Category: Staff Picks

The Vulnerables – Sigrid Nunez

“I love Sigrid Nunez! I love her mind. If I could I’d have dinner with her every week. It’s such a pleasure to read her books. This is kind of a novel, but you also get to spend time with Sigred – time well spent, plus there’s a parrot!” – Judy Blume, store co-founder

The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection

“I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny — good and strong company.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“With the intimacy and humor of a great conversation, this novel makes you feel smarter and more alive.” —People Magazine

“An ode to our basic need to connect with other beings, be they human or animal, even in a global crisis that told us to stay apart.” —NPR

Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself. 

November Staff Pick: Time’s Echo

Bookseller Leslie with a copy of Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler (Knopf), picked by bookseller Leslie

First line: “It is the hiss and crackle of the old recording that first reaches the ear.

I’d like to start by saying I am not an expert in classical music at all and don’t play or read music.  What got me hooked on this book was the way history is told and explained by Jeremy Eichler through the stories of individual lives and the music written by the four composers highlighted: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britton.  All four men created moving works of music to express emotions and attempt to understand atrocities of WWII. 

The writer is meticulous in telling these stories through archival research and traveling to such places as Goethe’s Oak, the home of Strauss in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Walchensee lake (and many others).

I wondered as I was reading: “how is it possible to have man’s most horrific actions and most creative on display at virtually the same intersection of time?”  This book is disturbing, beautiful, horrific, and deeply moving all at once.  

~ Leslie

The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson

“One of the only works of fiction to event make me cry from something other than overwhelming happiness or sadness, but from an overwhelming pure depiction of the character of honor and the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of total abject hopelessness. Sanderson tells the most epic story in the most grounded way possible that takes no shortcuts and will often leave you breathless.” – Joey (staff)

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, Book One of the Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.

The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.

Bitch: On the Female of Species – Lucy Cooke

“Do you love weird animal facts? Do you love academia? Do you love sticking it to the patriarchy? This book boasts all three with panache and grace.” – Riona (Staff)

CLICK HERE TO READ RIONA’S FULL REVIEW FROM OUR OCTOBER 2022 NEWSLETTER

A “playful, enlightening,” and “effervescent exposé” (Scientific American) on the queens of the animal kingdom 

Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. 

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. 

In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun. 

October Staff Pick: All the Sinners Bleed

All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby (Flatiron Books), picked by bookseller Lori

Lori’s pick is just in time for Spooky Season.

“This Southern noir crime novel creeps right over the line into horror as the sheriff of a small Southern town hunts for a serial killer who is targeting adolescent black children. Titus, the Sheriff, has his hands full while trying to identify the murderer and deal with the secrets and sins of his hometown. As the mystery deepens, and the murders become more horrific, it’s a wild, wild ride!”

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

“Both of Bechdel’s memoirs, this and Are You My Mother? are darkly funny and ultimately touching stories of trying to love and understand your parents to love and understand yourself.” – Robin (staff)

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER 
Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • 
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award •  Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award •
Nominated for the GLAAD Media Award

Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father. 


Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
 
In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Sadness is a White Bird – Moriel Rothman-Zecher

“Jonathan prepares to join the Israeli army while desperately hoping to keep his two best friends in his life. Besides being the most important people to him they are also Palestinian. The stakes are high. Tradition, culture, history, family responsibility, and love all battle for space in Jonathan’s heart. I read this book fast because I needed to know if I was going to be left heartbroken or relieved. Ultimately it’s so beautifully written that either option would’ve been worth it.” – Emily, staff

In this “nuanced, sharp, and beautifully written” (Michael Chabon) debut novel, a young man prepares to serve in the Israeli army while also trying to reconcile his close relationship to two Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalties to family and country.

The story begins in an Israeli military jail, where—four days after his nineteenth birthday—Jonathan stares up at the fluorescent lights of his cell and recalls the series of events that led him there.

Two years earlier: Moving back to Israel after several years in Pennsylvania, Jonathan is ready to fight to preserve and defend the Jewish state. But he is also conflicted about the possibility of having to monitor the occupied Palestinian territories, a concern that grows deeper and more urgent when he meets Nimreen and Laith—the twin daughter and son of his mother’s friend.

From that morning on, the three become inseparable: wandering the streets on weekends, piling onto buses toward new discoveries, laughing uncontrollably. They share joints on the beach, trading snippets of poems, intimate secrets, family histories, resentments, and dreams. But with his draft date rapidly approaching, Jonathan wrestles with the question of what it means to be proud of your heritage, while also feeling love for those outside of your own family. And then that fateful day arrives, the one that lands Jonathan in prison and changes his relationship with the twins forever.

“Unflinching in its honesty, unyielding in its moral complexity” (Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), Sadness Is a White Bird explores one man’s attempts to find a place for himself, discovering in the process a beautiful, against-the-odds love that flickers like a candle in the darkness of a never-ending conflict.

December 2023 Staff Pick: The MANIAC

George with The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut (Penguin Press), picked by store co-founder, George Cooper

Don’t be fooled by the title, or its listing as fiction. This is a brilliant biography of the greatest genius of the 20th century, John von Neumann, inventor of Game Theory and the modern digital computer (known by the acronym MANIAC, which his wife Clara called the JONNYAC) that was first used to design the hydrogen bomb.

Rather than taking us dryly through von Neumann’s endless accomplishments, many of which are beyond explaining to laymen, the author beguiles us with the voices of the genius’s celebrated scientific colleagues (who either loved or hated him) and his wives (who felt the same). We thus become witness not only to von Neumann’s triumphs but also his peccadillos and (in)humanity. The book is full of vignettes, from private meetings to marital quarrels, which give it a fascinating and compelling life.

He was a consultant to the Manhattan Project, drifting in from time to time and quickly solving problems other mental giants had been struggling with, and went on to a fruitful career with the U.S. Defense Department. But the problem that challenged him most was trying to generalize the process uniting biology, technology, and computer theory to explain all self-replicating phenomena, from life on earth to the possibility of machines doing the same.

He died at only fifty-six from cancer, in 1959, in a special suite provided for him by the government at Walter Reed Hospital, surrounded by dignitaries and attendants, hoping to catch the last pearls of wisdom from the fruitful mind of this singular polymath.

When asked what it would take for a machine to think and behave like a human being, he said it would have to “understand language, to read, to write, to speak. And it would have to play like a child.” But his death preceded the development of the truly powerful computers of today (still operating on the fundamental principles of MANIAC) that are doing just that. The very first project of DeepMind, a leading Artificial Intelligence machine, was playing Go, the game universally acknowledged to be the most intellectually difficult, and beating its human master. (The book concludes with a dramatic blow-by-blow description of this five game challenge match.)

When asked how he could bring together his ideas on computers and self-replicating machines with those on the brain and mechanisms of thought, von Neumann offered: “Cavemen created gods, I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.”

Don’t miss this book if you’re interested in biography, science or even science-fiction, because both were part of von Neumann’s world.

~ George Cooper

September Staff Pick: Wellness

Wellness by Nathan Hill, (Knopf, out 9/19/23), picked by store co-founder, Judy Blume

* Now out in paperback, Wellness *

If you loved Nathan Hill’s first novel, The Nix, as much as I did and you’ve been waiting seven long years for his next, as I have, rejoice!  You won’t be disappointed.  This brilliant storyteller has done it again. 

At its core Wellness is “a bittersweet, poignant, witty novel about marriage and the pursuit of health and happiness.  Expansive, tender, a reflection of life in America in the 21st Century.  Yet it’s also a sendup of gentrification, toxic internet culture, modern parenting.”  It even explores, briefly, polyamory and what a scene that is!

The story had me laughing while cringing when Jack and Elizabeth put their money down on a Forever home. It reminded me of my early marriage when friends asked one another, Is this your first house or your final house?  If only we’d known then what was ahead of us. 

We come to know Jack and Elizabeth intimately, from being young and madly in love to being married lovers, to twenty years down the road when they have an eight year old son.  We are on this journey with them, getting to know the families they left behind to the family they become. 

Wellness is compelling and quirky and yes, funny, because this is Nathan Hill writing, but it sometimes broke my heart.  It goes deep but never tries too hard, never shouts look at me!  There are a few tricky diversions along the way.  Don’t let them stop you.  If they do, skip them and come back later.  But don’t skip anything having to do with Jack or Elizabeth.  They are unforgettable characters. 

There’s a lot to think about, a lot to remind us of who we were and how we became who we are.  If I belonged to a book club I’d want us to read this book, to talk about this book.

Ultimately “this stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.” I’m quoting Publishers Weekly here because there’s no way I can say it better. Except to tell you I’m going to read it again.  Starting now.

~ Judy Blume

North Woods – Daniel Mason

“The story of a plot of land deep in the woods of Western Massachusetts and its human, animal, and supernatural inhabitants over the course of 400 years. A beautiful meditation on the rhythms of nature in which past is always present. This book is magic.” – Gael (Staff)

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?