Sunday, August 4, 2013

What's Selling at Boswell For the Week Ending August 3? Zealot's Frenzy, Orange's Netflix Bounce, Miss Peregrine's Burton Buzz, Plus Cuckoo for Cuckoo.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Cuckoo's Calling, by Robert Galbraith
2. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
3. The Illusion of Separateness, by Simon Van Booy
4. And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini
5. Good Kings Bad Kings, by Susan Nussbaum (event August 8, 6 pm)

Momentum is building on our Thursday event for Susan Nussbaum, author of Good Kings Bad Kings. The event is being co-sponsored by Disability Rights Wisconsin and Pathfinders Milwaukee and sign language interpretation is being co-sponsored by PIE, Professional Interpretation Enterprises. It won't show up until the book is released, but we're having very good advance sales for Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In event on August 27. We put an ad in the Journal Sentinel as well. You can buy your ticket here.

Meanwhile, anyone who didn't know about J.K. Rowling writing The Cuckoo's Calling must be hiding under a rock. Here's David Kudler in The Huffington Post. He likes it, but the Boston Public Radio reviewer Greg Cook uses the word "plodding" a lot, which seems like a bad sign.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Zealot, by Reza Aslan
2. This Town, by Mark Leibovich
3. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris
4. Wrapped in the Flag, by Claire Conner
5. My Dog the Paradox, The Oatmeal

By now you've seen or heard about the interview of Zealot's author Reza Aslan on Fox News, with Lauren Green questioning how a Muslim can write a book about Jesus. Slate writer Josh Voorhees notes that Aslan was ready for rebuttal and was prepared to be blindsided.  There are a lot of links to response interviews on the site as well.

Paperback Fiction:
1. D'Mok Revival: Awakening, by Michael Zummo
2. Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
3. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce
4. A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
5. The Secret Keeper, by Kate Morton

Rachel Joyce fell off the front table for a bit, but a place up front with a rec, combined with being carried over on an invigorated book club display and brochure is helping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry  improve in sales over the last few weeks. July was the book's second best month of sales since it came out in paperback.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt
2. Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman
3. The Good Food Revolution, by Will Allen
4. Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan
5. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

I was eating lunch with a friend, who had picked up Orange is the New Black (yes, there's also a tie in edition) after watching the show. Netflix apparently contracted a second season of episodes in advance to the first ones streaming, so they must have thought this was their own Sharknado, the buzz alone would carry the ratings. It's been interesting that while the first airing of Sharknado was not much higher in ratings than Syfy's other original movies, subsequent airings have increased eyeballs. We do not have a Sharknado tie in...yet.

Books for Kids:
1. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs
2. Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site, by Sherry Duskey Rinker with illustrations by Tom Lichtenheld
3. The School for Good and Evil, by Soman Chainani
4. Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers
5. The Lovabye Dragon, by Barbara Joosse with illustrations by Randy Cecil

I don't think I have previously mentioned that Tim Burton is said to be the director of the film version of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Oh, and I spotted Barbara Joosse's Mama Do You Love Me board book on display at Birchbark.

In the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins reviews Mark Leibovich's This Town, which is #2 on our bestseller list this week. He writes "Leibovich, a New York Times national correspondent known for his political profiles, chronicles big wheels in the capital from June 2008 through December 2012 as a way of getting at its insular, self-perpetuating culture, now more than ever stoked by the huge wealth that politicians, lobbyists and media figures can earn."

Higgins also spoke with Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves, who will be appearing at Boswell on Wednesday, August 7. He calls the it "one of the most sobering books of the year, a detailed and thoroughly sourced account of the murder, torture and rape of Vietnamese noncombatants during the war."

On the blog, a reminder that ReShonda Tate Billingsley will be at the Milwaukee Public Library tomorrow. 

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