Bookmarks, a new and used bookstore coming to downtown Midland, Mich., is set to open in a limited capacity this coming Saturday, April 1, MLive reported.

Owner Tricia Crivac, who also owns a bookkeeping and accounting service, plans to have the store open three days per week for the month of April. In May, the schedule will expand to six days per week, and Crivac will host a grand opening celebration that month.

Located at 126 Townsend St., the 880-square-foot store will carry general-interest books for all ages. The opening inventory will consist of about 2,000 titles, along with games, puzzles, greeting cards and other sidelines, and the store's children's area has a Chronicles of Narnia theme.

"I'm just excited to get the doors open and start talking books with people," Crivac told MLive.

Mark Rubbo

At the end of June, Mark Rubbo is retiring as managing director of Readings, which has eight bookstores in and around Melbourne, Australia, Books + Publishing reported. He will become chair of the Readings board. Joe Rubbo, his son and operations manager, will run the business.

"We have been working on the transition for a few years, but Covid interrupted that," Mark Rubbo told Books + Publishing. "Joe is as passionate about Reading as I, and I feel very confident that it will be in good hands."

Mark Rubbo has owned Readings since 1976, expanding it over the years and making it one of the preeminent bookstores in Australia. Readings was the inaugural winner of the London Book Fair's international Bookstore of the Year Award in 2016 and has received multiple bookshop of the year awards in Australia. Rubbo is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association (now BookPeople) and received a Medal of the Order of Australia. He is a gifted bookseller and has always been a warm, welcoming, thoughtful host to various American visitors. We're glad he's staying involved in Readings.

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The London Book Fair  is "investigating if there is a possibility to move the LBF dates" for 2024 due to a near-clash in scheduling of the Bologna Children's Book Fair, LBF director Gareth Rapley told the Bookseller. BCBF recently announced that next year's fair would take place April 8-11, putting it close to LBF's scheduled April 16-18 dates.

"We released our dates for the London Book Fair 2024 in October 2022. We were only made aware of Bologna Children's Book Fair 2024 dates in March 2023, and the dates were decided without prior consultation with LBF," Rapley said, adding that any rescheduling is dependent on the availability of the venue, Olympia London. "In any event, we will strive to ensure minimal disruption to our visitors. It is a shame that the issue around dates seems to be splitting the industry, forcing people to choose one fair over the other."

BCBF director Eleana Pasoli observed: "BolognaFiere's calendar is particularly busy in March due to the presence of two very large B2B trade fairs, which occupy the entire fairground plus some additional temporary halls built specifically to accommodate them. Logistically, therefore, the set-up and dismantling times are long and impose a shift of the other trade shows to April."

She added the fair has also heard "favorable opinions from long haul overseas exhibitors, for whom the proximity of the fairs is a positive aspect.... Of course, we are in constant dialogue with all the organizers of the national collective stands and also with individual exhibitors to ameliorate their experience as far as possible. When Bologna and LBF were as close in dateline once before, we worked closely together on logistics for mutual exhibitors and look forward to doing so again."

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In Canada, browsing for books is making a comeback, according to data from the Canadian Book Consumer survey, in anticipation of the release of the Canadian Book Consumer Study 2022 next month. BookNet Canada reported that the wane of the Covid-19 pandemic "also marked the rise of something else--in-person browsing for books. And this return to book browsing makes a difference in book buying and borrowing.

In 2022, 37% of Canadian book buyers felt that Covid-19 was affecting their book buying, down from 47% in 2021 and 45% in 2020. Out of all the book buyers surveyed last year, 64% visited a bookstore in person, up from 55% in 2021 and 54% in 2020. Year over year, most book buyers visited a bookstore in-person at least one to four times--a percentage that increased 38% from 2020 to 2022.

Frequent visits were not as popular, with only 5% of respondents visiting a bookstore in person five to nine times in 2021 and 2022 compared to 6% in 2020. In addition, those visiting a bookstore 10 to 14 times showed a downward trend from 4% (2020) to 3% (2021) to 1% (2022). 

The percentage of online bookstore visits by Canadian book buyers has remained relatively consistent: 73% in 2020, 76% in 2021, and 73% in 2022 visited a bookstore online at least once.

The top four reasons book buyers visited in-store in 2022 were related to browsing:

• Browse books to pass time: 29% (up 30% from 2021 to 2022)
• Browse for book deals and sales: 26% (up 28% from 2021 to 2022)
• Browse displays and shelves for books to buy: 26% (up 20% from 2021 to 2022)
• Browse new releases: 23% (up 10% from 2021 to 2022)

Out of all the book purchases tracked through the Canadian Book Consumer survey in 2022, 20% of Canadian book buyers became aware of the book they bought by searching or browsing either online or in-person. Of those book buyers, 33% discovered the book they bought by browsing in-store--up 38% from 2020.

Of all book purchases in 2022, 18% were impulse buys, up 13% from  2021. The number of purchases where the book buyer was planning to buy a book at that specific time, but not a particular book, also increased to 18%, up 6% from the year before. The number of purchases where buyers had planned to buy a particular book, but not necessarily at a specific time, remained the same for both years (25%). And the number of book buyers who had planned to buy a particular book at a specific time decreased to 36%, down 8%. --Robert Gray

Publishers Weekly has announced the finalists for the 2023 Bookstore of the Year and Sales Representative of the Year awards.

The Bookstore of the Year finalists are: Edmonds Bookshop in Edmonds, Wash.; Harvey's Tales in Geneva, Ill.; Interabang Books in Dallas, Tex.; Main Street Books in Lafayette, Ind.; and Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, Pa.

The Sales Rep of the Year finalists are: Emily Bates, Penguin Random House; Mark Fleeman, Fujii Associates; Julie Isgrigg, Hachette Book Group; Tom Leigh, Macmillan; and Ty Wilson, PGW/Two Rivers.

The winners will be announced on May 22 during the U.S. Book Show.

Scottish bookseller Ainslie Thin, former chair and joint managing director at James Thin Ltd., died February 24. He was 89. The Bookseller reported that Thin earned a degree in chemistry from Edinburgh University but chose a different career path, training at Blackwell's in Oxford and Bristol. He went on to join the main Thin Ltd. bookshop at South Bridge, Edinburgh, in March 1958, where he worked with his cousin, Jimmy Thin. 

Ainslie Thin made an effort to modernize the business, and Thin's was "the first bookshop chain to introduce computing into its operations. It was also one of the first to engage in steady expansion, first throughout Scotland and then south of the border," the Bookseller noted.

During his career, Thin was a director and chairman of Book Tokens, president of the Booksellers Association of the U.K. and Ireland, and director and treasurer of the Edinburgh International Book Festival for 15 years. He was also a director of BookTrust in England and a member of the National Trust for Scotland Merchandising Committee. 

Porter Square Books in Boston, Mass., hosted the launch of Elizabeth Shick's AWP Award-winning debut novel, The Golden Land (New Issues Poetry & Prose). Proceeds from the event benefited the local organization Boston Free Burma, which provided rangoon sweet tea and light bites. Shick was joined in conversation by author Michael Lowenthal, and the event was well-attended by local readers and members of Boston Free Burma. Expat and development worker Shick is originally from Newton, Mass., and has an MFA from Cambridge's Lesley University.

"Today's the day! Dog Man 11 is out today and @chomsky_thebookstoredog is excited! Come grab the latest installment of Dog Man and get a free Dog Man bookmark with purchase of the new book!" Backwater Books, Ellicott City, Md., posted on Facebook.

"She said yes! We love a surprise proposal! Congrats to @wristmas and @frecklesandlashes I bet that's a book you'll keep on the shelf for years to come... swipe to see the happy couple," the Strand bookstore, New York, N.Y., posted on Instagram. 

Seventy Times Seven by Alex Mar (Penguin Press).

Today:
Fresh Air: Clint Smith, author of Above Ground (Little, Brown, $27, 9780316543033). Smith will also be on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert tomorrow.

Universal Television is developing a TV series adaptation of Diane Marie Brown's debut novel Black Candle Women with Jenna Bush Hager, under her production banner Thousand Voices, Deadline reported. Hager is teaming with Bel-Air showrunner Carla Banks Waddles and Good Girls creator Jenna Bans for the project.

Waddles will write and executive produce the adaptation, with Bans exec producing through her Minnesota Logging Company, along with the company's head of television, Casey Kyber. Hager will also executive produce with president of Thousand Voices, Ben Spector.

"I am thrilled that my book will not only be adapted but also be in such incredibly talented hands. I'm so excited to see these characters that have lived in my head for so long brought to life on screen," said Brown.

Added Hager: "Diane's magical, poetic novel captured my imagination from the first page. I am thrilled to partner with the indomitable Carla to bring the four generations of Montrose women to viewers. We are also thrilled that Jenna and Casey have joined us alongside our partners at UTV."

The winner of the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize Book of the Year is Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (published by Pantheon in the U.S.), who also won in the nonfiction category. Other category winners are, in fiction, Scary Monsters: A Novel in Two Parts by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult), and, in poetry, Quiet: Poems by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (Knopf). The overall winner receives £30,000 (about $37,000) and the category winners receive £2,000 (about $2,500). The prize is open to all works of literature written in English and published in the U.K.

Judges commented on Constructing a Nervous System, "Life as a living art. A joyous, moving and inventive read." Concerning Scary Monsters, they said, "A sublime novel that slips, fascinates and terrifies at once. De Kretser's Scary Monsters deserves to be read again and again." And about Quiet, they wrote: "Impresses with its strength and power, its ingenious investigation of inner life, the tensions and surprises within. The book's quiet balance shook us to the core."

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A shortlist has been released for the €100,000 (about $108,320) Dublin Literary Award, sponsored by Dublin City Council to honor a single work of fiction published in English. The finalists, nominated by librarians worldwide, features authors who are American, Mexican, German, Croatian, and Canadian-Vietnamese. The winner will be named May 25, as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin. This year's shortlisted titles are: 

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
The Trees by Percival Everett
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, translated by Jo Heinrich
Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić
Em by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

photo: John Earle

William Landay is the author of the novels Defending Jacob, which won the Strand Critics Award for best mystery novel; The Strangler, listed as a best crime novel of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Daily Telegraph and others; and Mission Flats, winner of the Dagger Award for best first crime novel. A former assistant district attorney, he lives in Boston. His fourth novel, All That Is Mine I Carry with Me (Bantam), is a family drama/psychological thriller that spans decades.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

What if I told you a crime story so "true" and so honest that it feels more like a memory than a novel?

On your nightstand now: 

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff. Brilliant. The great media manipulator and dirty trickster--the true indispensable man of the Revolution, now mostly forgotten--forced out of the shadows where he preferred to remain, into the spotlight at last. (Key takeaway: he was never called Sam, always Samuel. "Sam Adams" is only a brand of beer.)

Favorite book when you were a child:

Let's say when I was a young man rather than a child, because I don't remember any books from early childhood.

The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham. Like a lot of men in their 20s, I wanted to be like Larry Darrell, but I wasn't as brave.

Your top five authors:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene (particularly The End of the Affair), Ian McEwan, J.D. Salinger.

But if you ask me again tomorrow, I may give you a different list. (Jane Austen, Philip Roth, John Updike, Colm Tóibín, George Orwell, Hilary Mantel...)

Book you've faked reading:

Can't think of one off the top of my head, but I'm sure I've done this many times. I'm a painfully slow reader, and as I've gotten older, I've become less determined to push through to the end of a book that I'm not enjoying. So I have lots of candidates. On the other hand, I don't think there's any stigma in skipping the classics if you're not enjoying them. Personally I've made multiple runs at War and Peace and Middlemarch, and never penetrated either one. Maybe someday. (I'm young yet.)

Books you're an evangelist for:

Hilary Mantel's Cromwell [Wolf Hall] series. J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Jaws. One of the all-time great covers. (Honorable mention: all the pulpy Mickey Spillane paperbacks my dad kept in the basement. Thanks, Dad.)

Book you hid from your parents:

Never hid a book from my parents. A few magazines maybe, but that's a different story.

Book that changed your life:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Not for the book itself, though, but for when it came into my life. I read Lonesome Dove when I was in law school, and it quickly became one of my all-time favorites. (Still is.) Of course, I was reading dry-as-dust legal writing all day and roaming the range with Gus and Call at night, so the contrast could not have been sharper. I had a bookish classmate who also loved Lonesome Dove, and we got into a long discussion about the relative merits of novel-writing vs. lawyering. The issue was: Is it better to be a lawyer or a novelist? The lawyer, no matter how masterful, will create nothing enduring or beautiful, just a few virtuosic, ephemeral, largely unwitnessed performances in court, or a few legal briefs to be read once and tossed in the trash. The novelist, it's true, probably won't create anything of lasting worth, either. But he might, just might leave that one immortal, transcendent book like Lonesome Dove. Shorter version: Would you rather be F. Lee Bailey or Larry McMurtry? To me, the answer was obvious. I had not even considered writing novels before then. After, I could not stop thinking about it. And thus America lost what it so desperately needs: another lawyer.

Honorable mention: The Sun Also Rises, which precipitated a Lost Generation fetish and a deeply held conviction that all my problems would vanish if I could only go to Paris like Hemingway. Spoiler alert: they did not.

Favorite line from a book:

Again, it's hard to pick just one. But let's go with this:

"It's me jaysis name."

The line is from Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. I'm sure I'm not spelling it the way Roddy did, and I can't remember which character said it either. But I remember reading that line and laughing out loud. The writing was so vivid and stylish and fun, and the dialogue was rendered so credibly, that you could hear the voices in your head. I mean that literally: it was a kind of auditory experience. I turned to a friend sitting nearby and said out loud, "It's me jaysis name!" I'd give my right arm to have written that line.

Five books you'll never part with:

I would have no problem giving away any book. One thing that writing has taught me is that a book exists apart from any particular physical copy of it. I am not a collector. I think books should be passed around and reread constantly. We should not be precious about books as things; we should think of them as experiences. We should wear them out, like old jeans. Nothing is as lovely as a worn-out book.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Gatsby.

One of the mistakes we make in teaching kids to love literature is putting Great Books in front of them at an age when they are unlikely to appreciate them. I must have read The Great Gatsby first as a high-school freshman, maybe even in eighth grade. I just was not ready to feel the book then, to be moved by it as I would be now, both its artistry and its theme, the sorrow and regret of looking back in time.

Could it be that what's behind a tornado's fury isn't a meteorological imperative but an anger management problem? So conjectures Drew Beckmeyer (The Long Island) in I Am a Tornado, which is so hilarious and psychologically astute that any other authors contemplating a picture book about a cow playing therapist to a whirling windstorm should probably think twice, as their offering is unlikely to measure up to this one.

The anthropomorphized tornado at the book's center is as egotistical as one might expect. "I AM A TORNADO," it announces as it blows by the animals ("Ouch"; "Oof"; "Ack"; "Help") in its path. "I AM SO BIG AND I AM SPINNING SO FAST," the tornado says as it swallows up a cow ("Oh no"). The cow's plea for mercy--"Could you put me down?"--is rebuffed: "NO. WATCH THIS!" The tornado guiltlessly takes out a house. Notes the cow, "Hey, someone could've been in there." The tornado is unmoved: "I DON'T CARE."

The cow, still ensnared by the fiendish squall, tries a new tack: "Tornado, is everything okay?" The tornado flatly denies that it could be having any issues: "WHY WOULD I NOT BE OKAY?" The cow continues to press; the tornado continues to practice denial. Through it all, the cow is ceaselessly compassionate, telling some meddling scientists to back off and reassuring the tornado, "With all these violently changing cold winds high in the sky, and that warm air rising from the ground, I can see how it would make anyone a little irritable." Finally, the tornado lets down its guard, hinting at an abandonment issue: "IF I DID DECIDE TO PUT YOU DOWN, WOULD YOU RUN AWAY?"

It's all as wonderfully wacky as it sounds, the essential lesson about the importance of being honest with oneself never eclipsing the comedy at the book's heart. Working in chunkily cut paper in blunt colors against vivid backdrops, Beckmeyer injects some science into the silly, using arrows to indicate that wind results from the collision between warm air and cold air, creating a "swirling rage funnel." In Beckmeyer's interpretation, that rage funnel resembles a chocolate-colored cone with googly eyes under Eugene Levy eyebrows. I Am a Tornado may well encourage some young readers to say "I am upset" instead of becoming destructive storms of flesh-and-blood emotion, but if that fails, at least the book will make them stop and smile. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

Shelf Talker: This hilarious and psychologically astute picture book conjectures that an anger management problem is behind a tornado's fury.