Posts tagged wellington square bookshop

The new Rock Flower Paper bucket bags are finally here and they are fabulous!

This new bag is 100% cotton canvas, with magnetic snap, zipper pocket and faux leather handles.  This is perfect for toting your snacks, towels, and of course books down to the pool or beach.  The new spring/summer fabrics are beautiful and very eye catching. 

We also go in a number of new patterns in our popular tiny totes.  My favorite is the purple dragonfly.   Stop by, pick up your favorite and fill it with books.                                                 

Happy Spring! 

This is my favorite wedding shower gift to give.  It is funny, sometimes shocking and definitely a conversation starter.  However, don’t let the name fool you because this is a GREAT cookbook!  I picked this cookbook up a few years ago to give a friend for a wedding shower gift and ended up getting a copy for myself too.  I have cooked a Valentine’s Day menu for my sweetie from this book as well as a casual nights dinner.  The photography is beautiful and the recipes are, for the most part, easy. 

The concept is that each chapter features an ingredient that has been known as an aphrodisiac.  There is a chapter on chocolate, strawberries, honey, oysters, flowers, figs, avocado and more.  Within the chapter is a beautiful picture of the ingredient highlighted on the human body like an asparagus skirt or a bath of black beans with a gorgeous pregnant belly popping out.  Each recipe has a short story of what makes that recipe or the ingredient sexy.  Even if the recipient does not cook this makes a beautiful coffee table book.

This was my Valentine’s Day menu:

Starter:  Oysters on the half shell with 3 preparations:  curried with chardonnay, Parmesan cheese and blue cheese

Main:  Grilled Scallops with basil and lavender essence over a simple salad

Dessert:  Chocolate fig bundles

This is my favorite meal of all time:  Sun-dried tomato and avocado fettuccine.  This has pasta, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, walnuts, cilantro, avocado, bacon and a few other things all mixed in.  I could sit and eat the whole thing by myself!  Bacon and avocado - you cannot go wrong!  It is super simple to prepare too.

Stop by the Bookshop and check it out.  You will fall in love. 

We are celebrating Classic Chapter Books this month and next. 

All of us here at the Bookshop picked a classic chapter book to feature.  We each picked something we remember reading when we were younger, something that touched, moved or inspired us.  We invite you to re-read these books or to share them with a new reader.  All of the books highlighted here are 25% off from mid-May to mid-June.

The Westing Game

by Ellen Raskin 

Winner of the Newberry Medal, Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and an ALA Notable Book

A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will.  And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger — and possible murderer — to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure:  Sam Westing may be dead…but that won’t stop him from playing one last game!

A great introduction to the mystery genre!

The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

A house with a hundred rooms is a house full of secrets.  That’s what orphaned Mary Lennox finds out when she comes to live in her uncle’s mansion on the Yorkshire moors.  At night, she hears the sound of crying down a long corridor.  Outside, she meets Dickon, a magical boy who can charm and talk to animals.  Then, one day, Mary discovers the most mysterious wonder of all - a secret garden, walled and locked, which has been forgotten for years and years.  Is everything in the garden dead, or can Mary bring this special place back to life?

“Then she slipped through the door, and shut it behind her, breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.  She was standing inside the secret garden.”

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

By E.L. Konigsburg

Claudia Kinkaid feels unappreciated by her parents and bored with her orderly, straight-A existence.  She is nearly twelve when she decides to run away from her home in suburban Connecticut.  Being practical, she chooses a comfortable destination — New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — and a thrifty traveling companion, her nine-year-old brother Jamie.  After careful planning, Claudia and Jamie arrive at the museum, hiding from the guards in the rest rooms, sleeping on priceless beds, and bathing in the fountain.  But when a statue of an angel, rumored to be a possible Michelangelo, is given to the museum, Claudia decides they must solve the mystery.  Their search leads them to the statue’s original owner, eccentric Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who narrates the story in a peppery letter to her lawyer.  Mrs. Frankweiler both solves the mystery and helps Claudia understand why the secret of the statue is so important to her.

After reading this book, every child will long for a trip to New York and a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ALA Notable Book 

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

by C.S. Lewis       

Four English school children find their way through the back of a wardrobe into the magic land of Narnia and assist Aslan, the golden lion, to triumph over the White Witch, who has cursed the land with eternal winter.

Lewis believed anything worth reading at 5, is worth reading at 50.  This enduring classic proves that to be true.

Charlotte’s Web

by E.B. White

E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, published sixty years ago, is the story of a guileless pig named Wilbur and the savvy spider who befriended him.

In a review at the time of publishing, Eudora Welty praised E.B. White’s novel for its “felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life, and the good backbone of succinctness that only the most highly imaginative stories seem to grow.”

Others we recommend:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Black Beauty

Mr. Popper’s Penguins

Anne of Green Gables

Destined to become a classic:

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Jeffrey Eugenides was born and raised in Detroit.   He graduated from Brown University with an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford.

He is a private person, but he loves talking about his city.  “I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music, Motown, the MC5, house, techno.”  He bemoans the decline of Detroit.

He lives in Princeton, New Jersey now and has joined the faculty at Princeton University’s Program in Creative writing.

I first began to be interested in Eugenides’ work, when I saw the movie The Virgin Suicides back in 1999.  I think it was the first movie directed by Sofia Coppola.  The film generated the early interest in Eugenides work.  The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and reissued in 2009.

The book is a haunting and evocative work, which succinctly sets out the dilemma of life and death and the choice, as Kurt Cobain made, of checking out “on top” or continuing to live on:  “What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself”.

The book garnered critical praise, but it was not until the publication of Middlesex in 2002 that Eugenides became a household name (sort of).  He won the Pulitzer Prize for that book.  “The book is a fascinating story of the Greek-American immigrant experience in the United States, against the rise and fall of Detroit.  It explores the experience of the inter-sexed in the USA.” [Wikipedia]  It is a fascinating and disturbing book, dealing with subjects that are generally taboo in American culture, but genuinely deserve our interest, and at times, compassion.

Eugenides has also published lots of short stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker.  By the way, if you subscribe to the New Yorker, get the iPhone app and you can browse, search and read every story ever published in The New Yorker since its date of publication.  Try searching for Nabokov.  It is a rewarding experience.

Eugenides’ third and latest novel is the just-published The Marriage Plot (available at the Wellington Square Bookshop at 20% off).  This book is a departure of sorts for Eugenides and has been called “[T]he most entertaining campus novel since Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons”.  The novel begins on graduation day at Brown University in 1982 and I’ll leave it at that.

Eugenides’ next work will be a compilation of short stories, presumably new ones.

Overall Eugenides is a very accessible writer, yet his works continue to resonate long after you’ve finished them.  He, like most of my favorite authors, leaves a lot of work left for the reader.  His endings are not tidy packages wrapped in brown paper and string (as we do here in the bookshop!) but ravels of musings, indeterminates and questions, left for the reader to ponder and argue about at Book club sessions, many of which are held here. (where we offer coffee and bakery items.  Boy! I am really plugging this place).

In any event, drop in and see us, look for our coupon in this issue of and each month I will try to bring you up to date, notwithstanding my pre-existing procrastinatory ways, on an author of interest to me, and hopefully to you.

You can also listen to me interview top-selling authors on WCHE 1520AM every Monday at 5, and access the shows on iTunes by typing The Avid reader, or an author’s name.  You will come up with our podcasts.  I’ve interviewed over sixty authors thus far, and love doing the show.  If you want you can listen to me talk for 60 hours straight (I would then refer you back to The Virgin Suicides!).

Also, come visit our sister emporium, The OtherColors art gallery, just one door down from the bookshop.  We have gallery openings every six weeks or so, including opening night parties with wine and hors d’oeuvres.  Right now we are featuring the work of Portia Mortensen.

We all hope that you will continue to patronize all of the fine shops in Eagleview, come to the concerts, enjoy Brickside and Nudys and keep abreast of all the activity going on in “our town”.  We greatly appreciate it and hope you get lots out of it too.

~Sam

Summer is almost here - Yahoo!!  We are going to have some exciting stuff going on down here at the Wellington Square Bookshop.  To get things going, starting in June we are going to be expanding our childrens storytime for the summer and hosting theme weeks.  Each week we will have a different theme.   To go along with the theme we will have a little craft and the kids can dress up if they would like to.  In addition there will be a special entrance for them to come into the Bookshop and get their magical adventure started.

Come join us Tuesday mornings from 10:00-11:00.  Our June themes will be:

June 5:  Fairy Tales

June 12:  Pirates

June 19:  The Great Outdoors

June 26:  Dinosaurs

Join us tonight…If you have not come out for our Open Mic Night you are really missing out!

The second Friday of each month from 7-10pm we celebrate the local artist.  If you play music, recite poetry, perform stand-up, or anything else come and join us.  If you are not a performer, no problem, come and support those who are.  The cafe is hoppin’ with coffee drinks and pasteries.  Who knows, you might be there for the debut of the next big thing!

We hope to see you here.

Tune into The Avid Reader today at 5:00pm on WCHE1520 AM. Sam will be interviewing Ben Marcus, author of “The Flame Alphabet”.

A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
 
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.

The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

BEN MARCUS is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String, and he is the editor of The
Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York Cityand Maine.

• If you cannot make the broadcast today you can listen to the interview any time on Podomatic, iTunes or at the Wellington Square Bookshop.

Charles Yu’s first novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe follows Protagonist Yu (P.Y.) through space and time. It’s science fiction, but, as New York Times reviewer Ander Monson put it, “Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart.”

Protagonist Yu can be found in Minor Universe 31, a slightly damaged world suffering from an incomplete conceptual framework. Joined by a piece of software named TAMMY and a virtual but “ontologically valid” dog, P.Y. navigates the maddeningly unsure space-time fabric of his universe in an effort to find his long-lost father. 

Author Charles Yu talked to Sam on the Avid Reader show a couple of weeks ago. He has a busy life as a lawyer and father, finding time to write between the hours of 12:00 and 3:00AM. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of our favorites of 2010!

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu

Hardcover $24

Listen to the interview

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