What are you reading this summer?

If you come into the store in the next few months (and why wouldn't you?), stop by our new Summer Staff Favorites display. We have everything from childhood favorites (A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle; Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome) to new nonfiction (Fire Season by Philip Connors; Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch) and classic fiction (Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; The Hunter by Richard Stark.) If all you can think about this summer is eating delicious things, there are some beautiful cookbooks to choose from (Fried Chicken and Champagne by Lisa Dupar; Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi)
I promise there will be no more parenthesis in this blog post.
These and many more great picks await your perusal. If you don't live around here, why not give our new "Ask A Bookseller" button a whirl and let us recommend something to you? Tell us what kind of books you like, give us a price range, and we will send you whatever sounds good. Personal shopper + free shipping = summer reading success!!


--Seija

For your bathroom reading pleasure...

Ok, now who is going to start making these!?  We need these in the store!

Ask A Bookseller!

Big (medium-sized?) news around here: we've added an Ask A Bookseller button to our website. It looks like the green square above. Now, that one's not a link, because I'm not quite savvy enough to do that, but if you go to our books homepage, it'll be there on the right-hand side and clicking on the real one will make your computer send us an e-mail. Here are some kinds of questions you could ask us through e-mail:

1. Do you have any used copies of that new hardcover that was just on the radio? (Maybe.)

2. What's the perfect book for a precocious six-year-old who likes adventure-y or fantasy books? (David and the Phoenix.)

3. Can you put Zeitoun on hold for me at your U District store? No, wait, in Bellevue? (Absolutely. Do you want the paperback for $15.95, or the remainder hardcover for $9.98?)

4. Are you guys going to do a summer reading program? (Yes!)

5. What was Lewis Carroll's real name again? (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.)

That's it! Easy as pie. And if that button doesn't work for you, you can e-mail us at ubs [underscore] askabookseller [at] earthlink.net. Except you should put an actual underscore and an actual @ sign instead of those brackets. I think if I write it out fully, robots from space will start sending us e-mails about certain medications and princes who need our bank account numbers.

Ask us a question!

-Anna, Kids Books

One Last Response to the Wall Street Journal Dustup

Our beloved UsedBuyer2.0 has his own take on Meghan Cox Gurdon's anti-YA piece.

Mrs. Humphry Ward on Sensational Fiction, Sufferage, and the Servant Problem

Contemporary fiction for domestics & humble persons is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?

Mrs. Albert Bunthorn-Pandowdy, wife and mother of thirteen, recently stood amidst the cheap paper novel section of her local commercial library, in Minge Lane, Worcestershire, feeling thwarted and disheartened.

More where that came from.

Twenty Twenty Twenty Four Hours Ago...

Does anyone else ever get songs stuck in their head while shelving because of the titles/authors/covers/subjects of the books? I was just shelving this:

Starfish by James Crowley

...and I without realizing exactly why, I left the kids fiction section with this song stuck in my head (for people who can't/don't follow links, that's Mr. Crowley by Ozzy Osbourne). Knowing that I haven't listened to that song since high school, I had to think for a second about how in the world that popped into my head, and it made me laugh to realize my brain was quietly making those kinds of connections while all I consciously thought about was the alphabet.

The other titles I can remember getting me are parenting books, which seem to be really big on this, for some reason:

I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
edited by Faith Conlon and Gail Hudson
(this one used to drive me crazy- that song is so hard to get out of your head!)

Beautiful Boy
by David Sheff

Does this happen to y'all? I imagine this is one of those librarian/bookseller phenomena that we all endure at some point.

--Anna, in Kids

#YAsaves

This is old news but important anyway, so we apologize for getting it up here late. On June 4 the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Meghan Cox Gurdon on the topic of young adult fiction. Specifically, she asserts that most young adult (YA) fiction is dark, violent, horrible, etc. The article contains stuff like this:

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

I stopped reading the thing somewhere around there, annoyed by the whole tone and not interested in feeling defensive about this category I spend much of my life reading and selling. It doesn't sound like she even reads YA for fun, so I felt okay dismissing the whole thing to save myself from a weekend of teeth-gnashing.

Well, one of the reasons I love YA is that the community of people who read, write, publish, review, and sell these books are particularly awesome and loyal people, and I should've known that the responses to this article would be worth keeping an eye on. Compiled below are some of my favorite responses so far.

The Age of Wisdom, by William Makepeace Thackeray

The Sorrows of Werther, by William Makepeace Thackeray