A Word from Catherine
Books for the Coming Season
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I’ve written before about bookselling’s seasons: “New Year, New You” (so tired!) in January, the glut of thrillers and mysteries in the Spring and Summer, back to school books in August, and Fall. Fall is the biggest season of all in the book world. The combination of more time spent indoors with holiday giving seasons brings us the blockbuster books, the gift books, coffee table books, and serious literary fiction. This year’s bounty is no exception. Here are a few books you should consider for your own reading, and for the book people in your life.
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Out of Darkness, Shining Light
by Zimbabwean novelist
Petina Gappah
is narrated by two 19th-century African voices, a servant cook and a religious zealot, describing their trip across the continent with Dr. David Livingstone’s mummified body. The narrative is a powerful, telling of time and place about to undergo cataclysmic change.
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Starless Sea
by
Erin Morgenstern
contains many elements of her first novel,
Night Circus
: hidden worlds, chosen families, unusual characters both brilliant and sly.
Starless Sea
is a long (500 pages!) love letter to books and bibliophiles that carries the reader to a hidden library and sanctuary for its guardians that is beautiful and astonishing.
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Water Dancer
is
Ta-Neheisi Coates’
first novel. He brings his keen intelligence and insight, his extraordinary research and writing skills to a sweeping, brutal tale of the dehumanizing effects of slavery. This isn’t a slog of a read, and is captivating and propulsive.
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The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
by Civil War historian
Eric Foner
is a bracing look at how the laws and policies put in place during Reconstruction helped the U.S. move closer to the ideals written in the Constitution, creating a second revolution.
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Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places
by
Craig Childs
is a brief book, but it did not disappoint this lover of hulking tomes. Childs’ characteristically sublime observations of the beauty of the desert and his own adventures within its unique world will stay with the reader far longer than it takes to read the book.
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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
is another highly entertaining
Caitlin Doughty
book that continues her crusade to demystify and normalize one of the most natural human acts, dying.
This funny, and sometimes dark, compilation of questions asked by children is actually a great holiday gift.
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Also consider these books by authors you know:
Find Me
by Andre Aciman
Imaginary Friend
by Stephen Chbosky
In the Dream House
by Carmen Machado,
Ninth House
by Leigh Bardugo
Talking to Strangers
by Malcolm Gladwell
Witches are Coming
by Lindy West
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Tony's Rare Book Spotlight
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50 Selected Magic Tricks
As a kid working for child wages in my parents’ bookstore, if I wasn't buying Beatles albums, I bought useful things from Loftus Novelty and Magic, founded on Main Street in our city in 1939. I remember the frightening and surreal excitement watching my father, Sam, trying to tear up the Loftus poo poo cushion I had hidden under his mattress.
In this
Word from Wellers
I present
50 Selected Magic Tricks
Volume No. II from
Loftus Novelty & Magic,
circa 1950. A thing I especially like about this volume of
50 Selected Magic Tricks
is the cover assures us, that the tricks require no sleight of hand and no skill. How could one fail? The pamphlet is staple-bound in blue printed yellow wraps. It contains 30 pages: 23 of tricks and a seven page catalog. Mystery. Magic.
“Don’t expose the secret.”
“There are unlimited possibilities.”
$50
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Weller Book Works
has been Selling Books for 90 Years!
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BREAKFAST CLUB
- Join our lead new book buyer and raconteuse, Catherine Weller, for book news and conversation every Tuesday morning. The Breakfast Club meets from 10:00 - 11:00 AM at the Bean Yard Coffee House, the shop that has replaced the Coffee Connection.
LIT KNIT
- Do you craft? Do you like books and casual conversation? Join our bi-weekly craft circle held the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of every month from 6:00 - 8:00 PM.
COLLECTORS' BOOK SALON
- Book lovers of all passions gather in the Rare Book Room each final Friday of the month, January through October for the Collectors' Book Salon. Glasses are filled and socializing begins at 6:30, and at 7:15 an invited guest presents a chat on a topic of her or his particularly bibliopassion.
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The 15 bytes Book Awards is the only statewide book award for adult literature, and we're excited to host
readings by the finalists of the Creative Non-Fiction category
once again.
This round's finalists are...
Tessa Fontaine:
The Electric Woman
Tessa Fontaine’s T
he Electric Woman
is the chance to rehearse death, to understand our fears by following them. Through loss and streets filled with souped-up Ford trucks, she is here and not here, charmed by the idea of a carnival. In between boxes and shared legs, she is on stage looking into Pandora’s eyes, pushing despite the thick, muscled body, a snake caught in her hair. In the midst of lost fathers & photographed daughters, here are the people putting another child safely on the Ferris wheel, secrets and sweat spilling onto the machine.
Through her use stunning use of lyric, Fontaine has written the hardest truths and not looked back. She has invented a language of suffering and sustained it, all the while giving us the medicine to swallow it.
Raised outside San Francisco in a tangle o’ hippies, Fontaine got her MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Utah. She is the recipient of the University of Alabama’s 2012 graduate departmental awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and the 2013 awards in fiction and nonfiction. Around the country, she has performed her one-woman plays in theaters ranging from New York to San Francisco. Fontaine spent the 2013 season performing with the last American traveling circus sideshow, the World of Wonders. Essays about the sideshow won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and have appeared in The Rumpus and elsewhere. Other work can be found in Glamour, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more.
Katherine Coles:
Look Both Ways
Katharine Coles’
Look Both Ways
, an absorbing story of two marriages lived lifetimes apart that mirror each other in ways unfailingly involving, is a combined memoir and biographical family history that lacks neither imagination nor vibrant poetic passages.
Subtitled
A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-Flung Path
,
Look Both Ways
walks us through Coles’ grandparents’ complex relationship from the perspective of her grandmother, Miriam Wollaeger, who comes to view her own needs/wants as paramount in a marriage with Walter Link, a fellow geologist who, solely because of his maleness, gets to relish the thrill of the field — where women simply aren’t “seen” in Cuba, Columbia, Indonesia or South & Central America where the couple have gone to find oil, and where Walter eventually finds employment as chief geologist for Standard Oil — while a rather bored Miriam plays bridge during daylight hours and dances into the dawn with pilots, rich Americans, and entitled sons of European aristocrats all while raising the couple’s several children. Not satisfied with the status quo, Miriam acts to erase her ennui, as Katie Coles may do on her mirrored pathway.
Coles was Utah’s poet laureate from 2006-12 and also was a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. A University of Utah faculty member since 1997, she has published two novels and six collections of poetry. Pasadena, CA’s, Red Hen Press brought out
Wayward: poems in June 2019
well after this 2018 memoir from Turtle Point Press in Brooklyn, New York. It is easy to lose track of work by this prolific bicoastal writer).
Tara Westover:
Educated
(Unable to attend)
Born from torn metal, broken glass, and gasoline in the shadow of a Judgment Day patriarch, Tara Westover weaves a story that recounts her rise from harrowing obscurity in rural Idaho to decorated Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Westover’s New York Times Bestselling memoir,
Educated
, tells of her upbringing in an evangelical Mormon family where, learning is only prized if it is from the Bible, Book of Mormon, or her own father’s musings. Homeschooled where home is a reality of mystical healing inside and a dangerous wrecking yard outside, Westover takes responsibility for her own education. And her own safety. And her own soul. And soul is what this memoir gives to its readers. With unsentimental, blameless story-telling, Westover shows how the desire for intellect and self-rule can be nurtured and ignited even when it may come at the cost of love, of one’s past, and of blood — blood both generational and blood spilled straight from the vein.
Tara Westover is an American author living in the United Kingdom. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom, and after that first taste, she pursued learning for a decade. She graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014.
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Join us in Welcoming
Kris Millgate for the reading and signing her memoir,
My Place Among Men: Misadventures in the Wild.
Kris Millgate has covered outdoor news nationwide for over two decades.
My Place Among Men
explores the frustrating reality of being a woman working in a man’s world. Each chapter examines an actual news story
that
Kris covered, & her experiences as a female backcountry outdoor journalist operating in a male-dominated realm.
Along with legitimate natural resource issues and real people antics, there is the intrigue of the Wild West. Its wildlife and wild lands fascinate people worldwide. From under Utah’s Green River to over Idaho’s highest peaks, the descriptive narrative takes readers on unreal, yet true, adventures. Read about tracking grizzlies, hiding under sagebrush and fighting for public land in this memoir.
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 6:30 PM
Seth Stewart
had planned to speak at our May Collectors’ Book Salon but was unable to attend. We're pleased to have been able to reschedule his Chat for this month's Salon! He will discuss and share examples of how writers have grappled with writing about and discussing music throughout the centuries. Music is often compared to language, but describing it in concrete written terms proves to be difficult. Theorists developed technical vocabulary that waxes esoteric, while lay descriptions can be abstract and overly subjective. Drawing from his experience as a classically trained composer & rock musician, Stewart will present historical milestones of musical literature, ranging from the cosmology-infused narratives of Ancient Greece, to the birth of musicology in the
18th
century, to modern mass-media coverage of the latest pop album. He’ll share examples of philosophic approaches of Pythagoras and Augustine; social conventions of Beethoven’s time; the complex technical terminology of Schoenberg; and the lay persons’ methods of Rolling Stone Magazine. Seth will guide our exploration of how various authors made synesthetic bridges to describe the experience of music.
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Author Brent Weeks
will be with us on this evening for a reading and signing of the final book in the
Lightbringer
series,
The Burning White.
In the stunning conclusion to this epic, New York Times bestselling
Lightbringer
series, kingdoms clash as Kip must finally escape his family’s shadow in order to protect the land and people he loves.
As the White King springs his great trap, and the Chromeria itself is threatened by treason and siege, Kip Guile and his companions will scramble to return for one impossible final stand. In the darkest hour, will the Lightbringer come?
Brent Weeks was born and raised in Montana. He wrote on bar napkins and lesson plans before landing his dream job years and thousands of pages later. Brent lives in Oregon with his wife, Kristi, and their daughters
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Thank you for supporting your local, independent bookstore.
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Store hours: Monday-Thursday, 11 AM-8 PM | Friday-Saturday, 10 AM-9 PM | Sunday, 12 PM-5 PM
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