Shelf Awareness for Wednesday, September 19, 2007


Quarry Books: Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L. by Richard V Reeves and Jonathan Juravich, illustrated by Chris King

Simon & Schuster: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nightweaver by RM Gray

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

Overlook Press: Hotel Lucky Seven (Assassins) by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Brian Bergstrom

News

Notes: Books and Bars; Brooklyn Indies; On the Virtual Road

Here's a book club for us:

Books and Bars, the monthly book club run by Magers and Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, Minn., takes place in a bar near the store where some 50 people gather each month to drink and discuss current books, usually fiction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The store believes it's the largest book club in the Twin Cities. 

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In March 2008, Barnes & Noble will close and open stores in Macon, Ga. The new store will be in the Shoppes at River Crossing at Riverside Drive (US Highway 23). The day before that store opens, B&N's current store at 265 Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard will close.

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A Harvard student writing down prices of required textbooks so he could do comparison shopping online was asked to leave the Harvard Coop, the Crimson reported. The Coop president told the paper that there is no policy against the practice, but "we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes."

The action appeared to be in response to the efforts of Crimsonreading.org, an online database of text titles required at Harvard whose information comes in part from students who take notes in the bookstore, which is managed by Barnes & Noble College. The store called such information its intellectual property.

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"The big, bad chain stores don't scare them," the New York Daily News reported in a piece about Brooklyn indie bookstores A Novel Idea, Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers, BookCourt, P.S. Bookshop and Heights Books.

Bina Valenzano, co-owner of A Novel Idea in Bay Ridge, cited one-on-one relationships with customers for the store's success. "When a person comes into a store and asks for a book, 80% of the time we know where the book is and what it is about," she said, adding that she "tries hard to remember customers' tastes so that when they return she has recommendations."

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WWJD? (What would Jack do?)

The San Jose Mercury News suggested that its readers go "On the Road" via the Web, beginning in Lowell, Mass., and then virtually crossing the country to a California that is "packed with all things Beat and Kerouac-related, including City Lights book store, which faced obscenity charges for publishing poet Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Generations later it is still owned by another Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti."

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The question, in one form or another, gets asked a lot these days, but Adweek isn't afraid to ask once more: "Will E-Books Get Lost in Translation?"

The answer, as usual, is a qualified maybe. 

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Ingram Publisher Services, Ingram Book Group's distribution company, has announced:

  • Michelle Fisher has joined the company as national account manager for mass merchandise accounts. She was formerly mass merchandise sales manager for PGW and will be based at the IPS office in Berkeley, Calif. She has more than 17 years of experience in book, periodicals and mass merchandise sales.
  • Cinda Van Deursen has joined the company as field sales representative for the Mid-Atlantic region. She has more than 30 years of experience at Bantam Doubleday Dell and Random House. In 1998, she won the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association's Helmuth Award given to outstanding sales reps and was a board member of NAIBA for three years.

 


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Emerging Leaders Seek Emerging Leaders

From the Emerging Leaders:

The Emerging Leaders Project continues to develop and grow, involving the next generation of booksellers from all over the country in networking and mentoring activities.  The Emerging Leaders Council--six booksellers from various regions--has created a new website, an online forum and a new mission statement reflecting the project's commitment to both young booksellers and new owners of all ages. Now you can voice your opinion about where you'd like to see the Emerging Leaders Project go from here AND get connected to the network of your peers at the same time. Click here to take a survey about the future of Emerging Leaders and to be added to the EL mailing list.
 
Visit the project website at abaemergingleaders.org for more information and links to activities in your region, especially those coming up this fall! Emerging Leaders gatherings are happening at the regional fall trade shows of NAIBA, NEIBA and PNBA [editor's note: the PNBA party is tonight!], but we're still looking for young booksellers or new owners from the Great Lakes, Midwest, Mountains and Plains, Northern & Southern California and SIBA regions to step forward as regional reps or one-time organizers. E-mail abaemergingleaders@gmail.com directly if you'd like to get involved or learn more. And keep an eye out for information on ABA Emerging Leaders scholarships to the Winter Institute, coming soon. See you at the fall shows!



GLOW: Berkley Books: The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland


Women & Children First's SOS Answered

Good news from Women & Children First, Chicago, Ill., which announced this spring that it was having financial difficulties. In an open letter, owners Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon said:
 
"So, how are you doing?"

So many of you have asked that question since our announcement of our fragile financial situation this past April. Your concern and support has meant everything to us.

Thanks to the outpouring that followed our announcement (300 new members! big increases in sales!), we finished our 28th fiscal year with a 6% profit--the first we've seen in five years. We're thrilled, grateful and energized as we begin a new year. Check out subtle changes in the store and our awesome October events schedule. And please, let us know what we can do better or differently to be the first place you go to buy books and gifts. Now that we've earned you support, we want to sustain your loyalty and good will.

We've also received generous contributions to our Women's Voices Fund and had a very successful used book sale in early August. Thanks for all the great donations. And we were thrilled to receive a $5,000 grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

The Goddess is VERY pleased.

[And so are the Shelf Awareness goddesses and gods.]


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Fresh Air Judges The Nine

This morning on the Today Show: Dave Barry, author of Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) (Putnam, $22.95, 9780399154379/039915437X). He will also appear today on NPR's Talk of the Nation and Dateline NBC.

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This morning on Good Morning America: Joy Behar, author of When You Need a Lift: But Don't Want to Eat Chocolate, Pay a Shrink, or Drink a Bottle of Gin (Crown, $19.95, 9780307351715/0307351718). She will also appear tonight on Larry King Live and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

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This morning on CNBC's Squawk Box: Linda Carlson, who handles marketing at Parenting Press and is the author of Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, $22.50, 9780295983325/0295983329), published in 2003. Because of the impending sale of one of those company towns, Scotia, Calif., she has been interviewed recently by USA Today and is on CNBC. For more information, check out her website.

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., has the theme "civil rights in Louisiana" and features two interviews:

  • Cleo Scott Brown, author of Witness to the Truth (University of South Carolina Press, $29.95, 9781570034893/1570034893)
  • Robert Sharenow, author of My Mother the Cheerleader (HarperTeen, $16.99, 9780061148965/0061148962)
The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show:
  • Gen. Wesley Clark, author of A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95, 9781403984746/1403984743)
  • Patricia McConnell, author of For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (Ballantine, $15.95, 9780345477156/0345477154)

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air, Jeffrey Toobin whose new book is The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Doubleday, $27.95, 9780385516402/0385516401).

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Tonight on Charlie Rose: Alan Greenspan, author of The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Penguin Press, $35, 9781594201318/1594201315). He will also appear today on NPR's All Things Considered.

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Gen. Wesley Clark, author of A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95, 9781403984746/1403984743).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Naomi Wolf, author most recently of The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, $13.95, 9781933392790/1933392797).
 


Book Review

Mandahla: Maynard and Jennica Reviewed

Maynard and Jennica by Rudolph Delson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $24.00 Hardcover, 9780618834488, September 2007)



The dog days of summer have been filled with books started and left unread, books half-finished, books read and set aside with a sigh. Then I picked up Maynard and Jennica, and the doldrums ended. This novel was an immediate and unalloyed delight.

Rudolph Delson's story of two New Yorkers falling in love is narrated by a large cast, including, briefly, cicadas and an emergency brake on the No. 6 uptown train. Overlapping, competing, explaining, the voices have distinctive verbal tics. Maynard's mother, Joan Tate, often falls back on "Well. I am his mother." Ana Kaganova, a Russian-German-Israeli scam artist, uses "weiß' du?" as a catch-all absolution for her tricks. Hilarious hip-hop artist Puppy Jones calls himself "our hero"; at a low point in his life, Puppy was feeling like "his rocket was in the air but his countdown was still descending . . . Our hero's countdown was getting down below zero . . . our hero was sitting in his Roadster . . . listening to WNYC because he is a member. Fifty dollars a year, because our hero believes in giving back. Our hero was sitting in his Roadster, feeling like negative seven might be the perfect state of mind to defeat Puzzle Master Will Shortz."

Jennica, our heroine, is fond of, like, ellipses. She came to Manhattan from San Jose, in search of an illustrious life; now in her late 20s, she laments her lack of a relationship, but "I don't think my life is as sad as, like, Wuthering Heights, or Love in the Time of Cholera, or Dave Eggers, or whatever." Maynard, who often speaks with hesitant--dashes, first sees Jennica on the No. 6. "The subway is, after all, one of the most dignified places to open an affair. Love should contain a constituent element of irreducible destiny, and destiny is exactly what is lacking when--. When Battery Park businessmen ransom dates with chesty socialites from commercial matchmakers in midtown. [On] the subway, with a beautiful girl, dignity demands action and condemns silence." Maynard is a somewhat talented musician who has turned to documentary filmmaking, scoring his films for piano. He's proud of his misanthropy, which causes a rift with Jennica after September 11, when he condemns the "dress-up fear" of the we-are-all-New Yorkers mentality: "I don't want your solidarity. I want my towers back--to block off my view of America."

Romantic, idiosyncratic, clever ("The doors close on 33rd. The train leaves the station like a dog on a leash--lingering behind to sniff the stains on the platform, then jolting ahead, down the tunnel, already smelling the urine of Grand Central."), Maynard and Jennica is also graceful and delicate: "It was that time of dusk when there is a--deepening of the interior shadows. It is a melancholy time: all you need do is switch on one lamp and the inside and the outside will separate, held apart by the reflections in the glass, and the evening will begin." The Russian River shivers out into the Pacific, and Manhattan towers express the same saffron opinion about a sunset.

At one point, Maynard says that sinking yourself in love up to the hilt is a grim business, but in Rudolph Delson's radiant prose, it is also a delightful, tender and wry business.--Marilyn Dahl



The Bestsellers

The IMBA Bestsellers: July

The following are the July bestsellers at Independent Mystery Booksellers Association member stores:

Hardcover

1. The Penguin Who Knew Too Much by Donna Andrews
2. The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
3. Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger
4. Sweet Revenge by Diane Mott Davidson
5. Justice Denied by J.A. Jance
5. Dead Ex by Harley Jane Kozak
7. Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
8. Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter
9. Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
9. Hard Row by Margaret Maron

Paperbacks

1. The Chocolate Jewel Case by JoAnna Carl
2. A Secret Rage by Charlaine Harris
3. Billy Boyle by James Benn
4. A Brush with Death by Hailey Lind
5. The Merlot Murders by Ellen Crosby
6. A Play of Lords by Margaret Frazer
6. Ammunition by Ken Bruns
6. The Tunnels by Michelle Gagnon
9. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
10. Saks and Violins by Mary Daheim

[Thanks to IMBA!]



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