Did you know that Einstein’s brain saw more of the US than he did? True story. Forty years after he died, a piece of his brain took a road trip with a journalist and the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 (and kept his brain! What?). You can read about it in Driving …
Amid the tumult and confusion of life in America—2017 style—we continue to stand fast by the adage that books are timeless curiosities that prove, over and over again, that we wander along a curious loop that perennially takes us around to a world that seems oddly familiar, yet strangely different. In the box this week …
Nicholas Eames’s debut novel, Kings of the Wyld, is one of those rollicking epic fantasy novels that starts big and gets bigger. Time hasn’t been kind to Clay Cooper and his merry band of marauders, and most of them have parked their ponies in Clay’s front yard and are banging on Clay’s door. It’s time to get …
“Is there any chance that I will ever talk you into letting me alphabetize this shelf?” This question was posed with pain and desperation from one of my employees. I took a deep breath and told her she had no chance whatsoever of convincing me to change the arrangement of the books. I remember when …
… Anu Partanen has done all the research so we don’t have to, and her report is The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. Anu, who came to the US from Finland in 2008, discovered that life in America is fraught with all manner of tension, hypertension, supra-tension, and basal ganglia tension. …
Appetites, Bourdain’s first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down forty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorite dishes that everyone should know how to cook. The result is a home-cooking, home-entertaining cookbook like no other, with personal favorites from his own kitchen and from his travels, translated …
Shaun Tan is back with The Singing Bones, an illustrated collection of some of the fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Tan, who has been making fantastic and whimsical art for a few years now, presents a series of sculptures that encapsulate these stories. They’re very minimalist, but also very evocative. As Neil Gaiman says …
Last evening we had a couple of groups waiting to check out. The two ladies first at the register were talking about students and books. The couple behind them pardoned themselves and asked if they were teachers. One the ladies said that yes she was a teacher. They offered to buy her books for her …
Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a modern fable about a witch named Xan, who accidentally gives a baby moonlight instead of starlight, and the child, Luna, who grows up to be magical and dangerous. Factor in a Perfectly Tiny Dragon, a swamp monster, a not-so dormant volcano, and a mysterious woman with …
We’ve been in a funk this week. One of those “why is it still raining in June” sort of funks. Or maybe it’s one of those “can we take the afternoon off to read?” sort of funks. Or maybe it’s just a funkier sort of funk that has no name yet. Regardless, there’s a sensation …
