Copy

Hello! We're delighted to start off our weekly roundup of new and interesting books with something everyone should have. It'll make you laugh. It'll make you cry. It'll make you laugh some more. It'll make you look at the world in an entirely new light. You won't believe you've lived this many years without knowing the wonder that is . . . 

 


Tom Gauld's Revenge of the Librarians. 

We know. You were expecting Colleen Hoover's new book. Don't worry. It Starts with Us came out this week too, and yes, it is flying off the shelves as quickly as you imagine. But come on, it's just a steamy and quirky love triangle with a girl who can't be happy with what she has and who has to second-guess her life choices until everything is on fire, but hey! At least she's picked the right guy this time, right? 
 


Anyway, Tom Gauld is a cartoonist, and like all brilliant cartoonists, he manages to condense all of the pathos and squashed rage and crying inside that is life in modern times. But he does it with librarians! And writers! And book people! We can't stop laughing, and it feels good to laugh again, thank you very much. 

(There are, at the writing of this newsletter, 30,000 + copies of the Hoover book in the warehouse. They'll be gone tomorrow. There are less than 200 copies of Gauld's book. We suspect there will still be copies this weekend. So, if there is a takeaway from today's newsletter, it is this: Gauld is a treasure; Hoover is everywhere. Plan accordingly.)

Meanwhile, John Grisham, Barbara Kingsolver, John Irving, and George Saunders all have books out this week. They are, we suspect, shoved in the back of the warehouse to make room for the Hoover, but hey, they're probably still worth your time. 
 


Grisham, for example, sticks with what he knows in The Boys From Biloxi. Childhood friends grow apart as life puts a wedge between them. The father of one becomes a legendary prosecutor, the other's father runs a criminal underground. The boys, naturally, follow their fathers, and eventually come around for a showdown in the courtroom, because Grisham. 
 


Meanwhile, Barbara Kingsolver riffs on Dickens with Demon Copperhead, an Appalachian revisiting of Dickens's Victorian classic. Demon grows up in a world that has little use for boys with single mothers, and he suffers a gauntlet of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, addiction, love and loss. It's a story told with a burning streak of anger that such stories are commonplace, but it's also told with a fiery heart of compassion and understanding. Recommended. 
 


And John Irving has a new book out. It's called The Last Chairlift and early reviews say things like "an imposing brick of paper" (Ron Charles in The Washington Post), and "Irving refuses to be embarrassed by anything" (Chris Vognar in the Boston Globe). Publishers Weekly says "Overblown and under plotted," while Kirkus Reviews goes with "Sprawling." So, yeah. It's Irving, and like Dickens a couple hundred years ago, you feel like you should pay attention, but perhaps this one won't change the world (or the reader) as much as you'd expect. 
 


George Saunders's new book is Liberation Day, and it's a collection of his recent short fiction. This is where Saunders shines, frankly, and we doubt there is anyone writing short fiction these days that is as charming, poignant, insightful, and heartbreaking as Saunders. These stories are going to leave marks, dear readers. Pace yourselves, but do treat yourselves. 
 


Veronica Roth is back this week with Poster Girl, a post-surveillance state dystopian novel that looks past the worlds imagined by George Orwell and Philip K. Dick and asks, "And then what?" In some ways, this is familiar territory for Roth, but at the same time, Poster Girl launches itself into unfamiliar territory that confronts the protagonist (and the readers) with some unfamiliar questions about the future we're all-too-eagerly rushing to embrace. Unsettling and riveting. 

Unbeknownst to us, it must be Celebrity Memoir Week. We have the diaries of Alan Rickman, a book by Ralph Macchio about karate and celebrity, an unexpected book by Paul Newman, and a passing fancy by Tom Felton, who sneered a lot in those wizarding films. 
 


Rickman's book—not surprisingly titled Madly, Deeply—is an edited version of his personal diaries. Initially, we were suspect on how interesting this would be (especially as it starts in 1993, which is after Die Hard and Truly, Madly, Deeply), but when we went to glance at it, we suddenly discovered that the sun had nearly set, the wolves had started howling, and we were intimately familiar with what Rickman had been doing in 1994. Strangely hypnotic and engaging. 
 


And speaking of folks who played wizards, Tom Felton's Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard. Tom played one of the mean kids in the Harry Potter films, and his book dishes a bit about life on the set. In case you were dying to know. 
 


Meanwhile, Ralph Macchio discusses life with an iconic role in Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me. It's one thing to be a world-wide phenomenon when you're young; it's another thing entirely to come back to that same role, thirty bazillion years later, and find that it still has resonance and meaning to several generations of fans. Macchio wisely eschews the tell-all route and instead offers some very Mr. Miyagi-like insight into life and meaning. 
 


As for Paul Newman, well, this one isn't like the others. Once upon a time, Mr. Newman asked all his friends, fellow thespians, and maybe even his landscaper to tell some stories about what it was like to work with him. For The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, he's interspersed those stories with his own recollections, making this less of a "Hey, look at me!" memoir and more of a "Huh, I did those things" sort of story. Quintessentially Newman, we suppose. 
 


And speaking of putting your hands front and center, Joanna Margaret has delivered a delightful atmospheric and slyly spooky mystery novel about dark machinations among academics. The Bequest is the story of a feminist professor's mysterious death, a cursed emerald, a paper trail that goes from Scotland to Genoa to Florence to Paris, and lots of coded messages. It's like Donna Tartt and Dan Brown conspired on a novel together. We're down. 
 

And speaking of riveting crime, here is Lev Ac Rosen's Lavendar House, which is sort of like Knives Out for a soap-making empire. We've got our deceased matriarch, a secretive estate and staff, a snooping widow, and a disgraced police officer. All of whom get caught up in a deadly game of old money, skullduggery, and jealousy. This one is tightly wound and will keep you guessing. 
 


And we're delighted to see a new book from Laura Anne Gilman. This is Uncanny Times, and it begins the story of Rosemary and Aaron Harker, who are Huntsmen, charged with keeping the world safe from the Uncanny. When Rose and Aaron investigate the death of a distant relative, they discover just how little they truly know about the world, and how much danger humanity is in. Recommended. 
 


And finally, here is Alex Pheby's Mordew, which is about what happens in a little town built on top of the corpse of God. It's the story of Nathan Treeves, who amounts to little and is worth even less, until he learns that he has a special gift. A gift that sets him against the Master, a dark necromancer who gets his power from gnawing on that corpse down in the catacombs. Naturally, the Master wants what Nathan has; Nathan doesn't understand what he has; and it's up to a talking dog to help Nathan figure out how to save himself and the city from the unholy monster gnawing on everything. It's like Norton Juster taking Milo and Tock on a drive through Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and we realize we've just crawled so far into the weeds that no one will get these references, but whatever. We're excited. 







This email was sent to <<Email Address>>
why did I get this?    unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences
A Good Book · 1014 Main Street · Sumner, WA 98390 · USA

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp