Shelf Awareness for Thursday, December 22, 2005


William Morrow & Company: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

Del Rey Books: Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

Peachtree Teen: Romantic YA Novels Coming Soon From Peachtree Teen!

Watkins Publishing: She Fights Back: Using Self-Defence Psychology to Reclaim Your Power by Joanna Ziobronowicz

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

News

Notes: Patriot Act Extended; Atlanta's Charis in Trouble

Yesterday the Senate voted to extend the Patriot Act for six months to June 30, to give time to consider yet again adding measures to protect civil liberties. President Bush indicated he will sign the extension and continue to fight to make permanent the Patriot Act in its present form.

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One of the best known feminist bookstores in the country, Charis Books & More, Atlanta, Ga., is in trouble, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Co-owner and founder Linda Bryant told the paper that sales have been decreasing for five years, particularly in the past year after the opening of a Barnes & Noble in the neighborhood.

The Southern Voice reported that the 31-year-old store sent an e-mail earlier this month to customers indicating it needs to boost sales 20% and raise $50,000 in capital. Sales are down 10% this year and 35% in the past five years. Co-owner Sara Look told Southern Voice that she and Bryant have been shouldering the financial burden personally, but can't continue for long.

"I'm not asking people to save us," Look said. "What I want to know is, in this culture, do people still value and want there to be feminist bookstores? . . . If people really want us, they need to support us."

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Cool idea of the day: to help customers with last-minute Christmas and Hanukkah shopping, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, Conn., will open on Saturday at 7 a.m. (The store will close at 4 p.m.)

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New York City's Penn Station may be jammed with more people than usual, using trains instead of subways and busses to commute to and from Queens and Brooklyn, but this hasn't helped business, according to New York Newsday. To the contrary, at Penn Books, one of several bookstores in the huge station, sales were down 30% on Tuesday, the first day of New York City's transit strike, compared to a year ago and down "a bit" yesterday. Owner Craig Newman said that the week before Christmas sales usually double, "with commuters snapping up last-minute gifts of fiction, bestsellers and the latest historical biographies."

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The Santa Monica Mirror has a glance at the new Santa Monica Public Library, which opens officially on January 7. The 104,000-sq.-ft. building is environmentally friendly, has community rooms, an auditorium, a reading room, a gallery, a café, a Friends of the Library bookstore and a view of the ocean through a two-story window wall. The Santa Monica Historical Museum also has space in the building.

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After draining the vampire vein, Anne Rice is writing about Jesus Christ, which has caused some unusual marketing problems for her and her publisher, Knopf, as dissected in today's Wall Street Journal. "Since Christ the Lord was published November 1, several religious retailers have refused to carry it," the paper wrote. "Some booksellers and media outlets have complained that the book isn't based on the Scriptures. Others have raised concerns about Ms. Rice's lack of theological credentials." Still, a marketing campaign launched in January, a long author's note about her faith, a lack of mention of Rice's vampire books, a first interview with Religion News Service, among other strategies, have helped Christ the Lord rise onto bestseller lists. After six printings, it has 375,000 copies in print.

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The Poughkeepsie Journal offers another round about the Spotty Dog Books & Ale, Hudson, N.Y., which opened in June and is a combination bookstore, art supply store and beer and wine bar. Referring to co-owner Kelley Drahushuk's connection to the company that crafts the beer sold at the Spotty Dog, co-owner Alan Coon explained the business's genesis: "There was beer in the family and Hudson needed a bookstore."

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The San Diego Tribune writes about writing workshops conducted each month at Book Works in Del Mar by Jill Badonsky, author of The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard) (Gotham).

"With the coffee shop next door and the ambience, it's a great place to get inspired to write," Badonsky told the paper, which noted that "dark chocolate and cookies are served at each workshop for additional inspiration."


Now Streaming on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME: A Gentleman in Moscow


For Cornerstone Books, Community Is Keystone

Just in time for one of the biggest sales weeks of the year, Cornerstone Books opened officially on Monday in downtown Salem, Mass., in the renovated Laundry Building--renamed Derby Lofts--that now houses several other businesses and 54 condos.

Exceedingly busy owner Gilbert Pili described the 3,000-sq.-ft. Cornerstone to Shelf Awareness as a general bookstore "with a little bit of everything." That consists of 14,000 book and audiobooks as well as music CDs, DVDs and board and computer games that "fit in with genres," as Pili said. For example, the mystery section includes the PBS Sherlock Holmes series and the game Myst. Cornerstone aims to be selective so that, as the store puts it on its Web site, "you won't find the latest Britney Spears album (although we can get that for you, too), but you might find a Duke Ellington classic or the latest world album from Ali Farka Toure." Already the site has listed a book, game, video and album of the week.

Cornerstone has a café serving coffee and baked goods, wi-fi access, a public access computer and a fireplace. Pili aims to make Cornerstone a place where community groups can meet and plans to host book clubs, chess tournaments, author signings, lectures, discussions, concerts and children's storytelling events.

"In the corporate world for 15-20 years," Pili is new to bookselling but participated in a Paz & Associates Opening a Bookstore workshop, among other educational initiatives, and spent three years planning for and setting up the store. His staff has bookselling experience.

Pili had hoped to open the store before the summer, but unexpected structural problems led to lengthy delays. Commenting on the opening, he said, "It's nice finally to control one's own destiny rather than have it all controlled by contractors and construction workers."

Cornerstone Books is located at 45 Lafayette St., Salem, Mass. 01970; 617-218-2931; fax 617-812-2562; info@cornerstonebooks-salem.com; www.cornerstonebooks-salem.com.


GLOW: Greystone Books: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe, illustrated by Reuben Coe


Media and Movies

This Weekend on Book TV: Oxford's History of the U.S.

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, December 24

10:45 a.m. History on Book TV. A panel of authors who have written books for Oxford University Press's History of the United States series talk about the periods they covered. The panel is moderated by John Avlon, columnist for the New York Sun and author of Independent Nation. Participants are:

  • David Kennedy, author of Freedom from Fear
  • James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
  • Robert Middlekauff, author of The Glorious Cause
  • James T. Patterson, author of Restless Giant and Grand Expectations

8 p.m. After Words. Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, who has written cover stories on religious issues and the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, interviews George Weigel, whose new book is God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church (HarperCollins, $26.95, 0066213312). (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

Sunday, December 25 (Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!)

12 p.m. Public Lives. In an event held at Olsson's in Washington, D.C., Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International and author of Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Gotham, $26, 1592401562), talks about her unusual upbringing: her father was Hussein's personal pilot. Includes Q&A.


BINC: Apply Now to The Susan Kamil Scholarship for Emerging Writers!


Media Heat: Food, Saint Nick, Being Jewish

Tomorrow morning Good Morning America talks food with Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore (Scribner, $40, 0684800012).

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Tomorrow morning on Morning Edition: Jeremy Seal, author of Nicholas: The Epic Journey from Saint to Santa Claus (Bloomsbury, $24.95, 1582344191).

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On Saturday morning the Early Show shares time with Don Pintabona, author of Shared Table Cooking with Spirit for Family and Friends (Random House, $35, 0375509224).

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On Monday morning on Good Morning America: Abigail Pogrebin, author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (Broadway Books, $24.95, 0767916123).


Books & Authors

S.F. Chronicle Dishes Up Cookbook Recommendations

The San Francisco Chronicle recommends some "delicious" cookbooks published this fall:

  • The New American Cooking by Joan Nathan (Knopf, $35), "a multiethnic departure for the veteran author best known for Jewish Cooking in America" that focuses on "the foods that have migrated to our shores in the suitcases, backpacks and, most of all, the culinary memories of new Americans."
  • Emeril's Delmonico by Emeril Lagasse (Morrow, $29.95), which "celebrates the 110-year history of this legendary New Orleans restaurant that was named after New York Delmonico's (founded in 1827), but evolved into a temple to Creole cuisine." The author took over the restaurant in 1997 and reopened it--after a Katrina-caused closing--December 8 for dinners.
  • How to Cook Italian by Giuliano Hazan (Scribner, $35), from the son of "legendary Italian cooking teacher and author Marcella Hazan and wine honcho and teacher Victor Hazan." Hazan "starts with unfussy advice on utensils and techniques and proceeds to the kind of gutsy but rarely complicated recipes that are the hallmark of true and traditional Italian home cooking."
  • La Bonne Cuisine by Madame E. Saint-Ange, translated by Paul Aratow (Ten Speed Press, $40). "The gift for the serious cookbook lover who has everything," this title was first published in 1927 and is "to French cooks what Joy of Cooking has been to generations of Americans."
  • Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 40th Anniversary Edition by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (Knopf, $40), "a faithful reproduction of the book that changed the way America cooks and eats."

Stocking stuffers

  • Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer (Artisan, $22.95), "a handsomely illustrated, less costly version of ArtisanBaking Across America [and] great for devoted bread lovers and bakers, but not for the bread machine crowd."
  • The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feeding Your Baby & Toddler by Elizabeth M. Ward (Alpha, $16.95), "chock-full of health and safety advice by this seasoned nutrition consultant/writer. . . . The recipes--some no more than improvements on store-bought foods such as frozen pizza--are for simple fare that in many instances lend themselves to meals for the whole family."



The Bestsellers

Abebooks.com's Top 20 Titles of 2005

The top titles on Abebooks.com's list of bestselling books in 2005 mirror the titles on new book bestseller lists in the past few years. (Only No. 1 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published this year.) But the marketplace for new, used, rare and oop books also has some titles that don't show up on "regular" lists.

Most notably, college textbooks graduated to a major category, accounting for 30 of the top 100 titles. The most popular textbook subjects were business, science and math. Richard Davies of Abebooks attributed this concentration in part to business students' savvy about e-commerce, since that is now a key component of most business classes. In the case of science, those "students are simply burdened with some of the most expensive textbooks around." (Abebooks intends to raise awareness about its services by sending "street teams" to 16 U.S. campuses in January.)

There was what Abebooks called "a continuing strong demand" for religious books, which resulted in the inclusion of The Purpose Driven Life, Conversations with God and the Ultra Trim Bible in the top 20. Concerning the Ultra Trim Bible, Davies said he thought that with the spread of palm-sized electronic devices like iPods and BlackBerrys, Christians saw the light and want to carry the Bible with them in the same convenient way.

One other note: To Kill a Mockingbird remains "eternally popular."

Abebooks.com's bestselling books in 2005:

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
2. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
3. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
4. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
5. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
6. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
7. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
8. Organizational Behavior by Stephen P. Robbins
9. Ultra Trim Bible
10. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Kidd Monk
11. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
12. Fish!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results by Stephen Lundin
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
14. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
15. The Norton Anthology of English Literature by M.H. Abrams
16. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
17. Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
18. Productions/Operations Management by William J. Stevenson
19. Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
20. Microbiology by Lansing M. Prescott et al.


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