.

Presenting Ayad Akhtar, Author of American Dervish, at Boswell, rescheduled for Friday, January 13, 7 pm

I may not love shoveling snow that much, but one of the reasons I look forward to January is because it is a great time to publish new authors. 2012 looks particularly bounteous, as we've got three authors visiting whose books are featured in the January Indie Next flier. I've read all three, and plan to talk about them at more lenth soon, but none has as much local importance as the first novel by Ayad Akhtar (photo at right credit Nina Subin), American Dervish.

American Dervish is the story of Hayat, a boy growing up in the Milwaukee area. He's a first-generaton American of Pakistani parents, and he's got a lot of influences in his life. His father, a research physician, is a nonbeliever. The Muslim Pakistani community that his family is immersed in is very devout and conservative. And then his mother's closest friend Mina arrives with her son. On the run from a bad marriage, she must leave Pakistan in order to hold onto custody of her son. Mina is also very religious, but she observes in her own way, rejecting doctrine for spiritual intent. I think one would call this Sufi-esque.

Now everyone knows that there only four of five great plots that tell all the great stories, a story that, and one of my absolute favorites, that drive my several of my top fifty books of all time (that I never gave to Hans at Micawber's, my apologies, thank you for trying) from Pride and Prejudice to An Unsuitable Boy, is a character choosing between two suitors. And in Mina's case, she has two doctors--what could be more difficult than that? One is a devout Muslim opthalmologist, who though perhaps not the most attractive or effervescent of guys, is nonetheless accepted by the community. The other is a Jewish researcher, a friend of Hayat's father, who is nonetheless willing to convert to be with Mina.

Hayat watches all this from the sidelines. As an astute observer, he breathes in every pronouncement, from those of his father and Aunt Mina, to that of the local religious leader. And from that you begin to get a sense, as he makes a number of decisions, some rather disastrous, that it's not exactly easy for a young Muslim to grow up in America. And mind you, this novel is set before 9/11. And yet Hayat's journey is one that anyone of a strong faith must come to terms with as he or she grows up in America, whether you are raised Muslim or Jewish, Amish or Dawkinsian Athiest. You've got family, you've got community, and you've got everything else--your journey is your story, only it might not be as well written as Akthar's.

And what a story it is! Akhtar's novel is positively cinematic with a broad canvas, and yet with the sharp dialogue and tight setting of a stage play, and that's not really a surprise, what with his work as an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Akhtar co-wrote and starred in the film, "The War Within," which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, as well as playing Neel Kashkari in "Too Big to Fail." He is also an accomplished playwright, and has not one, but two plays premiering in 2012, "The Invisible Hand" in Chicago and "Disgraced" in Saint Louis."

I'm excited to note that Ayad Akhtar will be speaking/reading/signing at Boswell for a special Milwaukee launch of American Dervish, now scheduled for Friday, January 13 (note: this was edited after publication). Since I met Akhtar at a pre-publication author dinner last fall, I can tell you that he is an erudite speaker (and I assume reader), full of charisma and wit. Yes, I know this is beginning to sound like an author crush. But isn't that a little about the allure of these events? The best ones, the Ann Patchetts and Jeffrey Eugenideses and Geraldine Brookses and T.C. Boyleses (did I really have to use so many authors whose names end in "s" and their ridiculous pluralization issues?), are nothing if not charmers.

For more information on Ayad Akhtar, visit his website.

I Haven't Done an All-Nighter in Many, Many, Many, Many Years--Taking Inventory.

Well, everyone is back to work today and I left for home at around 11 this morning.And what caused my crazed schedule? Last night Jason, Amie, and I went on a moonlight bender doing a physical inventory. This is myfirst time using anything but a service. Not only would we save a lot of money, but we also expected to be able to do section checks at the same time.

Alas, it turned to have several drawbacks. It took way longer than we expected, about half an hour per case per person.We worked from late afternoon on, and barely had the store customer-ready by our 10 am opening time. My joints something awful, and I even bruised the tips of my fingers by  continually scraping them against the carpet.

Someday I might try this again, with more folks working on shifts, and at least one more scanner.  We stll don't haven't seen the advantages of downloading an inventory comparison, something we aren't able to get when a company just tracks price points. But at least for 2013, I am finding a professional inventory service pretty alluring.

No Events This Week, but Plenty to Do!

1. We took a short event break that wasn't necessarily planned. We had two small press events tentatively booked, but I just couldn't get everything together to confirm them. In both cases, they were one of two events for the area; I'm hoping folks will go to see James Fleming, author of Tengo Sed, at the Medical College (8701 Watertown Plank Road, Room H3120) on Thursday, January 5, 12 Noon, as promoted in our email newsletter. Tengo Sed was awarded the PEN Center literary award and tells of the day in the life of an emergency doctor. You can bring your lunch! Alas, the other author sort of disappeared.

2. Tonight we are doing a manual inventory. Are we ready? No. Were there problems with the yearly update to our inventory system that might cause problems? Sure. But will that stop us? No.

3. Another issue with getting a full post out today is that I decided to write a post about a novel I just read that isn't coming out until mid December. Now what's the point of writing something so far in advance? Will you put a hold on it with us? No, you'll probably pre-order from our competitor. You could pre-order it from us, right? OK, I dare you. It's for Friends Like Us, by Lauren Fox. It comes out on February 14 and we're hosting a talk/reading/signing on February 16.

And after writing that piece, I'm all posted out.

4. Don't forget, due to inventory, we're open 10 to 6 tonight. Regular hours resume tomorrow and there shouldn't be a hitch until Easter.

What Did People Buy with their Gift Cards and Crisp Gifty Fifties*?

A little explanation there. This list includes the books that were sold during the Milwaukee Public Library Fill-the-Shelves event at the Katie Gingrass Gallery. And it also involves one catchup sale, where we were using a dummy number for some purchases.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi
2. The Destiny of the Republic, by Candice Millard
3. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
4. Van Gogh, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
5. The Food52 Cookbook, edited by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs

A last-minute publicity burst for Plenty cleaned us out, even on the reorder. One of the things that was particularly noticeable about this week's sales list was the prevalence of the cookbooks that had been missing all fall. Not just Ottolenghi's upmarket vegetarian, but Food52 and further down the top 20, The Cooks Illustrated Cookbook and Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, the backlist title that popped from high school classmate Jefferey Hertzberg's publicity stint in November.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Habibi, by Craig Thompson
2. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
3. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
4. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
5. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James

So what's up with the Thompson? It turns out that we double-coded Habibi, discounting the unsigned copies but kept the signed copies at full price. We don't feel comfortable raising our signed copies above list (though this is common at collectible stores, and it is certainly the norm on places like Ebay), but we also don't normally discount before we run out of signed copies. This was our compromise--if we do it again, we will use the dummy code, which doesn't register on bestseller lists, on the signed copies, not the unsigned copies, and we'll also update the sales every week, not at the end of the month.

TMI? Let's continue...

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Ukelele Nation, by Lil Rev
2. Gimbels Has it!, by Michael J. Lisicky
3. Bay View, by Ron Winkler
4. We are Wisconsin, by Erica Sagrans
5. The Woman Behind the New Deal, by Kristin Downey

I normally put poetry books with fiction, but Lil Rev's poems for the most part seemed so much about a nonfiction subject that I, on whim, went with nonfiction. I have similar random placements of kid-style picture books that are sold in as adult titles, like Goodnight iPad.

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
3. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell
4. The Trouble with Poetry, by Billy Collins
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

I normally remove bulk sales from these list, well, who doesn't want to see a bit of Billy Collins on a blog post? There's nothing like year-end lists to help a struggling paperback here. We weren't able to jumpstart Swamplandia when it came out in the summer, despite great sales in hardcover, but by Christmas, it was a big success.

Books for Kids
1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
3. Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick
4. The Snowy Day anniversary edition, by Ezra Jack Keats
5. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
6. The Wizard of Oz Scanimation, created by Rufus Butler Seder
7. Cabin Fever, by Jeff Kinney
8. The Adventures of Tintin Volume 1, by Herge
9. The Artist who Painted a Blue Horse, by Eric Carle
10. Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini

There are some who say the movie releases help book sales. I think the only books in the top ten without a film connection are The Snowy Day and The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, if we say that Selznick and Kinney's newest reached new audiences, due to films associated with prior works.

Not surprisingly, we have not done as well with the Wizard of Oz scanimation book as we did with Star Wars last year, but both still fared better than Swing at this location and none did quite as well as the original Gallop. It's fun to have old sales in the computer.

*There are more large-denomination bills in the week after Christmas.