What is it about lists of books that are so enticing? Can you list your top 50 favorites? Hans Weyandt, of Micawber’s Books in St. Paul, MN, challenged indie booksellers from all over the country to list theirs and posted them to the store’s blog, Mr. Micawber Enters The Internets (read his inaugural list and introduction to the project here). The series has gotten a lot of attention, and Weyandt recently compiled the lists and had them published in Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America’s Indie Bookstores, with an introduction by Ann Patchett.

Thanks to Coffee House Press for letting us reprint Alaska bookseller Eowyn Ivey’s list below. We’re not going to hyperlink each title (though we will link the NW authors!). If you want to check out any of the others, we suggest searching for them at Ivey’s store, Fireside Books in Palmer, AK. Ivey was humble enough not to list her own bestselling title, The Snow Child. (Read our interview with her about her double life as a bookseller-author from last fall). Here’s her list:

Click the jacket cover to order ‘Read this!’ (or the PNBA Award winners below) from your local indie.

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
Peter Pan, J.M.Barrie
Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
The Green Age of Asher Witherow, M. Allen Cunningham
And Her Soul Out of Nothing, Olena Kalytiak Davis
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
What Is the What, Dave Eggers
Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Tom Franklin
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Tinkers, Paul Harding
Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes
Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney
Adventures of Cow, Lori Korchek, photographs by Marshall Taylor
All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, Gretchen Legler
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’EngleT
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, Candice Millard
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Two in the Far North, Margaret E. Murie
Suite Française, Irene Nemirovsky
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
True Grit, Charles Portis
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
The Spanish Bow, Andromeda Romano-Lax
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein
The Ice-Shirt (SevenDreams), William T.Vollmann
Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival, Velma Wallis
We Are in a Book!, Mo Willems
Stoner, John Williams

GIVEAWAY: Leave a comment with your take on one of Eowyn Ivey’s READ THIS! picks or her own book, The Snow Child, and enter to win a copy of Snow Child wrapped a READ THIS! t-shirt.

Eowyn Ivey’s book list is reprinted by permission from Read This! Handpicked Favorites from America’s Indie Bookstores (Coffee House Press, 2012). Copyright © 2012 by Coffee House Press.

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