Book Signing with Jennifer McMahon

Join us on Thursday, June 25th at 3pm

Dismantled
by Jennifer McMahon

"A failed marriage. A long-buried secret. A lonely
child's imaginary friend. From these simple ingredients,
Jennifer McMahon has constructed a fun, twisty
thriller. Expect Dismantled to earn comparisons to
The Secret History."

- Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

About the Author
Jennifer McMahon writes full time and lives in Barre, Vermont with her partner, Drea and their daughter, Zella. Dismantled is her third novel, following Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell.

Donna's Favorites's

Pictured here are a few of the books I spoke about while doing a recent "207" on wsch6 TV.
The 2 books I'm probably the most excited about are Backyard Homesteading by Carleen Madigan and Gardening When it Counts by Steve Solomon. Both are very comprehensive and through, with lots of very useful info. They are easy to follow and process and Backyard Homestead is full of great illustrations. Gardening when it Counts is so complete I can't imagine that you'd need any other book on vegetable growing, at least to get you started .. let's face it though if your like me, collecting gardening books can take on a life of it's own.

THE LAST " 207 " SEGMENT THAT BOOKS ETC CONTRIBUTED TOO

Listed below is the full list of titles on sustainability/gardening that appeared on the table during the '207" segment I did that aired Friday, March 14th.

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest - Carol W. Costenbader

Root Cellaring - Mike & Nancy Bubel

Build Your Own Underground Root Cellar- Phyllis Hobson

Easy Composters You Can Build - Nick Noyes

Growing Herbs In Containers - Sal Gilbertie & Maggie Oster

The Homebrewer’s Garden - Joe & Dennis Fisher

Organic Crops in Pots - Deborah Schneebeli-Morrell

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

Preserving Summer’s Bounty - A Rodale Garden Book

Community Gardening - Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Putting Food By - Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, & Beatrice Vaughan

The Omnivore’s Dilemma - Michael Pollan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving - U.S. Department of Agriculture

The Renewable Energy Handbook - William H. Kemp

How to Grow More Vegetables - John Jeavons

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide - Barbara Pleasant & Deborah L. Martin

Living Green - Greg Horn

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning - The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante

Sharing the Harvest - Elizabeth Henderson

The Backyard Homestead - Carleen Madigan

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn - Fritz Haeg

Grow It. Eat It. - Linda Larson

Don’t Throw It, Grow It! - Deborah Peterson & Millicent Selsam

Food Not Lawns - H.C. Flores

Gardening When It Counts - Steve Solomon

Fresh Food From Small Spaces - R.J. Ruppenthal

On Guerrilla Gardening - Richard Reynolds

Grow Organic - DK Publishing

Books Etc was lucky enough to be part of a celebration to honor Maine's own Melissa Sweet on Saturday-March 14th . Melissa recently was awarded a Caldecott Honor, the book world's highest honor for book illustration, for the book, River of Words-The Story of Williams Carlos Williams, written by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet. The text, part brief biography of his childhood and later career as a doctor interspersed with the constant stream of poems he wrote about everyday objects, weaves it's way around the lush and jewel-like illustrations that are full to bursting from this fabulous book.
Well over a hundred people stopped by to congratulate Melissa, try their hand at a collage, buy a book or eat some of the fabulous cupcakes provided for the guests.
Kirsten Cappy of Curious City planned and organized this wonderful event and brought it all off with her usual panache.
We still have a few signed copies of this amazing book, which is selling briskly.
If you would like one set aside call soon.

Pictures From the Melissa Sweet Party and Images From the Book

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JOHN MONAHAN IS FALMOUTH 'S "GO TO" GUY TO FIND OUT ABOUT CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED ADULT FICTION.
SEE HIS LATEST REVIEW BELOW:

A Free Life
by Ha Jin
paperback 672pgs.
vintage

Ha Jin's new novel, A Free Life, is a wonderfully meticulous and subtle account of a Chinese Family's experience as immigrants in the United States. The acclaimed author's lengthy work received mixed reviews upon it's initial publication in this country. I believe this is due in large part to it's pointed avoidance of melodrama, in favor of a deliberately paced accounting of the banal details of life's everyday struggles. This thoroughness may not provide a conventionally satisfying dramatic experience but it does authentically portray the rhythms of life and is genuinely moving it this respect.
It tells the story of Nan Wu, his wife Pingping and their son Taotao and their struggle to make ends meet after their immigration to the U.S. in aftermath of the Tainanmen massacre. Nan Wu and Pingping share a fragile relationship complicated by it's lack of romantic love, their bond being forged primarily by their commitment to raising their child. Nan Wu's struggle may be difficult for some readers to sympathize with as he constantly pines for his lost love to the detriment of his marriage and struggles with his ambition to write poetry while facing the practical demands of supporting a family. Yet these concerns are precisely what render the narrative an authentic portrait of life's real tribulations and provide an emotional thread to bind the largely episodic narrative together. A Free Life is Ha Jin's first novel written directly in English and this gives it's language a simplicity which some may find awkward, yet it's crucial in giving the work an authentic clarity. New in paperback, A Free Life is a long and in some ways demanding work that moves at a slow pace but it rewards one's attention thoroughly and leaves the reader pining for more at it's conclusion.

-john

Elegance of the Hedgehog

Elegance of the Hedgehog

by Muriel Barbery
Translated by Allison Anderson
325pp. paper $15.00

This book has been a bestseller in France and Lola from our Falmouth store is fast making it a best seller right here.
Read her review below:

The book I'm most excited about right now is "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," by Muriel Barbury. (It's published by Europa Editions, and they have never bored me. Not once.) "Hedgehog" is a wonderful book -- one person might read an engaging story of an unlikely friendship between the concierge of a tres chic Parisian condo building and a 12 year old girl. Another person will realize belatedly that s/he thinks something about philosophy, unthought before the book. Another person will internalize it all and try to figure out whether she or he is a hedgehog or a fox. (Many Tolstoy references, subtle, and not so, in this book. The author doesn't give you a trail, but I will: Archilochus, Tolstoy, Berlin. I forced my book group to read this. To a person, they said thank you. And I was really grateful to have friends to discuss it with. This was my absolute favorite fiction of 2008.

A great young adult recommendation by Karen Keyte, manager of the Falmouth Books Etc. Who says nothing exciting every happens in Maine?

Need
by Carrie Jones (ages 12 & up)
Bloomsbury USA  
Zara White collects fears the way other people collect baseball cards or state quarters. She memorizes the names of obscure phobias and repeats them to herself, the better to ward off her own fears. “It’s a lot easier to understand things once you name them,” Zara thinks. “It’s mostly the unknown that freaks me out.”
Once an avid runner and a passionate supporter of Amnesty International, Zara’s world changed dramatically with the death of her father (“My stepdad, really. I call him my dad. He was my dad. He raised me.”) After a couple of months of watching Zara stumble through life like a zombie, her mother has decided to pack the high school junior off to Maine to live with her grandmother, ostensibly to "get her spunk back."
Almost immediately, Zara notices a several strange things about the tiny town of Bedford: it's very cold, colder than you’d expect; the boys all seem to be taller than average; almost all of the students at her new school are fast runners; and, oh yeah, it may be infested with pixies.
Just to be clear, we're not talking the Tinkerbell kind of pixie here. We're talking pixies that use glamours to disguise themselves as humans so that they can use local teens to feed their terrible needs.  
Luckily for Zara, her new friends Issie, Devyn and Nick (as well as her grandmother, Betty) are made of stern stuff.  She’s going to need all the help she can get when the evil lurking in the Maine woods comes calling for her.

Peter Turner this Sunday!

We've just scheduled local furnituremaker Peter Turner, featured in the February issue of 'Fine Woodworking,' for an event this Sunday at 2pm here at our Portland store. He'll talk about the process of working on the article, as well as displaying the blanket chest shown above. A discussion time will follow his presentation.

The Awesomeness That Is Hannah Holmes

Last week we hosted one of our funniest local authors, science and nature writer Hannah Holmes. She was here promoting her newest book, The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself.


Just in case you weren't aware, she's awesome!
And good at showing off her Pinnal Flap, as you can see...


Her reading technique this time around was quite innovative, and started with a little bit of a story. She said (roughly): "So I was at a concert recently, an unplugged concert, and the musician had all these guitars lined up across the stage, so somebody yelled out 'hey, what's with all the guitars,' and he answered that each guitar was for a different song, as they all sound different and are tuned differently too. So some other wiseacre calls out 'play number fourteen!' So he did, and abandoned his set list and just played the songs in the order that the audience called out."

And this is the methodology she employed - audience members called out page numbers and she read whatever was on that page. It was actually quite effective for this kind of book as there's something interesting on every page, and every page makes you wonder a bit about the context and what else might be mentioned nearby. The audience certainly seemed to appreciate it. Though Hannah might appreciate not suggesting page 16 ever again, as it involves a section titled 'Prominent Mammary Glands.'

Just for future reference.

Hannah was also featured on the local television newsmagazine '207' a couple weeks ago, if you want to see her in live-action here.

Inventory 2009

In bookselling, as in all retail ventures, it becomes periodically necessary to do an inventory of goods. We here at Books, Etc. always do ours in January because inventory involves closing for an entire day and ripping the store basically to pieces, and this is the slowest time of year. We begin prepping as soon as the holiday rush is over, doing all sorts of organizing and running all sorts of fun reports. Inventory is always on a Monday at the Portland store and the following Tuesday in Falmouth so that we can sequentially share the laser machines(!) that we rent to scan the books.

The day before inventory we go around and work down every display, endcap, window, tabletop bookstand, etc., and then in the morning we shove everything around on the shelves to make it as easy as possible to scan everything quickly. The end result is something like this:



Understandably, and especially in this economic climate, we spend a good proportion of both Sunday and Tuesday explaining what's going on and that no, we're not closing, remodeling, or moving. We did have one woman this year who walked in on Sunday evening, took one look around, smiled, and cheerily commented "Wow, you must be doing inventory!"

I kind of wanted to hug her.

Of course, the best part about inventory (other than the computers being updated so that they're actually accurate!) is that Allan (the Big Cheese) always buys us coffee in the morning and lunch at lunch. The past few years it's been Asian fusion from Fuji, across the street, but this year we tried out a new pizza place, Joe's New York, that opened up around the corner in the old Granny's Burritos space. It was pretty darn tasty, and they even brought it to us in the middle of the snowstorm that inevitably seems to accompany inventory.



There's definitely something to be said for sitting around with your coworkers and your boss, eating and shooting the breeze. Downright relaxing it is, and very unlike our usual customer-service buzz!

Sidney Hall, Jr. Event Roundup

This past Thursday we were lucky enough to have Sidney Hall, Jr. here at our Portland store. He read excerpts from his newest, Fumbling In The Light, as well What We Will Give Each Other and Chebeague, a collection of poems he wrote while visiting that island in Casco Bay. It was a wonderful reading with an enthusiastic audience!
Elizabeth Tibbetts was unfortunately ill and not able to make it this time around, but we look forward to rescheduling an event for her in the future.

Up next in our events schedule is fellow local Hannah Holmes on January 22nd, who was profiled in the January 4th edition of the Maine Sunday Telegram. The article can be read here, though you may need to free-register to access it.

For those of you who are wondering how a book gets produced and sold, the digital marketing department at MacMillan produced this amusing explanation




To be taken with a grain of salt!

January and February Events

Fumbling In The Light by Sidney Hall, Jr.
and
In The Well by Elizabeth Tibbetts

Sidney Hall, Jr.has lived most of his life in southern New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals such as Graham House Review, Chattahoochie Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Hollins Critic . He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and three of his poems have appeared on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac." He is also a publisher, book designer, and typograher. Fumbling In The Light is his third book of poems.

Elizabeth Tibbetts lives in Maine and works as a nurse. She has received a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship and Good Idea Grant, and a Martin Dibner Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Scholar, The Beloit Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review.
She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and two of her poems have appeared on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac." In The Well is the winner of the 2002 Bluestem Poetry Award.

Where & When
5:30 pm Snacks and Coffee
6:00 pm Poetry Reading

Thursday, January 8th

38 Exchange Street
Portland, Maine 04101

The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself

Hannah Holmes

With wit, humility, and penetrating insight, science journalist Hannah Holmes casts the inquisitive eye of a trained researcher and reporter on . . . herself. And not just herself, but on our whole species-what Shakespeare called "the paragon of animals." In this surprising, humorous, and edifying book, Holmes explores how the human animal-the eponymous well-dressed ape-fits into the natural world, even as we humans change that world in both constructive and destructive ways.

"A very important book - a graceful and forceful reminder that the natural world is everywhere all around us." - Bill McKibben

Hannah Holmes is the author of Suburban Safari and The Secret Life of Dust. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Discover, Outside, and many other publications. She was a frequent contributor on science and nature subjects for the Discovery Channel Online. She lives with her husband and dog here in Portland.

Where & When
7 pm

Thursday, January 22nd

38 Exchange Street
Portland, Maine 04101

Asta In The Wings
Jan Elizabeth Watson

Asta In The Wings is a poignant and often darkly funny story narrated by Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old growing up in an isolated house in Bond Brook, Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three," constructing fanciful, theatrical worlds of their own. When circumstances push her into a strange outside world - with all of its discontents - Asta must find a way to assimilate while remaining true to herself and her fractured family.

Jan Elizabeth Watson was born in Washington DC, grew up in Maine, and spent nearly a decade in New York City, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She has worked extensively as an editor, copywriter, and adjunct professor of creative writing. She lives in Maine and has one child, a daughter. Asta In The Wings is her first novel, and has received starred reviews in Booklist and Publishers Weekly.

Where & When
6 pm
Friday, February 6th
38 Exchange Street
Portland, Maine 04101

Lincoln: The Biography Of A Writer
Fred Kaplan

Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his audience with equal and enduring effectiveness. Acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan focuses on the elements that shaped Lincoln's mental and imaginative world; how his writings molded his identity, relationships, and career; and how they simultaneously generated both the distinctive political figure he became and the public discourse of the nation. This unique account of Lincoln's life and career highlights the shortcomings of the modern presidency, reminding us, through Lincoln's legacy and appreciation for language, that the careful and honest use of words is a necessity for successful democracy.

Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of several biographies, including The Singular Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Henry James, The Imagination of Genius, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Boothbay, Maine.

Join us in celebrating Lincoln's 200th birthday this February 12th!

Where & When
5:30 pm
Thursday, February 12th
38 Exchange Street
Portland, Maine 04101