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QUICK LINKS
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Weller Book Works
607 Trolley Square 801.328.2586
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Casual book talk and news with Catherine.
at Coffee Connection in Trolley Square
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LIT-KNIT
Craft Circle and casual nerdy conversation.
Every 2nd and 4th Wednesday
6-8 pm
Jan 24
Feb 14 & 28
COLLECTORS' BOOK SALON
Join bibliophiles for the Collectors' Chat. Light refreshments
and nerdy conversation provided.
Every last Friday
6:30-9 pm
Jan 26: Great Finds sharing event! Bring a special book that is one of the coolest things you've ever found.
Feb 23:
Daniel Davidson and his presentation of rare books and items on ancient religious themes in Europe and the Near East
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From Tony Weller
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Happy New Year everyone! I wish I could make it a magic spell. What will it take to achieve a Happy 2018? Booksellers are merchants of dreams and knowledge; and readers' minds are made of what they choose. I have found durable wisdom in books of widely varied topics, and from every geographic region or era. No one person, or period or culture has all answers, and none has none. Readers expect to find wisdom in philosophical, psychological, sociological or religious works. When I think I find good wisdom, I compose it into nutshells and store in mental pockets. All things are connected and Zen taught me that even a stone can teach. You'd be surprised what gems are found in cookbooks and music books.
Hopefully, present paroxysms of fear are nothing more than ante-mortem dementia. Our contentious history caused our ancestors to mistrust difference. Mores became laws. Habit and custom were simplified to dogma. Maybe that was enough then, but in the modern blended era some of us are excited to embrace the full chaotic range of human culture. We envision a world of peace where poverty and accumulation of wealth are small. We ask technology to serve life instead of commerce. The two forms of profit, money and time, must be shared to reap sage benefit from science. Consumption must be balanced with need and waste minimized to stop building mountains and islands out of our refuse.
Read Tony's full article on our
Blog
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Best Weller's Pick for January-February
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The Choice
Dr. Edith Eva Eger
Review by Mel Ziegler
Scribner Book Company
9781501130786
Publisher's Price: $27.00
Our Price $21.60
Dr. Edith Eger's memoir offers hope for the new year. A moving account of Eger's family dynamics, her imprisonment in Auschwitz, and her healing journey after the war. Edith danced the Blue Danube Waltz for Mengele, she slept in Goebbels' bed, and though she forgave Hitler at the ruins of the Eagle's Nest, self-forgiveness was her greatest trial.
Edith recounts a touching moment when she and her sister Magda just had their heads shaved at the camp:
'"How do I look?' is the bravest thing I've ever heard. There aren't mirrors here. She is asking me to help her find herself. And so I tell her the only thing that is mine to say. 'Your eyes', I tell my sister, 'they're so beautiful. I never noticed them when they were covered up by all that hair.' It is the first time I see that I have a choice: to pay attention to what we've lost or pay attention to what we still have."
After their release and return home to Hungary, the sisters process their suffering in different ways: "Magda, her pain visible only in the humor she uses to transcend it"; and Edith's trauma resurfaces as flashbacks, "I don't yet understand that they are physiological manifestations of the grief that I haven't dealt with yet. A clue my body sends as a reminder of the feelings I have blocked from my conscious life." Edith braves a return visit to Auschwitz where she unlocks a repressed memory enabling her to finally forgive herself.
In an effort to integrate her past, Edith studied psychiatry, earned her Ph.D. and now assists others with PTSD. Dr. Eger wonders to herself what a little Hungarian ballet student has to offer men and women of war:
"I reminded myself that I was there to share the most important truth I know, that the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are - human, imperfect, and whole."
The Choice
is haunting, heart-wrenching and healing.
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Events
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SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, 11 AM - 4 PM
 The
Fifth Annual Clean Air Solutions Fair's mission is to amplify communal engagement and empowerment, spread awareness on our unique air issues, and create an environment for family fun.
How do we clean or adapt to our air?
Events will be happening in the South Court of Trolley Square and inside Weller Book Works:
Torrey House Press
writers will read from
Breathing Stories
, a chapbook of air quality stories that will be handed out on January 22 at the State Legislature. And there will be music bands and other activities. Please, invite your friends to get everyone involved in the answer. It takes all of us!
THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 6:30 PM
 Books and Bridges event:
Kristin Matthews, Professor of English at Brigham Young University, will present from her book Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature. She examines how literature and reading practices reflected Cold War paranoia. The desire to defeat Communism prompted a particular brand of "Americanism" at home. Politicians, educators, cultural critics, and writers linked the activity of reading with being a "good American." Matthews situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 6:30 PM
 Books and Bridges event:
Maeera Shreiber,
Professor of English and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Utah, will discuss the "
Spiritual and Cultural Ideas of the Judeo-Christian Literary Border Zone."
She will explore Jewish writers who engage Christianity in their work - novelists and dramatists such as Amos Oz (Judas), Sholem Asch (God of Vengeance), and Henry Roth (Call It Sleep).
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 6:30 PM
 Books and Bridges event:
David Bokovoy,
Utah State University professor of Religious and Jewish Studies, and his presentation "
The Hebrew Prophets and Social Justice."
An examination of the writings of the Old Testament prophets from the standpoint of social justice, not religious authority. These figures had a lot to say about how society should be constructed to help the disadvantaged and why it's important to speak truth to power and entrenched authority.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 7 PM
 Willy Vlautin will be reading and signing
Don't Skip on Me, as well as playing tracks from the soundtrack he wrote for the novel with his guitar.
Horace Hopper has spent most of his life on a Nevada sheep ranch, but dreams of something bigger. Ashamed of not only his half-Paiute, half-Irish heritage but also of the fact that his parents didn't want him, he feels as if he doesn't truly belong on the ranch, or anywhere. Knowing that he needs to make a name for himself, Horace leaves behind the only loving home he has ever known for Tucson, where he can prove his worth as a championship boxer.
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Rare Book Spotlight
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The Dark Tower: Treachery. 2008 and 2009. All six issues. $50
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Find us on
our website for more about our
events,
book news, and
staff picks.
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