#5 Kobo, holiday books, and more!

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The last week or two at the store have been amazing—busy, productive, and full of surprises!

Jeff Kinney, author of the Wimpy Kid books, stopped by, and dozens of families came by to meet him and have their books signed. Kinney was wonderful with all his young fans and patiently signed every book, even those brought in by the bagful. And it’s terrific for us to have lots of signed copies of The Third Wheel, the newest Wimpy Kid book, going into the holiday season.

Yesterday morning our whole staff had breakfast with two of our Random House sales reps, Bridget Piekarz and Laura Baratto, who told us about some of the books they think will make great holiday gifts. Laura went through Chris Ware’s Building Stories piece by piece, talking about Ware’s painstakingly detailed work on this project and his ideas about multiple places to enter a story. It may have just been me, but I think Bridget especially enjoyed talking about the cookbooks on the Random House list—The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Foolproof, and Lidia’s Favorite Recipes by Lidia Bastianich come to mind. I also appreciated Bridget bringing along New York Review Books’ new edition of Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, which had come out earlier this fall and somehow I’d missed! Thank you, Bridget!

After the breakfast, I spoke with Laura and Bridget about possibly making a presentation like this to our customers. They loved the idea and were very interested in helping me get something going—perhaps a series that would include not only Bridget and Laura but also reps from other publishers, large and small. I’m looking forward to putting something together, perhaps in the spring.

Also, yesterday we officially launched our relationship with Kobo. We now sell Kobo eBooks from our website and Kobo eReaders in the store. The eReaders are stylish and have many great features. (See our website for all the details!) And to kick off the holiday shopping season, the pocket-sized one (called the Mini) will be on sale for only $49 on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday. If you’ve been waiting for a low-priced eReader to dip your toe into the eBook pond, this might be the device for you. We also hear Kobo is planning to release a new tablet this winter, and we’re excited about the possibility of offering that at the store, too, as soon as it’s available. I already own an eReader but look forward to being able to order my eBooks from Kobo, which has a much larger selection of books than Google had.

As I write this, the pumpkin pie is in the oven (yes, just one—some of the friends who we used to share this holiday with have moved away, so we’re a smaller group these days). But, after the dinner’s eaten and the dishes are done, four is the perfect number for playing cards! And, of course, we’ll be listening to Christmas music, because we’ve been waiting all year and, well, there’s just no need to wait any longer, is there? And perhaps after the guests leave, I’ll curl up in my reading chair with my new copy of Cassandra at the Wedding. . .

Cheers, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Lynn

Women & Children First, Chicago

#4 Lists

It’s that time of year when I start to think about the books I’ve read over the course of the year and which ones I liked best. I am a natural list maker, and so lists of books . . .well, what could be more fun and interesting? I have kept a list of every book I’ve read for about 30 years now (since about my junior year of college). Over the years it has changed from a pen and paper list to a digital document, and since then has resided on various computers in various formats (I started with a Word doc but recently switched to a spreadsheet). Over all these years, I’ve only lost about half a year’s worth. If you’re into the bottom line, on average I read about 60 books a year (my partner reads about 100 books a year, and you can imagine how competitive that makes me feel, but I’m just not a particularly fast reader), and I do include audio books (unabridged ones, naturally).

But the list I want to talk about here—a list of the best books I’ve read in a particular year—began when I started working at the bookstore. It’s a particular help during the holiday rush when people ask me what book I’ve particularly loved. Being middle aged and not having always taken care of all my brain cells, I am perfectly capable of drawing a total blank when asked what book I’m reading NOW let alone what I read last spring, so Lynn’s Top 10 of the Year list was born. 

Also, list making is fun, which is another reason why I don’t wait until Dec 31st for this. I actually began pondering this a few weeks ago and will probably ponder a good bit more before my 2012 reading is done. At the moment, my 2012 candidates are:

Midsummer Night at the Workhouse by Diana Athill
Carry the One by Carol Anshaw
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The Believers by Zoe Heller
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

These are listed in the order I read them. I haven’t even begun to think about the rankings yet. (OK, maybe a little.) And considering that I work at a feminist bookstore, my rate of 10 female to 3 male authors feels about right to me. Also, you may know that several of these books were published before 2012; it’s just that I only got around to reading them in 2012—although, I will admit I did better this year than I usually do re: reading things promptly.

One thing you may notice right away is that there are more than ten, and there are still two months of reading time left. In the end, this list may or may not actually be 10 books long. Sometimes it’s 10, but sometimes it’s 11 or 12. Just because I like lists doesn’t mean I’m rigid about them!

Do you make lists of books you’ve read, too? What are the best books you've read this year? Do any of mine make your list? 

(And, yes, I’ll be sure to post the final list!)

Lynn
Women & Children First
Chicago

#3 A Visit with Sara Pennypacker

One of my favorite children’s authors, Sara Pennypacker, stopped by the store this week, and while she was signing stock, my coworker Mack and I had a wonderful chat with her. We were talking about the absence of parents in so many book for kids ages 7 and above. Pennypacker said she quite deliberately made a very different decision in her much-loved Clementine series. She believed that the only way that the character Clementine could be the strong, confident, bold (and might we even say reckless—but isn’t that was childhood is for?) girl she is, she had to have the solidity of a loving, functional family supporting her. Pennypacker believes that nothing else would have made sense logically.

As she explained, when one or both parents are dead, you are always worrying about the character a bit, and that fear is the start of a very strong bond between the reader and the character. Giving Clementine two interesting, functional (albeit human) parents, the challenge for Pennypacker was to create a strong bond between the reader and Clementine without resorting to the easy answer of making us fearful on her behalf. And she achieves it brilliantly—but now I’ll have to go back and reread the series and figure out how!

Of course, Pennypacker made a different choice in her new book, Summer of the Gypsy Moths—she did “kill off” a parental figure or two. (If you haven’t read Gypsy Moths yet, you really must!) And during our conversation, Pennypacker also made reference to what she had done in Stuart’s Cape. I kept smiling and nodding (now nervously), while I madly racked my brain to figure out if I’d ever heard of Stuart’s Cape, or had I misheard, or perhaps it was a book by another writer???  You probably know that panicked feeling that embarrassment and mortification are just around the corner (not that Sara Pennypacker would have put me on the spot in any way—I assure you she was absolutely gracious and lovely). But as soon as we’d seen her on her way and put away the books and pens and stickers, I dashed to the computer and Googled "Stuart’s Cape"!

It turns out that before Clementine and Summer of the Gypsy Moths, Pennypacker wrote a series of books about character named Stuart: The Amazing World of Stuart, Stuart Goes to School, and Stuart’s Cape. Right away I got hold of a copy of Stuart’s Cape, and I enjoyed it very much. It’s about a boy who is about to start at a new school, and he’s bored and badly in need of distraction to take his mind off his worries. He realizes that people with capes have lives full of adventure, so he makes a cape out of old ties and a purple sock, and immediately things get more interesting. He discovers he can fly after eating some angel food cake; he is visited by a talking dinosaur, horse, and gorilla; and he grows toast from a seed (my favorite part!). In the end he makes an unlikely friend, which is what he really needed all along. It’s imaginative and fun, and there’s not a parent in sight!

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One last thing regarding children and reading, from the Persephone Letter, October 22, 2012:

“The Guardian ran a piece telling us that scientists have found ‘that the more mental stimulation a child gets around the age of four, the more developed the parts of their brains dedicated to language and cognition will be in the decades ahead’ ie. that four is a simply crucial age. No surprises there, most parents sense this intuitively, but it’s fascinating to read the scientific proof.”

See the original Persephone Letter at http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/persephoneletter/22-october-2012/, and scroll down to the bottom.

Lynn
Women & Children First
Chicago

#2 The Heartland Fall Forum

I’ve been back from the Heartland Fall Forum (a regional booksellers’ conference) in Minneapolis for more than a week already, and I’m still buzzing with the excitement of that show. There are so many terrific fall books!

At one of the sessions, where Midwest authors spoke to a room full of booksellers about their new books, Peter Geye, author of The Lighthouse Road, asked, “How do you thank people for making a dream come true?” So I guess it’s no surprise that Lighthouse Road was the first book I read after the conference, and I’m currently struggling to write just the perfect shelf tag to hang under it on my staff picks shelf. Set in northern Minnesota near Lake Superior, it tells two tales, one of a woman and the other of a man, 30 years apart, who happen to be mother and son. It’s a wonderful book, and I can’t wait to hand sell it in the store!

And I just finished reading Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub, another author who spoke at that session. The book is set, at least in part, in Door County, Wisconsin, and involves both community theater and the Golden Age of Film—what a great combination! The main character is the youngest daughter of a family that runs a community theater who leaves for Hollywood after the tragic death of a family member. I really enjoyed the book, and it would also be on my staff picks shelf, but one of my colleagues at WCF beat me to the punch and already has it on hers. Darn!

I also heard readings by Jami Attenberg, from her new book The Middlesteins, Julia Pandl, from Memoir of the Sunday Brunch, Jim Heynen from The Fall of Alice K., and Michael Perry, who not only read from his new book Visiting Tom but also told some hysterical and heartwarming anecdotes about being a stay-at-home dad (while trying to write!!).

As wonderful as it is to discover new writers, reading new books by old favorites is a special pleasure. I’m excited that many of my favorite writers have new books coming out this fall—among them: Zadie Smith’s NW, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Emma Donoghue’s short story collection Astray, and Mark Halperin’s In Sunlight and in Shadow, which are already out, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, which will be out soon.

Lynn
Women & Children First
Chicago

#1 It Begins!

So here I am—my first day as a blogger. For a long time I’ve been wanting to write about books and my personal experiences of them—and also about bookselling. Not surprisingly, those experiences often involve the city where I live (Chicago) and the bookstore where I work (Women & Children First).

Why now? Two reasons. First, after four years at Women & Children First, I’m taking on new responsibilities involving events planning and publicity, which means I’ll be more involved with the authors who read at the store and the publishers who send them to us. The second is time. I’m taking some time off this fall from my other career as a freelance editor. I feel very lucky to have this kind of flexibility and very much want to do something worthwhile with the time off I’ve given myself. My goals are modest. Besides this blog, catching up on my reading is a big part of it—which creates a nexus of time for reading and then writing about great books. (In addition, in this blog I will inevitably be sharing the experience of working in a bookstore and my thoughts about the publishing industry in general—which in one way or another I've been part of since 1985.)

One of the first things I did was put the word out that I was starting a blog and needed a name for it. I got so many wonderful suggestions—I hated picking just one! So, if there’s anyone out there about to start a book blog, here are some of the terrific suggestions I received from my creative and supportive friends, coworkers, and fellow book group members: Books First, Booklynn, Inside of a Dog, Between the Pages, Shelf Life, Shelf Interest, From the Shelves, and Digital Thoughts from an Analog World.

I hope you like my choice! (Thank you, Doug!)

To close, I’ll mention one book I’m “reading” now. (I’m always “reading” at least one audio book. I’m a real fan. I only listen to unabridged recordings, and, yes, to me they “count” as books read.) Right now I’m listening to Bill Bryson’s book At Home, which is fascinating. The book’s blurb focuses on Bryson’s own house, but his house is really just the jumping-off point. He explores everything from why we live in houses at all to how the names for the various rooms evolved over time. I have a bit of an Anglophile bent (which adds to the pleasure), but he explores the history of things American, too, including Mount Vernon and Monticello. It’s also just a big, fun mash-up of history, sociology, architecture and interior design, natural history, and many other disciplines, all pulled together into a single story of the houses (and by extension, the cities and towns and countries) we live in. Bryson himself is the reader of the audio recording, and he’s terrific. I especially love how droll he is reading his own humorous writing.

Do any of you have a favorite Bill Bryson book? I think At Home is my new favorite, but at one point in my life I had aspired to through-hike the Appalachian Trail, so A Walk in the Woods will always have a special place in my heart!

Lynn
Women & Children First
Chicago