If you wanted to know how crazy people in Florida are, you could either read the newspaper or pick any one of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious bite-sized volumes. The cast of amazingly insane characters in Skinny Dip run the gamut from despicable to achingly endearing, all rendered in neon technicolor, and I swear real life Floridians are more like them than you want to believe. I read this one in two days and wanted to instantly hop on the plane back to the thick air and mosquitoes of my youth.
Bear in the Air
by Susan Meyers Harry N Abrams Inc
Our Price: $15.95
I was taken in by the charming and beautiful illustrations, and the hipster mom with her green wellies and orange cloche really cinched it for me.
"..[T]he arc of the moral universe , although long, is bending toward justice." "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
I wonder how many people think to pick up a book by Martin Luther King, Jr. to read for pleasure. As another employee put it, "It’s like reading something by George Washington." These ideas and this man are so much a part of our national identity, even our personal identities, we assume we know what he said and how he said it and what it meant. But I can tell you, reading his words makes a difference. It gave me the chance to understand him as a person, not a giant. This narrative was his first chance to explain himself to a world that didn't understand him, and many times despised him. He was thrust into their living rooms on the news every night. His face was the face of change and change was terrible. Or at least uncomfortable. With this book he took the story back and told it his way. He follows his own ideas all the way to the end and builds up his ideology for all of us to see. It’s engaging, inspiring, beautiful, and timeless. It may be mostly about a bus boycott in 1956, but the power of these ideas is eternal. Read this and know our world better.
The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay
by Umberto Eco Rizzoli Intl Pubns
Our Price: $45.00
This book is wonderful in that it can be as difficult or as easy as you want to make it. If you just want some light intellectual exercise, feel free to only read Eco's own short observations and skim his examples. If you'd like some heavier lifting, you can focus on one chapter by reading every word and picking apart the visual examples, too. I really appreciate the opportunity to think about the larger concepts he presents here without the pressure of struggling to understand every example, because really, if I wanted to think that hard I'd go back to school.
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
by George Johnson Vintage
Our Price: $13.95
In the realm of science writing, this pretty little volume is light on the science and heavy on the writing. Johnson's descriptions and illustrations are almost as elegant as the simple (though generally earth shattering) experiments he so wonderfully recounts.
Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
by Gina Kolata Picador USA
Our Price: $15.00
This book was a complete paradigm shift for me. What if I told you everything you think you know about weight, heart disease, and dieting is based on biases and not facts? That naturally fat people live longer than naturally thin people? That even permanent weight loss achieved by surgery does not change heart disease risk factors? You'd try to throw a diet book at me, wouldn't you? Or any number of articles about the "obesity epidemic." Well, I would be right, and you would be wrong. You must read this book.
The Screwtape Letters: With Screwtape Proposes a Toast
by C.S. Lewis Harper San Francisco
Our Price: $13.99
I'm constantly telling friends to pick up this little volume. It's provocative no matter your religious feelings (or lack therof). Lewis a master observer of humans, and his very wicked sense of humor is grandly on display here.
Many of the stories in this collection are a mere 3 pages long, making them perfect for your bedtime reading. Try it, your dreams will be full of hedgerow mazes in twilight, sword fights in spherical libraries, and dreams within dreams within dreams.
I read this two weeks before Katrina turned the Superdome into a Kafka-esque hell on Earth. With this tale of victims turned into prisoners still fresh in my mind, Saramago struck me as eerily prescient, but I realize now he simply has a staggering ability to imagine people at their institutional worst. He also, thankfully, has an equally staggering ability to imagine them at their intimate best.
Green Porno: A Book and Short Films by Isabella Rossellini
by Isabella Rossellini Harperstudio
Our Price: $24.99
Isabella Rossellini is fearless. This shit looks like a bjork video. It is insane and insanely cool.
I read this aloud to a room full of adults who collapsed into giggles and started yelling "RAWR RAWR RAWR!" along with me; Imagine what will ensue when you read it to actual children! Bright pictures and a fun refrain, what more could you ask for from classy literature?
The Man Who Fell to Earth
by Walter Tevis Ballantine Books
Our Price: $15.00
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a heartbreaking love letter to the dispossessed, the outcast, the ungainly one in all of us. A Sci-fi work only in that its main character is an alien, it was the basis for the film of the same name starring David Bowie in his first role. It is beautiful, haunting, and unflinching in its exploration of Otherness.
For an extra bonus experience, play Bowie's Low while you're reading; much of the material on the album began as soundtrack pieces for the film.
Last-Minute Knitted Gifts
by Joelle Hoverson Harry N. Abrams
Our Price: $24.95
So you had 9 months to make some awesome booties for your roommate's sister's new baby...9 months ago. Now that baby's putting on a pound a day and if you don't think fast she'll be graduating highschool just as you're getting the final bobbles finished. So now what? Good thing for you, Joelle Hoverson's got you covered with her beautiful collection of last minute gift patterns. Arranged by approximate knit-time and paired with some delicious photos, these will be your go-to patterns for the upcoming holiday season, and all year round.
Also of note in this book Ms. Hoverson's illuminating essay on color and her excellent tips for combining yarns to get simple yet beautiful effects. Just make sure you check for the online correction guide, since the edition went to print with some minor mistakes. And while we're at it, I highly suggest visiting the website for Ms. Hoverson's yarn store in Soho, Purl (www.purlsoho.com, www.purlbee.com).
However tempting and appropriate a weaving metaphor might be to describe this novel, I've felt since I started recommending it that it was a tired one. A more effective illustration might be to imagine being asked to consider a heap of sparkling jewels in your hands, each one in turn. You see each stone and all its brothers jostling for your attention, illuminating each other, obscuring each other. A Lebanese man returning home from L.A. to visit his dying father, a beautiful slave with her jinni lover, an epic narrative of an ancient king and his companions...
This is truly a work of shocking beauty. I haven't been so bewitched by a novel in years.
