Dear Readers,
Cowboy Poetry & Prose
We’re excited to announce “An Evening of Poetry and Prose” with Wally McRae and Paul Zarzyski, co-sponsored by the Western Folklife Center, here next Thursday, June 25th at 7pm. This event is free and open to the public.
Wally McRae’s new book of essays, Stick Horses and Other Stories of Ranch Life, and Paul Zarzyski’s poetry collection, Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat, will be available the day of the event. Call or email to reserve your copies today!
Art Walks
The Country Bookshelf will be open until 8pm for each of this season’s Downtown Art Walks. We will be hosting representatives from the Intermountain Opera Association. Downtown Art Walks will be held July 10th, August 14th & September 11th.
Shakespeare in the Parks starts this week.
Want to brush up on the bard? We have copies of both plays being presented by Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona) as well as complete editions and single play versions of many of Shakespeare’s works.
Father’s Day Gift Ideas
Here are some books chosen by our staff as intriguing selections for Father’s Day:
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro (well-known as the creator of the Oscar-winning film Pan’s Labyrinth) and Chuck Hogan. This fun vampire thriller is the anti-Twilight. As a recent IndieBound pick, another bookseller wrote, “The Strain begins with a newly landed plane stopping dead on the runway. When the rescue crews arrive, they discover that all the passengers and crew are dead in their seats, with their necks cut and their bodies devoid of blood. This utterly original novel is absolutely fantastic and like no vampire novel I’ve read. You will love it!”
—Jon Tobin, Saturn Booksellers, Gaylord, MI
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Mary Jane loved listening to the audio version of this book.
The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. This sequel to The Shadow of the Wind is a must-read for those who loved the first. Nancy says it’s darker, more violent, and thoroughly enjoyable.
How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever by Jack Horner.
Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live by Sarah Susanka and Marc Vassallo
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape by Richard Manning
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. This beautifully-written and absorbing first novel is one you can expect to sink into.
Summer Reading Recommendations
by Ariana Paliobagis
(a condensed version of these reviews was recently printed in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s monthly insert, Balance, and is reprinted with permission)
Fiction (hardcover)
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.
This sad, beautiful novel felt like it could have been the story of one of my grandmothers. It is both a character study of a young Irish woman who is sent to America in the 1950s, a woman who always lets others make decisions for her, and an exploration of the meaning and search for home. Well- but never over-written, this is a quiet, absorbing, thoughtful masterpiece.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford.
If you’ve already heard of this novel, it’s for good reason. Ford (who lives in Great Falls, Montana) seems able to effortlessly recreate the past worlds in this haunting tale of Henry Lee, a Chinese-American man who grew up in Seattle’s ethnic neighborhoods during World War II and befriended a Keiko, Japanese-American girl. Lee loses Keiko when she is sent to the internment camps, and forty years later, when Lee is widowed, he tries to cope with his loss by looking back to the love he lost so long ago while trying to repair relations with his grown son.
Fiction (paperback)
I’ve decided that the best way to keep cool on hot summer days is to pick up one of the many fabulous Scandinavian mysteries now available in translation. My current favorites are the suspense-filled Detective Kurt Wallander books by Henning Mankell. Wallander is a philosophically-inclined opera lover trying to understand the cultural and social changes of late 20th century Sweden while racing to solve what at first appear to be inexplicable murders.
Social critiques and social justice are also important themes running through the works of fellow Swedish authors Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the upcoming The Girl Who Played with Fire) and Kjell Eriksson (The Princess of Burundi, The Cruel Stars of the Night, and The Demon of Dakar) and the Icelandic wonder Arnaldur Indridason whose Silence of the Grave kept me from completing all other tasks until the final page.
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely.
Although this hilarious novel does not debut until July, it’s well worth waiting for. Pete Tarslaw is a well-educated young man with a talent for words, so why is he slaving away writing the college entrance essays of those less literate for peanuts? He’s not, at least not for long. After being fired from this dubious job, Tarslaw decides that it can’t be that hard to write a sappy literary bestseller along the lines of The Bridges of Madison County to make money, earn fame, and shame his ex-girlfriend at her upcoming nuptials. So he starts collecting the cliches and pounding out mellifluous phrases. Though critiquing the literary world is easy, you’ll find yourself laughing the whole way through the bookworld rollercoaster Hely lays out for his protagonist.
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen.
Galchen’s highly intelligent first novel captivated me from the very beginning: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” From there we get the story of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist who believes that his wife, Rema, has disappeared and an almost perfect duplicate has taken her place. As he searches for the real Rema, he becomes convinced that her disappearance is somehow linked to the disappearance two days prior of his patient, Harvey, who believes he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meterology with the power and duty to control small-scale weather patterns. Galchen’s work has garnered comparisons to Murakami and Borges. In this meditation on love, the heart, the humor, and the carefully observed detail have not gone missing.
Nonfiction/Memoir (hardcover)
Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities & Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman.
This delightful essay collection moves swiftly from humorous and breezy to somber, heart-rending, defiant and controversial, as it reflects upon, critiques, and sometimes simply records a myriad of motherhood moments. I greatly appreciated this book because I think all mothers, at some point, feel that we’re not up to the task, that we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t measure up, and that our poor children will be ruined by something we’ve said or done or not said or not done. Waldman puts these anxieties into perspective, which comforted, challenged, and entertained me.
Nonfiction/Memoir (paperback)
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn.
Following in the steps of other cozy culinary memoirs (think Julie and Julia which has been turned into a feature film), Flinn’s account of her time at Le Cordon Bleu focuses on food and the culinary arts but also weaves in her story of recreating her life after an unexpected job loss and finding love (and a rather storybook life in Paris). Recipes are included. Light, fun to read, and atmospheric. This made me want to reread Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast which is being reissued this summer in a restored edition.
Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh.
I didn’t know what to expect from this book, but I loved what I got. Venkatesh (now a sociology professor at Columbia) starts his tale as a naïve graduate student from the middle-class suburbs of California who becomes immersed in the life of Chicago’s housing projects. As he tries to understand gangs, poverty, race relations and the underground economy, Venkatesh provides the reader with a rare and intimate account that never glosses over the complexity of these issues. And yes, he does get the opportunity to be a gang leader for a day, but in case you were worried, he sets clear limits of what he is and is not willing to do in the course of this day. This highly readable (and often suspense-filled) book is likely to spark some fascinating conversations.
Best,
The Country Bookshelf staff
