A Boswell gift post - what's happening in greeting cards

It's September and that means it's time to get our fall holiday spinner up. Normally I'd put out the 12-pocket one, but we're having such success with the New Yorker cards (two reorders in two months) that I'm loathe to consolidate them into our regular assortment. It took me close to ten years to bring them in and now I feel I lost ten years of sale. With each reorder, we've been able to bring in a few new designs in addition to reordering the old ones. Here's some sausage details - I usually reorder a block card if it sells out in six months, but I can't figure out if this card buyer is going broad (lots of different designs) or deep (multiple units of the same card) and that would determine how much I rotate them.

Fortunately, by just adding two fall themed blank cards, I was able to fill a 24 unit spinner with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and a few Rosh Hashanah cards. One of the things I've learned over the past few years is that Halloween doesn't sell as well as I thought it would (based on how many cards are on the market) while Thanksgiving sells a bit better (with a far more limited selection to choose from). Do you think perhaps that the Thanksgiving card is an end-of-year alternative to Christmas/generic-holiday/New Year/a-tiny-bit-of-Hanukkah cards? We're also looking for general interest lines that might feature some Ramadan, Hajj, and Eid cards, which according to this article, are the three holidays where Muslims send cards. 

We usually do also try a new local line each year. Earlier I brought in Persika Design, which is the work of Christina Schepmann Thomas. The secret trick to get reorders is more birthday and less friendship/love, which has a strong Valentine's Day sale but is modest the rest of the year. I get the feeling that this is a stronger category in boutiques. I also feel like this is changing. When we opened, I read several columns advising indicating that our percentage of blanks were too high. Now I'm seeing that they turn faster than all our occasion cards except birthday and they are neck-and-neck with sympathy. 

In addition to Nelson Line's New Yorker cards,the Little Red House's blank bird cards, designed by Aggie Cheung in San Jose, have been a big hit. Another line that seemed weak on birthday but is turning just fine is Anthology, created by the Sisters Komai (Sachi and Laura) for their store on State Street in Madison. They wrote to me and asked if I wanted to try their cards, many of which are Wisconsin themed, and I did. I've now reordered three times. They also have wonderful Madison-themed cards, but we don't have those at Boswell. 

Our latest local line is She Said It, from Kathryn Christenson and her daughter Anna, working from the based in the Milwaukee and Madison area. The line is a collection of quotes from women in history. I'm generally not a text card enthusiast. We brought in one line that really didn't sell well and have rejected a dozen more. I think people think that because we're a bookstore filled with text, we like plain text, but when it comes to cards, I think we need a little art too, to pop. The cards are multicolored and hand-lettered, which make all the difference, I hope!

So far we brought in eight designs and five are on the shelf - more will come out as space opens up. The quotes are from Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Breedlove, Marie Curie, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman. Oh, and Jane Austen. Currently I have them in encouragement, even though there are cards not too dissimilar in blank. Hey, it's sort of like you'll see a book on baseball during World War II sometimes in the baseball section and sometimes in the World War II section, depending on the store. 

Grammar, usage, proofreading, and two books - Cecelia Watson's Semicolon and Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians*

As we at Boswell pile up email newsletters and blog posts and press releases and signs, I have learned that not everybody agrees on common usage and grammar. Style guides offer conflicting advice and as we've had various people pass through the department writing marking material, we've see variations in the way we did things. So we came up with one rule, which was to at least be consistent within one newsletter, blog, or press release. If we decided, as one of our marketing folks decreed, to stop putting an apostrophe before the s when referring to a decade (1920s, not 1920's), we'd have to make sure that every time we cut and pasted some publisher copy (we're not journalists, we cut and paste a lot of marketing copy), we'd remember to fix this, especially if it’s done both ways in one story.

We have a weird tic where for a dash, we use a "space, hyphen, space." I'm not sure where this came from, as I was definitely a double hyphen person, but one of our sources was doing this, and just decided to standardize, with one exception - we do use an em dash with no spaces to separate event headers from the copy in our print calendars. Once again, that was the doing of another long-gone bookseller.

That said, you have to give a bit. Chris is adamant about making sure that two clauses that could stand as sentences be connected by a comma before the conjunction – I have to say that we’ve never had another bookseller that consistently corrected that. Sometimes I have to put my foot down. Another bookseller insisted that when separating independent clauses by a semicolon, you should capitalize the first word in the second clause. “Not on my watch,” I cried! And while we’re using quotes, I have this other pet peeve about overusing quotation marks in non-quotation situations. I find them very unhelpful and only leave them in if you can’t understand the sentence without them.

I also want to say one more thing about the dash, or to be specific, the em dash. In just the last decade since I've been writing and pasting and proofreading, it feels like its use as exploded, and this sometimes works me up into a state. And that's why I was so excited to read Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. Cecelia Watson chronicles the punctuation’s origin, its explosion in use and subsequent falling out of favor, and its possible comeback. What I liked about the book was more of this idea that grammar was once an art and then was reverse engineered to become a science during the mania of applying the scientific method to everything. Though I still wince when I see a sign in a store that uses an apostrophe and s for a plural, I will no longer go up to the customer service desk and demand a correction. I don’t think I’ve actually done this, but I’ve certainly thought about this.

Watson argues for the mark’s comeback, quoting artists of the form such as Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, and Rebecca Solnit, arguing how, to quote myself, “artistic license can lead to a more joyfully nuanced reading life.” The book made quite a splash over the summer, resonating with the critics, reviewers, and segment producers who are probably often immersed in the kind of grammar debates that we go through. And can I mention that while I don’t subscribe to Grammarly (despite it interrupting every other video I watch), I have noted that Microsoft’s grammar rules don’t match mine. I’m sorry, but that proper name ending in s really should have an apostrophe s when it is a possessive.

One way Cecelia Watson laid things out was by looking at language criticism as either descriptive or prescriptive. That reminded me of my old dictionary talk I used to give, where I’d sort out the major dictionaries from prescriptive (American Heritage) to descriptive (Websters New World), with Merriam Webster somewhere in between. But the truth is that until the early 1960s, Merriam Webster was a prescriptive dictionary, and its change in attitudes sent shockwaves through the language community.

Can that be the basis of a novel? Yes, it can! Cathleen Schine’s latest, just out this week, is The Grammarians, the story of two sisters, Daphne and Laurel Wolfe, sisters who grow up with a great love of language. Like so many other novels I read (and Schine’s own Three Weissmanns of Westport), are the sisters feuding? Yes, eventually. I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t write novels with identical twins so that at one point the sisters can do a switcheroo. In The Grammarians, there is an excellent switcheroo.

Some language books can be rewarding but feel a bit like a class assignment. While I did recently read The Milkman, I’m not sure I can ever handle Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, for example. Over 1000 pages and pretty much one sentence? Our In-Store Lit Group will vote me out of office. But if it wins the Man Booker, I make no promises to the group. But The Grammarians language writing is something else entirely - exuberant, effervescent – I felt a little tipsy afterwards.

Daphne and Laurel grow up together, but then they grow apart, and it comes to a head over their father’s prized possession, a copy of the Webster’s International Dictionary. By adulthood, Daphne and Laurel Wolfe have become two versions of the dictionary itself, one the descriptive poet and the other the prescriptive columnist. Yes, they are the personification of diverging dictionary philosophies. But since this is a comedy, you can expect that things will eventually work out, with some unexpected twists along the way.

Like another Schine novel I enjoyed, Fin and Lady, the story is steeped in New York nostalgia. But more than her previous books, The Grammarians really called to mind Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time, in its almost fairy-tale telling. In fact, it is the most Colwiny-est novel I have read in a long time, and if that is not a compliment, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and I'm sure there are typos in this post, but it's possible that they are stylistic errors I made on purpose. 

*We like the Oxford comma; not everyone and every style guide does.

Events - Dave Rearick on sailing, Susan Welch's Twin Cities sister story, William Kent Krueger's #1 Indie Next Pick

Here's what's going on this week at Boswell.

Wednesday, September 4, 7:00 pm, at Boswell:
Dave Rearick, author of Spirit of a Dream: A Sailor's Ultimate Journey Around the World Alone

Dave Rearick has been sailing since his first ride on a Sunfish off the southern shores of Lake Michigan at age 12. He has raced throughout the Great Lakes, with over 28 Mackinac Races, 7 Solo Mac Races, 2 Solo Super Mac Races, and has won the Mike Silverthorne and Ralph Elberg Awards, given by the Great Lakes Singlehanded Society.

On October 2, 2013, Dave Rearick began an epic solo voyage around the world. Onboard his racing sloop, appropriately named Bodacious Dream, Dave sailed from Newport, Rhode Island to Cape Town, South Africa. From Cape Town, Dave sailed to Wellington, New Zealand where 'Bo' was originally built, and then onto the fabled Galapagos Islands, one of earth's great nature preserves. On the final leg, Dave returned to Newport, Rhode Island by way of the Panama Canal.

Rearick’s full circumnavigation took 256 days to complete, leaving an indelible memory of the challenges and rewards of being at one with nature, the solitude of the open sea, and the ever-changing landscape of life.

Thursday, September 5, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Susan Welch, author of A Thread So Fine

Susan Welch grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. She earned a Masters in International Management and built an international career in the brewing industry. Now this Midwest native discusses her debut novel about two sisters, drawn in part from her mother’s stories of being quarantined as a TB patient in 1940s Minnesota.

Welch’s debut is a deeply personal novel, layered with reality and insights about her family and life for women coming of age in the post-war boom in the heartland. One sister falls ill with tuberculosis and the other falls prey to a violent assault. Separated by increasing distance, both physical and emotional, the two women go on to live their own lives, yet one of them vows to hold fast to the invisible thread that connects them and protect her sister’s secret.

Kirkus Reviews calls A Thread So Fine “an engaging and poignant historical novel.” As a girl, Welch heard her mother’s stories about months in quarantine as a 19-year-old TB patient. As an adult, Welch discovered her own adoption story. The characters in her novel were created as a way to imagine how women such as her birth mother and adoptive mother might have overcome challenges as young Catholic women in the post-World War II culture of the Midwest.


Sunday, September 8, 3 pm, at Boswell:
William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land

On sale today! Edgar-winner William Kent Krueger returns to Boswell with his long-awaited stand-alone novel, This Tender Land. Krueger’s latest follows an orphaned boy's life-changing adventure traveling down America's great rivers during the 1930s, seeking a place to call home and a sense of purpose in a world sinking into despair. Cosponsored by Crimespree magazine.

Register for this free event at kruegermke.bpt.me. This Tender Land has been named the #1 Indie Next Pick for September. While our preorder campaign is over, you can make sure we have a copy of the book held for you at the event by upgrading to book-with-ticket through Friday.

Over the course of one unforgettable summer, four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Christine Brunkhorst in the Star Tribune calls This Tender Land "a picaresque tale of adventure during the Great Depression. Part Grapes of Wrath, part Huckleberry Finn, Krueger’s novel is a journey over inner and outer terrain toward wisdom and freedom."

More on the Boswell upcoming events page.

Photo credit for William Kent Krueger - Diane Krueger

Boswell Bestsellers for the week ending August 31, 2019

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending August 31, 2019

Hardcover Fiction:
1. A Better Man V15, by Louise Penny
2. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
3. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
4. The Girl Who Lived Twice V6, by David Lagercrantz
5. City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert
6. Circe, by Madeline Miller
7. Inland, by Téa Obreht
8. Normal People, by Sally Rooney
9. The New Girl V19, by Daniel Silva
10. The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo

St. Martin's Minotaur didn't listen to Jason and moved Louise Penny back to her end-of-August slot for A Better Man. Jason thought that sales went up with the November release, but our guess is that at other outlets, there's less competition for placement. From Tom Nolan in The Wall Street Journal: "Over the past 14 years, Ms. Penny has written a saga in which both hero and author have grown in ability and assurance. A Better Man, with its mix of meteorological suspense, psychological insight and criminal pursuit, is arguably the best book yet in an outstanding, original oeuvre. We look forward to additional encounters with the dignified, inspirational Armand Gamache."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
2. Strengthsfinder 2.0, by Tom Rath
3. Educated, by Tara Westover
4. The Dying of Whiteness, by JOnathan M Metzl
5. How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
6. Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
7. The Ghosts of Eden Park, by Karen Abbott
8. Ruffage, by Abra Berens
9. The Source of Self Regard, by Toni Morrison
10. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die, by Amy Gutmann

It's the first week out for Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America, written by a University of Pennsylvania professor and the school's present, both of whom served on President Obama's bio-ethics panel. Andrea Mitchell calls the book "required reading for anyone with a heartbeat who wants to understand the ethical and practical contradictions of our cultural obsession with prolonging life at all costs."

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Air You Breathe, by Frances de Pontes Peebles
2. The Overstory, by Richard Powers (In-Store Lit Group at Boswell, Oct 14 7 pm)
3. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
4. Milwaukee Noir, edited by Tim Hennessy
5. The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
6. The Incendiaries, by R.O. Kwon
7. Good Omens (3 paperback editions), by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
8. Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney
9. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

Our November In-Store Lit Group pick returns to our regular schedule after two displaced weeks - Labor Day throws things off. Thought we're open 10 am to 5 pm, we're closed in the evening when we'd normally meet. November's pick is The Incendiaries, which some critics say is about "violence and beauty," while others say no, its themes are "politics and faith." And here's the Ron Charles take, from The Washington Post: "The Incendiaries is a sharp, little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon doesn’t make it easy to get her debut out of your system."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Policing the Planet, edited by Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton
2. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
3. White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo
4. The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein
5. White Rage, by Carol Anderson
6. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
7. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
8. Reclaiming Community, by Bianca Baldridge
9. Calypso, by David Sedaris
10. 111 Places in Milwaukee that You Must Not Miss, by Michelle Madden

As you might note, we had a large order for books that deal with race issues this week. Most of them have already been highlighted on our bestseller wrap ups, but I think this is the first appearance of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives. It's an anthology and a little more academic than the other titles - I think all by The Color of Law went on to be New York Times bestsellers and Rothstein's book was certainly on some national lists (and many weeks in Milwaukee). Cornel wrote of Camp and Heatherton's collection: "“This book is the best analytical and political response we have to the historic rebellions in Ferguson. Don't miss it."

Books for Kids:
1. Dog Man For Whom the Ball Rolls V7, by Dav Pilkey
2. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Barbara Joosse and Renée Graef
3. Rite of Passage, by Richard Write
4. The Downstairs Girl, by Stacey Lee
5. Hello Girls, by Brittany Cavallaro
6. Pigeon Needs a Bath, by Mo Willems
7. Best Friends, by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham
8. The Lightning Thief V1 by Rick Riordan
9. Lawrence in the Fall, by Matthew Farina and Doug Salati (event at Boswell, Sat Sep 21, 11 am)
10. Pigeon Has to Go to School, by Mo Willems

Great to see a first week pop for The Downstairs Girl, from Stacey Lee. Lee visited between books to the Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series. Her new book is a variation on Dear Mrs. Bird, about Jo Kuan, a young woman who secretly writes an Agony Aunt column in Atlanta in the 1890s. Booklist wrote: "If anyone found out that a Chinese American teenager was behind the column, she'd be run out of town or worse. Lee has concocted another thrilling historical novel, blending stellar plotting and a dynamic cast of characters with well-researched details and sharp commentary on America's history of racism and prejudice."

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins offers a fall preview. In addition to some events we've been promoting, Higgins revealed the keynote for the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books, Andre Dubus III, appearing for the paperback edition of Gone So Long.

Barbara VandenBurgh reviews Téa Obreht's Inland in The Arizona Republic: "The Serbian-American writer displays dazzling dexterity and wit with the English language, transporting the reader to a fantastical late 19th century that borders on outright fantasy, where descriptions wax decadent and ghosts are treated as a matter of fact."

Bruce DeSilva's Associated Press review tackles The Cold Way Home: "Julia Keller’s eighth yarn featuring small-town West Virginia crime fighter Bell Elkins is a heartbreaking blues song of a novel, employing beauty to evoke despair while reminding readers that even in the darkest of days, there might also be light"

A visit to the Newberry Library in Chicago, with a side trip to Unabridged Bookstore

It started with an anniversary party. Lisa from Books & Company and I went down to our sales rep Jenny's 20th anniversary party. Before she sold us HarperCollins Books for Young Readers out of New York, she'd worked at several of the great bookstores in Chicago. And so we got to see a few of Chicago book people, and that sort of inspired me for a day with my sister Merrill* when she visited earlier in August.

I spent time chatting with Jenny's friend Melinda, who works at the Newberry Library book store. As these things go, I spoke to her more in Chicago than when she lived in Milwaukee. The last time I had visited the Newberry, it was being run by Seminary Coop, and I had said hello to another former old friend, Laura. Now the library is running the store directly.

I was intrigued. So when our Chicago walk began and took us within blocks of the library, I realized that I had never seen anything other than the bookstore and the first floor exhibit space. We arrived and the tour was just beginning (and that was providence, as there are only two per week). We were encouraged to jump in and we did. Stephanie was our charming and knowledgeable guide, who offered a compact history as we toured the floors.

While I would have loved to see the restoration rooms up close and was itching to explore the ten-story stacks, those spaces are reserved for trained professionals. Still, they have a non-updated-but-still-functioning card catalog, perfect if I want to go back to my never-started department store book. Unlike most private libraries, anyone can join and the membership is free. It's not a circulating library, but Newberry Fellows can hold books at their research desks.

I'm sure the internet has changed the way the library is used, but I think it's so important to have these books available, especially with most other libraries purging their physical books for digital equivalents. It brought back memories of my research papers, and all the libraries I used. My mother and I would browse about eight different branches of the Queens (then Queensboro) system, but for research, Jamaica was best.  I still have this weird memory of tagging along with my other sister Claudia while she researched a paper on Isadora Duncan.  In high school, the program I was in gave us access to the library at St. John's University - I think the neighborhood is called Hillcrest, but more importantly, it was on the Q75 bus that started near our house.

The Newberry has a lot of specialty collections, containing works that are not digitized, including maps, indigenous studies, and performing arts. It's very popular for genealogy work. Our group had a lot of questions, but I kept my mouth shut when one attendee connected the library to the esteemed Newbery Medal, as that Newbery was some relative of theirs. Alas, that Newbery is spelled differently from the Library, so their enthusiasm for the tour from a genetic-relation viewpoint was a bit misplaced.

In the bookstore, I was taken by a shelf labeled Curios. I like that. It was a bit of a potpourri category - not dried flowers, but the Jeopardy connotation, a nice one for a miscellany-lover like myself. As a last note about the Newberry, Stephanie highly recommends their annual book sale in July.

The bookstore got me hungry for more book shopping, so I brought Merrill over to Unabridged Bookstore in Lakeview and we did a whole mess of browsing. I did some research for my book-club discussion of Call Me Zebra (Ed's shelf-talker was, as they often are there, packed with detail) and bought The Incendiaries**, our November title. I suggested we visit their basement for the best travel section in Chicago (and probably better than many other cities), which she bought a guide for Melbourne.

One last thing for book lovers. On the way down while waiting for the Hiawatha, Merrill and I ran into one of our regulars, Mary Beth, who was visiting family. We discussed bookstores, and what do you know, we ran into her again at Unabridged, along with her daughter.

What a great and bookish day we had in Chicago***! And since you asked, I was reading the appropriately Chicago-ish Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright (register for our event on October 21 here) while Merrill read J. Ryan Stradal's The Lager Queen of Minnesota. Back at the store, I asked Merrill to try to hand-sell a copy of Vintage 1954 (which we both loved) while I was working. But that's for a different post.

*Famous for calling the novels of Anita Brookner "breezy." She's currently rereading all of them.

**Particularly appropriate because our PRH Penguin rep formerly worked at Unabridged.

***It was about an eight mile walk, including detours. We took the brown line back to the Loop.

What did the book club think of Call Me Zebra?

We had an interesting discussion of Azareen Van der Vliet's Call Me Zebra. I had picked the book because of the phenomenal reviews and author recommendations, as well as its status as the PEN Faulkner prize winner for 2018. But then I hit a speed bump when one of our regulars warned the other attendees that it was very difficult to read. And so we were kind of offered a challenge.

The story is about Bibi, a refugee from Iran. Her family was for many generations part of the intelligentsia who helped overthrow the government of the Shah, only to have the Ayatollah turn on them after he came to power. I don't think this is an unusual narrative.

Bibi, who has renamed herself Zebra, escapes with her family, losing her mother on the journey and her father after they settle in Manhattan. So she decides to go on a pilgrimage, packing up her worldly goods, including a lot of books and possibly her father's body, and setting off, first for Barcelona and then the small town of Girona. At the apartment where she's staying, she decides to take the resident bird. Many have called the bird their favorite character in the novel.

In Barcelona, Zebra hooks up with Ludo Bembo, which not enough reviewers have noted is a fine typeface. For those delicate flowers among us, I should note that there are a number of sex scenes, including some unusual descriptions. She's able to gather up a ragtag following to head off on her pilgrimages, each one referencing a different writer. Not an easy person to be with, Zebra breaks off for the group and heads off on her own.

But nobody would ever say that this is a plot-driven novel. It is a story of ideas, with references to philosophers and great minds in literary theory. It is about a person in exile, who holds onto these ideas as a way to give herself stability in what must be PTSD. The problem is that if you are not well versed in the theory, it's likely harder to enjoy the book than if you were more knowledgeable.

What appears to be a book about books is not quite that. While Zebra carts books around with her through the entire story, she never does read, and very few book titles stand out among the philosopher-authors. In fact I counted - two Don Quixotes, de Cervantes and Kathy Acker*, and Dickens's Bleak House. The Wall Street Journal's fiction critic Sam Sacks notes the connection: "Zebra’s metaphysical quest, like that of Don Quixote, is marked by ridiculous hauteur and deeply buried sorrow."

Instead of reading, she is fixated on transcribing and orating. For her, literature has become a belief system, as substitute for the religion which she renounces when she reminds us that she is from a tradition of Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. It's also a defense, as Nathan Scott McNamara noted in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

One thing I noticed in reading about the book is that while many reviewers called the book funny and absurd, I wasn't always sure what they were referring to, as at the same time they took Zebra's obsessions at face value. I had come to see Zebra as a kin to the protagonist in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Sometimes I wondered whether critics were conflating Zebra and Azareeen. That might be why Oloomi noted in one interview that she did not come from a family of readers.

I kind of feel like the Kirkus reviewer got it, calling the book demented and bizarro. And I should note, that's enthusiastic. In The Millions, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim noted that we see all ourselves in Zebra's self-absorption. But this was another tricky part of the book - it's hard to see yourself when the character tries so hard to be unlikable.

Once again, themes overlapped between two books, because isn't Washington Black also a story of exile? For those who complained, however, that Wash's travels didn't seem to have a financial logic to them, Oloomi has an answer - Zebra's mentor gives her $10,000 to travel out of his academic budget? Why? We don't know.

Have I made it clear that while Call Me Zebra is not for everyone (alas, including several folks in last night's meeting)? Still, it's a worthy investment for an adventurous reader and a great fiction alternative to all those folks browsing our philosophy case. I can think of a bunch of those readers for whom this book might be a great recommendation, including one fellow Boswellian. I'm giving my copy to him now. And I recommended it to another potential fan (he was buying Doxology) on my way back from lunch. He noted that he's done well by the PEN/Faulkner in the past.

My sister Merrill and I happened to spend Saturday in Chicago, where we went to Unabridged Bookstore. Ed had one of his legendary shelf-talkers, dense and full of quotes, which in this case, seemed perfect for the book. He named it one of his ten favorite books of 2018, calling it "an astonishing novel, inventive and exhilarating."

Up next we read The Overstory on Monday, October 14 (note another special date) at 7 pm, at Boswell. Here's the rest of the Boswell-run book clubs: www.boswellbooks.com/book-clubs-0.

*And Don Quixote as inspiration never ends. Up next is Salman Rushdie's latest, Quichotte, available September 3.

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending August 24, 2019 - two classics get updated treatment - here's how The Turn of the Screw and For Whom the Bell Tolls look on Boswell's bestseller list

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending August 24, 2019

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
2. Inland, by Téa Obreht
3. Chances Are, by Richard Russo
4. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
5. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
6. Death by the Bay V5, by Patricia Skalka
7. Circe, by Madeline Miller
8. A Dangerous Man V18, by Robert Crais
9. The Chain, by Adrian McKinty
10. The Turn of the Key, by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware might have a regular publishing schedule, but her reviews are as strong as those for writers who take two or three times as long. I looked at Book Marks, the review compiler, and her latest, The Turn of the Key, had ten raves and two positives. Here's Maureen Corrigan who tackled this thriller for The Washington Post: "What kind of suspense writer would be so reckless as to invoke Henry James’s masterpiece of terror and ambiguity and expect to see her own work do anything but suffer in the comparison? Happily, the answer is: a superb suspense writer who is dead set on making her own distinctive mark on the governess-alone-with-weird-children-in-an-isolated-house formula. The Turn of the Key pays scrupulous homage to James’s The Turn of the Screw and also slyly updates it."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. On Spice, by Caitlin PenzeyMoog
2. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
3. How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X Kendi
4. Educated, by Tara Westover
5. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King
6. The Second Mountain, by David Brooks
7. Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo
8. The Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
9. Becoming, by Michelle Obama
10. Milwaukee: A City Built on Water, by John Gurda

A major nonfiction work that got the jump on the post-Labor-Day release rush is Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, a biography of David Boas and his circle: Jennifer Szali in The New York Times writes: "Boas is at the center of Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,” King writes, “the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.”

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Overstory, by Richard Powers
2. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
3. Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
4. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
5. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
6. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
7. The Only Woman in the Room, by Marie Benedict
8. Death Stalks Door County V1, by Patricia Skalka
9. There There, by Tommy Orange
10. Down the River Unto the Sea V1, by Walter Mosley

If I weren't running our book club discussion for Call Me Zebra tomorrow, I'd be attending Anne's Mystery Book Club discussion for Down the River Unto the Sea. Walter Mosley's latest won the Edgar Award. Says Steph Cha at the Los Angeles Review of Books: "Joe King Oliver, the protagonist of his new novel Down the River Unto the Sea, is a black ex-cop who was framed for the rape of a white woman. The premise alone is enough fuel for hours of classroom discussion. Add in a wise teenage daughter, a devilish antihero partner, and a death-row inmate inspired by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and we have a wild ride that delivers hard-boiled satisfaction while toying with our prejudices and preconceptions."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. The Ground Truth, by Mark L Hineline
2. Calypso, by David Sedaris
3. Brick Through the Window, by Steven Nodine, Eric Beaumont, Clancy Carroll, and Dave Luhrssen
4. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
5. Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, with an introduction by Helen Rosner
6. Disordered Mind, by Eric R Kandel
7. Good Time Party Girl, by Helen Cromwell
8. Selma of the North, by Patrick D Jones
9. Wicked Milwaukee, by Yance Marti
10. Sapiens, by Yuval Harari Noah

Just out from Feral House is a new edition (originally from 1966) of Good Time Party Girl, the life of Helen Cromwell, who ran Milwaukee institution The Sunflower Inn. From the notes: "Dirty Helen, with the self-assurance of a defrocked debutante, takes you through her life and adventures. Demure, sweet, and wild teenage Helen flees from small-town Indiana to Cincinnati with her first of six husbands. She soon realizes that the traditional role of wife and mother isn't for her. She meets cunning millionaires, bank robbers, detectives, and gangsters as she hustles her way through life. Her friends were everyone else's enemies - Al Capone, Big Jim Colosimo, and Johnny Torrio all spend time with Helen as she bounces from adventure to adventure. It's the true-life story of a woman who never said No and carved out an independent life that transgressed every societal boundary."

Books for Kids:
1. Dog Man For Whom the Ball Rolls V7, by Dav Pilkey
2. Pigeon Has to Go to School, by Mo Willams
3. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Barbara Joosse and Renee Graef
4. Fancy Pants, by Roger Priddy
5. Anthology of Intriguing Animals, by DK
6. Atlas Obscura Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid, by Dylan Thuras and Friends (event October 16 at AGSL. Register here)
7. Wilder Girls, by Rory Power
8. Lawrence in the Fall, by Matthew Farina and Doug Salai (event at Boswell Sat Sep 21, 11 am)
9. Extraordinary Birds, by Sandy Stark McGinnis
10. Specials V3: The Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld (event September 16 at UWM - Register here)

It's another big week for the latest Dog Man installment, For Whom the Ball Rolls, in which the Supa Buddies meet a brand new super villain. And on top of that, Pete the Cat has gotten out of jail and is ready to start a new life with Lil Petey. And while I haven't read it (yet), I've heard that the book does take on the Ernest Hemingway classic from which it derived it's name.
Featured on the Journal Sentinel book pages:

--From the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins reviews a familiar subject penned by a popular Wisconsin writer: "Would you have imagined that the late Todd Bol, who started the Little Free Library movement, was once a boy who had trouble reading? In the new book Little Libraries, Big Heroes, for children 4 to 7 years old, author Miranda Paul traces the thousands of Little Free Library bookcases around the globe back to Bol’s childhood.

--From Kendal Weaver at Associated Press: "Zach Powers’ First Cosmic Velocity is a cleverly conceived and beautifully delivered novel that looks at the struggle for space supremacy from the Soviet side of the Cold War... The darkness and gravity of the narrative is mixed with stirring prose and dialogue that make First Cosmic Velocity a novel of ideas from the Cold War era."

--From Bruce DeSilva at Associated Press: "This is the 17th Cole and Pike novel, putting it well past the point that many crime fiction series become repetitive or otherwise lose their steam. But A Dangerous Man — suspenseful, fast-paced, tightly written and peopled with compelling characters — is one of Crais’ best."

--We referred above to Charles King's Gods of the Upper Air. David Holahan in USA Today adds to the praise: "The author, a professor at Georgetown University, succeeds in bringing Mead and her fellow travelers into sharp focus as they pioneered a new field and documented mankind’s many-splendored diversity in a positive, rather than a divisive, light."

--And Matt Damsker, also from USA Today, offers this another pick: "If your summertime activity includes slapping away noisy insects while enjoying a fat beach book, you might relate to Timothy C Winegard’s entertainingly educational new opus, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator."

What the Book Club Thought Extra - Matt Haig's How to Stop Time at Boswell's Books and Beer Book Club

It is a rare evening when I can attend one of our other book clubs. Most Monday evenings, we either have an author talk going on in the rear in the store or at an offsite location. But it is August, and that means the schedule is a bit lighter. And so I decided to join up with Jen's Books and Beer Book Club at Cafe Hollander. Knowing the set-up of our In-Store Lit Group, I just don't think I would have been able to eat a plate of Brussels sprouts* while discussing a book. Plus I've told people time and again not to eat Brussels sprouts in the store. At least the drippy kind with sauce.

We formed the Books and Beer Book Club with a slightly concept - a mix of genres, and an entertainment component to the stories. The kind that almost always got film rights sold, though lately, it's more streaming series than films. That said, because we do like to pick selections with vetting that includes looking at reviews and interviews, but not by reading the book in advance, sometimes the books aren't as entertaining as we hoped. But that happens with all our groups - a recent science fiction book club consensus was that the book they just read was not at all what was promised. Books and Beer skews a little younger than the other clubs too, which might be a function of the books chosen, or it might be the beer.

This week's selection, How to Stop Time, has been a fixture on Boswellian Tim's rec shelf, and that encouraged Tim to attend. So that was two booksellers, plus Jen plus our other attendees, which brought us to double digits, which is a nice size for discussion. I'd attended a few meetings on start-up so I knew a bit what to expect. Every book club is run a bit differently - Jen's proceeds with a series of questions to the group and ends with us having to rate the books from zero to five stars. She well knew that rating things is tough for me, but I was game, only confessing that I give every book on Edelweiss eight stars or I don't review it all. Books I don't like are my little secret.

We'd put How to Stop Time on our recent time travel table, but truth be told, it's not a time travel novel, except in the book's structure of jumping around in time as the story is told. Our protagonist, currently named Tom Hazard, has a disorder that causes him to age at one tenth the speed of a normal human. So here he is in London, teaching history to kids, only he's lived it, having been alive since the 1400s. He lives by a few rules, one of which being he can't fall in love. And then, of course, he catches the eye of a fellow teacher, Camille.

For over a century, Tom lived by his wits, playing the lute for Shakespeare (he's a talented musician), finding and losing love (with Rose), fathering a child (Marion). And then the Albatross Society got a hold of them, a secret organization that keeps self-proclaimed Albos out of trouble, by giving them a new identity every eight years and otherwise keeping them financially solvent. Hendrich, the self-proclaimed leader, made his fortune in tulip bulbs. Their mission? To recruit other slow agers and keep them out of the hands of witch hunters (historically) and scientific experiments (more recently). And if you say no? Uh oh.

Tom really does have one mission - to find his missing daughter, who is also a slow-ager. It doesn't have to be that way. The condition, which appears to be either recessive or random, may or may not manifest in your kids, as one of the slow agers has an elderly child. Hendrich promises he's helping Tom find Marion, but it's a big world and she's stayed off the radar. And if there's another thing Tom has to come to terms with, it's feeling at fault for the death of his mother, who was drowned as a witch. Talk about guilt inducing, the townspeople make it clear that it is Tom's fault.

The problem with living almost effectively forever is that its hard to come up with a focus. You can always try to live life later. Hendrich suggests losing yourself in material indulgence, and Tom's friend Omai (who is mostly only referred to in memory) lives for the moment. And so the story becomes not just an adventure, a speculative thriller, and a romance, but a philosophical investigation as well. And that is not particularly surprising because Matt Haig's biggest seller before this was Reasons to Stay Alive, a memoir about overcoming depression.

Most of the attendees really liked How to Stop Time, far more at least, than their previous club selection. Jen asked some conversation starters, including pondering the trope of why all these time travel books wind up having the protagonists interacting with famous people in history. Is that tired? Well, having been recommending Vintage 1954 all summer, I sort of feel like this comes part and parcel with the genre. And we know that even in historical fiction, many editors are advising authors to add in real-life figures. Authors have told us this at their events. Not that every mystery has to have a murder, but it doesn't hurt.

Jen noted noted that in a lot of ways, How to Stop Time used some of the conventions of vampire** novels, as well as Deborah Harkness's The Discovery of Witches. It reminded me of the Magnus Flyte novel, City of Dark Magic, that was popular about five years ago. But the contemporary parts of the book really called to mind Nick Hornby as well - a self-doubting good egg floundering at life until he finds the people who can help him put the pieces together. And Tim? His comparison is David Mitchell. How's that for a range of influences?

This is a great book club selection for folks with groups who want a spirited discussion with a little meat, but also have attendees who need some solid action to keep them going. How to Stop Time was a New York Times Editor's Choice pick, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year. Neil Gaiman wrote: "Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories." Here are interviews in Book Page and The Guardian. Did we mention the movie is being filmed?

One big complaint that was pretty much a consensus - the ending wraps up a little too neatly for our tastes.  So my big question, which is always something I think about when someone has problems with a book, is, if you were an editor, what would you try to change? And would that help the book or lead to more problems?

The next Books and Beer Book Club selection is The Municipalists, by Seth Fried, on Monday, September 16, 7 pm. Alas, I'll only be there in spirit; we have two author visits that evening. Here are the rest of our upcoming Boswell-run book club selections.

*The greatest Brussels-sprouts-themed novel ever is Don Lee's Wrack and Ruin.

**Matt Haig wrote at least one vampire novel, The Radleys. It's available, but it's a high-priced POD title. Oh for the days when the new publisher would repackage the backlist. But nowadays, the ebook rights don't seem to ever move, so it doesn't make sense. Thus it's much harder for an author's hit novel to breathe life into their previous works, unless they never move publishers.