Young Adult Books for Old Adults

I bet a lot of you grown ups out there have read the Hunger Games series.  Probably a fair few of you have read the Twilight books, perhaps more than care to admit.  And I know a ton of you have read Harry Potter.  But those aren't the only awesome young adult books out there that can satisfy the adult reader.  Patti at our Ravenna store has put together a list of young adult books that can be enjoyed by all ages.

The Dark Unwinding by Sharon Cameron

A spine-tingling tale of steampunk and spies, intrigue and heart-racing romance! When Katharine Tulman's
inheritance is called into question by the rumor that her eccentric uncle is squandering away the family fortune, she is sent to his estate to have him committed to an asylum. But instead of a lunatic, Katharine discovers a genius inventor with his own set of rules, who employs a village of nine hundred people rescued from the workhouses of London.

Katharine is now torn between protecting her own inheritance and preserving the peculiar community she grows to care for deeply. And her choices are made even more complicated by a handsome apprentice, a secretive student, and fears for her own sanity.

As the mysteries of the estate begin to unravel, it is clear that not only is her uncle's world at stake, but also the state of England as Katharine knows it. With twists and turns at every corner, this heart-racing adventure will captivate readers with its intrigue, thrills, and romance.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Oct. 11th, 1943-A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she's living a spy's worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?

A Michael L. Printz Award Honor book that was called "a fiendishly-plotted mind game of a novel" in The New York Times, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other.

Every Day by David Levithan

In his New York Times bestselling novel, David Levithan introduces readers to what Entertainment Weekly
calls a "wise, wildly unique" love story about A, a teen who wakes up every morning in a different body, living a different life.

Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.

There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere. It’s all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with—day in, day out, day after day.

With his new novel, David Levithan, bestselling co-author of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, has pushed himself to new creative heights. He has written a captivating story that will fascinate readers as they begin to comprehend the complexities of life and love in A’s world, as A and Rhiannon seek to discover if you can truly love someone who is destined to change every day.

Graceling  by Kristin Cashore

Kristin Cashore’s best-selling, award-winning fantasy Graceling tells the story of the vulnerable yet strong Katsa, a smart, beautiful teenager who lives in a world where selected people are given a Grace, a special talent that can be anything from dancing to swimming. Katsa’s is killing. As the king’s niece, she is forced to use her extreme skills as his thug. Along the way, Katsa must learn to decipher the true nature of her Grace...and how to put it to good use. A thrilling, action-packed fantasy adventure (and steamy romance!) that will resonate deeply with adolescents trying to find their way in the world.

Summer Syllabus

Having just finished school, I find myself with some long-overdue extra time and a whole lot of reading to catch up on. I wonder what should the form of my reading take. Because, while school may be over, I still have this strange need to be told what to read. So, I'm working on my syllabus for the summer. In doing so, I've been looking into the reading related goals of others, here a few that I'm pondering:

• of course there is the practical and money-saving read every unread book in my house. Read it or get rid of it could be my new mantra.
• I could pick one new author and read all of their books...I probably wouldn't try this with Charles Dickens.
• I've always been a fan of theme reading. Maybe Moby Dick followed by a non-fiction tome about whales.
• My mom is slowly making her way through all the presidents, reading a biography of each...though I think one presidential historian in the family is enough.
• Maybe I should read every book that's won a literary prize in the last three years. That would get me caught up.
• I have one friend who is reading the favorite book of each of her friends.

Those are a few ideas. But I'm still not set on a specific course. I should probably just go back and re-read the Harry Potter books while I figure it out. Any ideas for me? What's your summer syllabus?

Books for Dads

Need some help figuring out what to get your Father this weekend. Here are some ideas for all different kinds of Dads.

Literary Dad

The Son by Phillip Meyer (Ecco)
This brutal and exquisitely written Texan generational saga is about as much as a guy book as you can get. In researching the book the author killed a buffalo and drank a mug of its blood for crying out loud.





Sports Dad

Class A by Lucas Mann (Pantheon)
Spend a year in the life of a minor league team, the Clinton LumberKings, which happens to be the Seattle Mariners Class A minor league affiliate. Its like Friday Night Lights meets Field of Dreams (not really, but you get the idea).




History Dad

The Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt)
The magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson’s acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II. At 896 pages it will also double as an exercise dumbell.





Kitchen Dad

Smoke & Pickles by Edward Lee (Artisan)
Brooklyn raised Korean American chef does Southern food. Do you need more of a sales pitch than that? OK, recipes include Chicken-Fried Pork Steak with Ramen Crust and Buttermilk Pepper Gravy and Braised Beef Kalbi with Soft Grits and Scallions. Plus there is fried chicken and waffles on the cover.



Music Dad

Waits/Corbijn '77-'11 by Tom Waits and Anton Corbijn
For the Dad who has everything, this gorgeous oversize slipcase photography book showcases the thirty plus year collaboration of  these two iconic artists, the musician Tom Waits and the photographer Anton Corbijn. Its a limited edition, so Dad will be the only kid on the block with one on his coffee table.

Some Big Names and Some Big Books

Here's a quick recap of some of the new books just released by big authors that you might have missed. You can tell these are big authors because their names are in larger font than the titles.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
From the unique perspective of David Sedaris comes a new book of essays taking his readers on a bizarre and stimulating world tour. From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that are not to be forgotten.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan
In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook.

Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, the soil, farmers, our history and culture, and, of course, the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Cooking, above all, connects us.

The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?  On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?  Darkly comic, startlingly poignant, and utterly original -- this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best.


Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
Best-selling popular science writer Roach turns her attention here to the alimentary canal. Roach asks the questions that some readers may have always wondered: Does saliva have curative properties? Do pets taste food differently than their owners do? Could Jonah have survived three days in a whale's stomach? Could Americans lower the national debt by chewing their food more thoroughly? As she investigates these questions, Roach encounters many an eccentric scientist who has worked tirelessly to unlock the mysteries of saliva, gastrointestinal gases, and mastication. As she recounts her adventures in tasting centers and laboratories, she aims not to disgust readers, but to inspire curiosity--even awe--for the most intimate functions of the human body. VERDICT Filled with witty asides, humorous anecdotes, and bizarre facts, this book will entertain readers, challenge their cultural taboos, and simultaneously teach them new lessons in digestive biology

David Foster Wallace Kind of Day

You may have seen this already. Maybe not. It's worth another view even if you have.  Inspiring and truthful, and a great reminder of how thoughtful David Foster Wallace was, and how much the world is missing without him in it. This is a short film based on his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, maybe the best commencement speech. Ever.



The full speech is also available as a book.

Speaking of David Foster Wallace, I've been enjoying the most recent collection of his essays. Not only is the writing fantastic (naturally) but the book itself is such a beautiful object.

Both Flesh and Not

Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more. 

Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.

And just to round out your Saturday with David Foster Wallace...here is Ami's review of Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is a great summer book, not so much because it's a beach read but more because it will take you ALL SUMMER to read it. But what an enthralling, immersive experience! Both profoundly hilarious and absurdly sad, Infinite Jest is a sweeping, spiraling epic that builds upon itself with control and adeptness. I truly believe that this is the Great American Novel to end all Great American Novels.

Fresh Gift Ideas for Your Graduate

Have a graduate in your life?  Not sure what to get them?  Worried that they'll get seven copies of Oh the Places You'll Go?  Or is your grad just little bit different, a little bit special, a little more deserving of a really interesting book.  Here are a few unusual and engaging suggestions for grads going in all different directions...and there's no Dr. Seuss...

For the College-Bound:

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Make sure your graduate knows who they should and shouldn't get to know their first year on campus.

Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

101 Things I Learned...series

Save your grad a ton on tuition!  The books in this series are pretty much as good as going to school.  Okay, maybe not, but they do pack an informative punch in a very petite package.

For the Out-on-Their-Own:

The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti

Should neighborhoods change? Is wearing a suit a good way to quit smoking? Why do people think that if you do one thing, you’re against something else? Is monogamy a trick? Why isn’t making the city more fun for you and your friends a super-noble political goal? Why does a computer last only three years? How often should you see your parents? How should we behave at parties? Is marriage getting easier? What can spam tell us about the world?

Misha Glouberman’s friend and collaborator, Sheila Heti, wanted her next book to be a compilation of everything Misha knew. Together, they made a list of subjects. As Misha talked, Sheila typed. He talked about games, relationships, cities, negotiation, improvisation, Casablanca, conferences, and making friends. His subjects ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. But sometimes what had seemed trivial began to seem important—and what had seemed important began to seem less so.

The Chairs Are Where the People Go is refreshing, appealing, and kind of profound. It’s a self-help book for people who don’t feel they need help, and a how-to book that urges you to do things you don’t really need to do.

Twenty-Dollar, Twenty-Minute Meals by Caroline Wright

Quick and easy with a creative twist, here are more than 90 recipes (serving 4) that use simple techniques, fresh produce, and ready ingredients that don't sacrifice flavor or healthfulness for budget or time.  It's a whole new way to think about dinner: some nights meat and veggies; some nights a pureed soup, colorful salad, or cheesy tart.  Some nights the comfort of a perfect plate of pasta.  And every night. delicious.

For the Socially-Conscious-Activist:

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

First published in 1971, Rules for Radicals is Saul Alinsky's impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” Written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation. Community, and the Common Good  by Cecile Andrews

Living Room Revolution refutes the notion that selfishness is at the root of human nature. Research shows that people--given the right circumstances--can be caring, nurturing and collaborative. Presented with the opportunity, they gravitate toward actions and policies embodying empathy, fairness, and trust instead of competition, fear, and greed. The regeneration of social ties and the sense of caring and purpose that comes from creating community drive this essential transformation. At the heart of this movement is the ancient art of conversation. This book provides a practical toolkit of concrete strategies to facilitate personal and social change by bringing people together in community and conversation.  At the heart of happiness is joining with others in good talk and laughter. Each person can make a difference, and it can all start in your own living room!

For the World-Traveler:

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?

In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.

Off Track Planet's Travel Guide of the Young, Sexy, and Broke by Freddie Pikovsky and Anna
Starostinetskaya

This all-encompassing travel guide features approximately 100 exciting destinations like Buenos Aires, Brazil, Columbia, Greece, and Thailand, and everything college students, grads, and those in their twenties and thirties want to know about them, including: the cities with the craziest sex shops; the best places to get a tattoo; where to check out some amazing street art; why you should try fried bugs; the best clubs to party until dawn; and much more. Broken into three parts, the first section focuses on what to do and where: food, fashion, music, sports, sex and partying, and more. The second half of the book dives into practical tips and advice on budgeting, hostels, and transportation, and the third section offers great ideas about extending your stay. Entertaining and informative, this lively guide also includes fun charts and graphs and 100 to 150 full-color photos throughout.

Read This Book

Adam says, "Read this book"...

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

In this brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future.

Here's what Adam has to say:

This is less a novel than an exercise in poetic monologue, in Voice and Character--a darkly playful dirge-for-marriage shot through with surprising laugh-aloud gallows humor; an engine burning the dense and dangerous fuel of bitterness; a book only for the very brave and the unhurried, for those willing to take a careful Orphic expedition through an unsettling landscape where, perhaps, nothing at all may be rescued.

In short, a middle-aged Jewish couple and their daughter and son find the family dissolving, the marriage ending, and we see it all through the eyes of the Caribbean, immigrant, writer-wife, in her abandonment.  In one sense, the novel's theme is marriage as culture shock. In another sense, as the title suggests, Kincaid's story centers around the way in which perception may become an exhausting contest between memory, the past, and the-moment-now (and woe to those who lose the battle, those who are punished with ego-incarceration, with the hell of self-torment).

With its fetish for voice, its complete rejection of plot in favor of rarefied stream-of-consciousness or phenomenological narrative, this is the sort of post-modern novel that makes you a little worried serious literature really is going the way of much contemporary poetry, very elite-minded and marginally accessible--yes, and yet it's also such a damned good read, if you have the patience, if you will not (as I was tempted to) overreact and shout: pretension! Be warned, this isn't a book you can read through with good speed, at your normal clip; the book demands that you allow it alone to call all the shots.

Kincaid has produced, here, exactly the kind of novel other writers fear to read, one with so strong a voice that it threatens to influence one's own style in an un-asked-for manner.

In the end, what is it that “See Now Then” leaves us with? Maybe just this. There are many literary references to Greek mythology, and the narrator's abandonment--as it hits home in the final section, left physically by her husband, left emotionally by her children--conveys just how awful a thing it is to be a god in whom no one any longer has faith, a deity who has lost all her worshipers. On a final, practical note: I recommend springing the extra six bucks and buying the audio book on CD, which gives you the unforgettable experience of hearing Kincaid read this work.

Join Third Place Books on Bike to Work Day

Third Place Books, along with some Lake Forest Park residents and business owners, will be hosting a Bike to Work Commute Station on the Burke Gilman Trail on Friday May 17 from 6am -9pm.

Here's what's happening at our station :

Third Place Books will be giving away free Third Place Books reflectors (good for bikes, backpacks or jacket zippers).

Third Place Books will be doing drawings for over 30 cycling books and posters.














Honey Bear Bakery will be providing free coffee and snacks. 

 

Muscle Milk will be giving out free samples.

Bring the kids on the way to school and enter to win a copy of Everyone Can Learn to Ride a Bicycle

Drop by for some swag or just to get a high five 

(everyone can use a high five).

Our crew from last year

What to Read after you Reread The Great Gatsby

With Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby coming to theaters this Friday, we've noticed  many customers rereading F Scott Fitzgerald or perhaps even discovering him for the first time. Jessica H recommends Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities as a chaser to your Jazz Age indulgences. With gentle self mockery and delectable prose, Schwartz describes what it was to arrive at adulthood in the Great Depression having been raised on the decadent artistry of the 1920s. Though very much of the age in which it was written, the potent story of a generation's disillusionment and difficulties transitioning into adulthood is universal and timely. Just reissued with a gorgeous new cover from New Directions Press with a preface by Schwartz's pupil, Lou Reed, it's the perfect complement and logical next step to witnessing Gatsby's fall. Read it while floating in the pool this summer.

A "Better" Beach Read

Looking for a beach read for the sunny days ahead?  As I was shelving today, I came across this book.  Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat.  It's new in paperback, and really interesting, with a Seattle connection, and compelling story that keeps you reading.  And while I thought it was a great book, The New York Times thinks it should be your next beach read.  Here's the beginning of their blurb on the front cover...Your perfect beach book has arrived.  I guess I never thought of e. coli as beach book material.  To be honest, I've never thought of non-fiction as beach book material.

But why not?  Why can't non-fiction be a beach read?  So, here are a few more ideas for beach reads with a little more substance.

Pharmacy on a Bicycle: Innovative Solutions for Global Health and Poverty by Eric G. Bing and Marc J. Epstein

Every four minutes, over 50 children under the age of five die. In the same four minutes, 2 mothers lose their lives in childbirth. Every year, malaria kills nearly 1.2 million people, despite the fact that it can be prevented with a mosquito net and treated for less than $1.50.

In this profoundly important book, Eric G. Bing and Marc J. Epstein lay out a solution: a new kind of bottom-up health care that is delivered at the source. We need microclinics, micropharmacies, and microentrepreneurs located in the remote, hard-to-reach communities they serve. By building a new model that “scales down” to train and incentivize all kinds of health-care providers in their own villages and towns, we can create an army of on-site professionals who can prevent tragedy at a fraction of the cost of top-down bureaucratic programs.

Bing and Epstein have seen the model work, and they provide example after example of the extraordinary results it has achieved in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is a book about taking health care the last mile—sometimes literally—to prevent widespread, unnecessary, and easily avoided death and suffering. Pharmacy on a Bicycle shows how the same forces of innovation and entrepreneurship that work in first-world business cultures can be unleashed to save the lives of millions.

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick

Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord. In June, however, with the city cut off from supplies by a British blockade and Patriot militia poised in siege, skirmishes give way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It would be the bloodiest battle of the Revolution to come, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists.

Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. He finds new characters, and new facets to familiar ones. The real work of choreographing rebellion falls to a thirty-three year old physician named Joseph Warren who emerges as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause and is fated to die at Bunker Hill. Others in the cast include Paul Revere, Warren’s fiancé the poet Mercy Scollay, a newly recruited George Washington, the reluctant British combatant General Thomas Gage and his more bellicose successor William Howe, who leads the three charges at Bunker Hill and presides over the claustrophobic cauldron of a city under siege as both sides play a nervy game of brinkmanship for control.

Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away by Eric G. Wilson

Whether we admit it or not, we’re fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: as conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we’re still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there’s no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible?

In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the gruesome, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there’s something nourishing in darkness. “To repress death is to lose the feeling of life,” he writes. “A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies.”

His examples are legion and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag’s On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.

Bookshelves of Desire

It's been awhile since we've posted some book porn...you know, drool worthy photos of the library you might one day have, the reading nooks you can only imagine in your mind.  Let me tell you a little something about the internet...it will waste your time.  One of the best places to waste that time is on Pinterest.  Don't know what Pinterest is...don't worry.  You're better off to just pretend you've never heard of it and hold on to those 3 hours per day that will be sucked into the vortex that is Pinterest.  If it's already too late for you, have you tried a Pinterest search of bookshelves?  Well, go do it right now...better yet, I'll do it for you...there.  Beautiful, aren't they?

Sigh...

And don't even get me started on book nooks.

2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Just announced...here are the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners

FICTION - The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson 

DRAMA - Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar 

HISTORY - Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall

BIOGRAPHY - The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

POETRY - Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds 

GENERAL NONFICTION - Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

Head here for more information including the journalism winners, and finalists for all categories.  I'm really happy to see Eowyn Ivey's Snow Child as a fiction finalist.  Congratulations to all!

Getting to Know...Doug TenNapel

Until recently, if you stumbled into one of Doug TenNapel’s quirky fantasy worlds there’s a good chance that it was through the video game Earthworm Jim or Nickelodeon’s Catscratch. But TenNapel has also worked away valiantly in the graphic novel format for the past 15 years and now seems to have hit the pop culture jackpot with his Cardboard, instantly beloved by librarians and elementary school teachers around the country (nominating it for all sorts of 2012 “best-of” lists). It has also been optioned as a Toby “Spider-Man” Maguire film by the folks behind Ice Age. The fantasy device at the heart of this TenNapel story may feel very familiar, fairytale-familiar in fact: a boy is given a seemingly ordinary object which quickly displays astonishing properties, taking on a life of its own and churning out so much magic that the adventure soon threatens to veer into nightmare territory. But can something as mundane as cardboard ever pass convincingly for magical, you may ask. Yes. Imagination + corrugated paper . . . as every child knows, it’s a simple, foolproof, alchemical formula. Also, even older readers really don’t have much chance resisting the story’s enchantment--TenNapel doesn't play fair and always uses his vibrant illustrations as the jack up his sleeve, his loaded dice.

This is the third of his popular graphic novels published for Scholastic Books (earlier books having come mainly through Image Comics) and aimed at a young audience. The first was Ghostopolis, a story of a troubled boy's journey into the land of the dead. Ghostopolis is an unusually haunting, richly mythopoeic book for TenNapel and might function as a natural stepping stone for kids destined to wander--a few years down the line--into Neil Gaiman territory. Between the release of these two graphic novels, TenNapel produced the energetic adventure story Bad Island. This was something of a cross between Jurassic Park and elements of the original, animated Transformers: The Movie from 1986 (sigh, yes, I'm geeky enough to bring in that reference).

And for the readers who just can't get enough TenNapel, his slightly more mature (i.e. enigmatic and a bit bloody) Gear is something else entirely. Gear was the first of his graphic novels. It is raw and rough-hewn. It's so short on exposition, so unconcerned with being “accessible” that I'd be tempted to call the book uncommerical, except that TenNapel later raided his character cast here to create the Catscratch cartoon. And the artwork is just as bold and gonzo as the story.

-Adam

Read This Book

I say, "Read this book!"

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since.

This book is sad. I mean, like super sad. If you aren't ready to cry, don't read this. And not just crying while reading (although that definitely happened...a lot) but crying while trying to fall asleep and just thinking about the book, or crying while listening to a particular Smiths song the author mentions, crying while riding the bus. Seriously, this book is sad. 

This is the story of a woman who loses everything in the space of a few minutes. The story of a woman who's entire family is ripped from her in a freak tragedy that she somehow survives. It's riveting and harrowing and don't forget, super sad. But, hold on. I know you're saying to yourself, "why would I read such a sad book?" Well, this book is also the remarkable story of a woman who loses everything worth living for, and who chooses to live anyway. Grief, love, hope, loss...yeah, that's all there. But it's the quiet strength of the author that had me entranced and left wondering, would I be that strong? 

Beautifully written and well worth the tears