Category: staff reviews

Why you SHOULD judge a book by its cover

I’ve talked about it before, but the idea that you can’t judge a book by its cover is wrong. Very wrong. You should be judging books by their covers. I also think you should be judging them by their spines, too, but that’s another blog. The design of a book is purposeful and artistic, chosen to target the right audience at the right time. Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular writers of the last 20 years, and he’s a great writer, but Chip Kidd’s incredible designs helped push a quirky, mostly unknown writer into the rare space of an author who actually makes money. And even if money has nothing to do with it, Kidd brings more readers to Murakami’s works because he condenses what’s inside into visually stunning cover art.

The Nobel Prize for Literature, Past and Present

Nobel Prize time! I don’t know about you, but nothing gets my literary list juices flowing quite like the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sure, the National Book award is usually the most literary, the Pulitzer creates the most buzz, and the Booker opens our eyes to World literature, but it’s the Nobel that warms my coffee cup. It’s the Nobel that often surprises, but never disappoints. This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is the Peruvian juggernaut of political and social satire, Mario Vargas LLosa.

Staff Reviews: Adam Levin’s THE INSTRUCTIONS

Kester’s review of Adam Levin’s The Instructions (from the always dependable McSweeney’s press) is the first of several from our staff. The book has really taken hold here at BookPeople, and to give you a sense of it’s immensity and presence (it’s a real big book), we’ll publish several different perspectives. I know what it’s like to believe a thing that lots of people think is crazy to believe. In my case, it is that there is a God, that that God has a Son, and that that Son died and then, three days later, wasn’t dead anymore. It is the craziest thing that I believe wholeheartedly. I mention this, because it shapes how I come at a book like Adam Levin’s The Instructions. That isn’t to say that you have to be religious or even to believe in God to enjoy it. You don’t. But it made me empathize with Gurion Macabee (a boy who may or may not be the messiah) all the more. This is the story of a boy who struggles to know what it is he’s meant to do and who it is he’s meant to be. A boy who feels a high degree of confidence that he is the messiah, but a willingness to admit that he can’t really know until he knows. You know? It’s that kind of struggle, a knowing unknowing, that make faith the exciting adventure that it is. I’m pretty sure I’m right…but what if I’m wrong? I have to live into the truth of what I believe in order to discover whether it is true, but what if I give my whole life to that truth only to discover it’s a lie? This is the risk of faith. To watch that risk play out in the life and mind of a twelve-year-old boy is a marvelous and sometimes frightening thing.

Melville House and the new direction of literary humour

I like talking about books. Nothing makes me happier than having a customer walk into the store and ask me for a recommendation. I also love it when customers recommend books to me. Please come into BookPeople and interact with us. It’s a long day, and we get lonely. That being said, we get some tough questions. "I’m traveling to Indonesia, do you know any uplifting Indonesian fiction?" or "I’m looking for a mixture of Robert Jordan and Flannery O’Connor, what do you suggest?" Usually these questions lead to great conversations, and usually I end up leaving with a new book, and, hopefully, the customer leaves with, at least, a smile. Some questions are harder than others, but one question has tormented me for a long time, and only recently (about an hour ago) have I come to what I consider a quality answer: "I want something really smart, highly challenging, fresh, and funny. It has to be funny. Got anything like that?" Yes, I do. Thanks to Melville House Publishing, we now have a place to go for Literature that makes you laugh, Literature that doesn’t make you want to put your head in the oven. I should say that Melville House puts out a variety of titles, so they don’t simply put out humor, but in 2010 with releases like T Cooper’s art project/Hollywood fable The Beaufort Diaries and Tao Lin’s enigmatic novel Richard Yates, this Brooklyn based company has found the mysterious funny bone of American writing.

Franzen Mania

Even if you didn’t read the recent Time magazine cover story, you may have noticed one of the seemingly hundreds of articles and blog postings praising the work of Jonathan Franzen and salivating over the release of his latest novel. Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is considered by many to be the best work of fiction produced in the last decade. Fans of Franzen's were provided a collection of essays in 2002 and a memoir in 2006, but waited expectantly for his next novel, hoping that it might provide the same humor, pain, and pathos as his previous novel had. Today, the wait is over. Nine years after penning his Corrections, Franzen has written Freedom, and it is as rich and rewarding as anything he has ever done; the characters are fully realized, the backdrop is perfectly captured, and the story is playful and sad, as heartbreaking as it is hopeful.

The Hard Word reads TRUE GRIT

True Grit is one of those books I've been meaning to read for years. Authors I love, like George Pelecanos, have sung its praises and my fellow employees have raved about it. I grew up on the John Wayne movie and would hear the famed line, "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!" almost every Saturday night at whatever Missouri bar I was in. Even when my manager loaned me his copy, I let it sit on my table for over a year and a half.

By any other name; Talking about titles

Self-deprecation is important. It’s especially important in the book business. There’s a funny website making its way around the literary blogs, Better Book Titles (http://betterbooktitles.com/). The idea is simple, Dan Wilbur is gonna change the titles of some of our favorite books so that we can tell what the book is really about by the title alone. Great! Here is a list of my favorites:

Top 5 Reasons (book wise) To Be Excited For Fall

Top 5 Reasons (book wise) To Be Excited For Fall Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Franzen fans (like myself) have long awaited a follow-up to his brilliant 2001 novel, The Corrections. The ways in which he wrote about family, with all its joy and pain and angst and anger, captured the hearts and minds of many a reader and the praise of many a critic. I am one of those who counts it among the best fiction of the past decade. But the questioned remained; can he do it again? I am here to tell you, he can and he did. Freedom touches upon similar themes, but creates an entirely new cast of characters, as fully realized and alive as those he imagined almost 10 years ago. I cannot wait to sell you this book. You cannot wait to buy it. Trust me.

Declaratives Never Work.

Declaratives never work. There is always an exception for, or an argument against whatever hardened rule someone creates. Always. But what happens to Pinocchio’s nose when he says, “I’m lying”? We don’t always have the answers, and when talking about pop culture, those untrustworthy declaratives remain perpetually flawed, but they also become incredibly interesting. To Kill a Mockingbird is about to turn 50 and we’ll be inundated with wonderfully nostalgic rants about the book being the best novel of the 20th century, or the most important American book ever, or the first “this”, and the last “that”. The book deserves high praise, but I’m launching a pre-emptive strike. Other than being the best book Harper Lee ever wrote, it’s not the best anything. And despite being, possibly, the most read American novel of the 20th century, it can’t touch the upper echelon of American literature. You should read To Kill a Mockingbird, everybody should read it, but lets not overstate its place in history. That being said, hyperbole is also fun. So I’ve come up with some hyperbolic declaratives that are absolutely, positively, 100 percent true, and are beyond brilliant. Watch out James Wood.