Eight Years Purloined, Relatives, Crowds, & Lines
Carriage Return, week of 11/9/2017
Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s round-up of recent Literati Bookstore staff favorites, as well as an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
Recent Staff Favorites (in Hardcover)
It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree, by A.J. Jacobs
A.J. Jacobs is always going off on tangents, as evidenced by his previous books The Year of Living Biblically and The Know It All (about trying to read the encyclopedia). After receiving an email from a man who announced that his wife was Jacobs’ eight cousin, and invited him to explore the 80,000 people in their personal database, Jacobs jumps into genealogy with both feet. With his usual humor, he explores both his roots and the human genome, and shares some remarkable, information about the quest to find the connections between us all. IF you haven’t dabbled in researching your own family tree, this book might just give you a push to do so. — Deb
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I have been an avid reader of Coates’ work for a very long time, back when he was a relatively unknown blogger. At the time, he was moderating one of the most interesting online discussion groups, covering issues of race, comic books, the Civil War, and popular culture. Then he published his piece on reparations for The Atlantic, and everyone was talking about Coates and his writing. This collection includes eight previously unpublished essays, one for each year of the Obama administration, each with a new introduction, detailing Coates’ thinking at the time he wrote them, and now looking back. If you want to understand where we are now in the United States, and how we got here — especially in terms of race — this is a must read. — Jill
The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, by Philip & Erin Stead and Mark Twain
Imaginative, original, and simply delightful. This is a new and wonderful work of art from Philip and Erin Stead, and — oh yeah! — Mark Twain. After several pages of an incomplete Mark Twain fairy tale were discovered a few years ago, the publisher approached the Steads to finish it. What Phil and Erin ended up doing is something truly remarkable — the illustrations are gorgeous, and the story itself borrows notes from Kurt Vonnegut and Charlie Kaufman. It is a book that has meaning, speaks to present day, will become a classic, and moved me. — Mike
How to Behave in a Crowd, by Camille Bordas
Isidore Mazal, age eleven, is the youngest of six exceptionally talented siblings. His brothers and sisters are all near geniuses, skipping grades in school, performing in opera houses, making plans to be famous in one way or another. Izzy, however, does not feel particularly special — rather, in comparison, he is unremarkable, destined to be forgotten, always out of place, even running away from home without causing much alarm. Yet, is through his eyes as the narrator that Camille Bordas is able to work magic. Izzy is so keenly observant and effortlessly caring to those around him that he develops into one of the most genuine characters in literature today. This English Language debut is a delight to read, darkly funny, and I can’t wait for Bordas to write more. — Matt
A Line Made by Walking, by Sara Blume
A mesmerizing meditation on art and mental health. Struggling to make a life for herself as an artist in Dublin, Frankie leaves the city to become the caretaker to her late grandmother’s country home. She spends the days observing her surroundings, mining familial memories, and re-examining the meaning of seminal works of art. The result is a lovely and often surprising prose style mixed with a curiously enlightening art education. For readers who eschew plot in favor of wandering exploration of the psychological landscape. — Hilary
