The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

This was my book club’s latest selection. I'd been interested in it given that it's been on the NYT best seller list for months. I really enjoyed this story of a aging actress who decides to tell her life story to a novice magazine writer, revealing for the first time who the love of her life was.

Remainders of the day: A bookshop diary, by Shaun Bythell

 

Bythell (Confessions of a Bookseller) is the owner of Scotland's largest used bookstore, which has more than 100,000 books in stock. The Bookshop is located in Wigtown, a small town in southwest Scotland that has transformed itself from a declining industrial center to a haven for booklovers.

With Bythell's fourth book (after Seven Kinds of People You Meet in Bookshops) about his experiences as a bookstore owner, he shares amusing and wry anecdotes about the ins and outs of running a secondhand bookstore. Written in diary form, this book covers a year, beginning in February 2016.

The author takes readers along with him to appraise and buy collections, and he describes his everyday encounters with local characters, eccentric employees, and customers who both buy and sell books. As one of the organizers of the annual Wigtown Book Festival, Bythell reveals the planning that goes into making such an event successful.

His dry humor and skeptical view of humanity make for a very funny take on his business. This is a charming look at a small-town bookstore, its owner, and the people he meets.

Originally published in Library Journal 147:11 (2022): 115.

Election, by Tom Perrotta

 

This was my book club's August pick; one of our members wanted to read it in anticipation of the sequel. It was a quick and very amusing take on a high school election, made into a movie decades ago with Reese Whitherspoon in the lead role. Based on my memory of the film, it followed the book very closely.

Making the list: a cultural history of the American bestseller, 1900-1999, by Michael Korda

 

I picked up this book in the Books about Books section of the Dog Ears Used Bookstore in Hoosick, NY a couple of weeks ago. It gives the history of the bestseller lists and includes the lists for every year of the 20th century. Based mostly on the Publishers Weekly lists, it reveals trends in American interests, showing that they haven't changed all that much in the last hundred years. Nonfiction lists reflect the times (war, political scandals, celebrity biographies), but also include diet, health, and cooking. Fiction lists went from novels geared primarily toward women in the early part of the century to bigger books that were marketed at both men and women. Author Michael Korda demonstrates that the fiction list has become much more difficult to break into as popular authors developed a rhythm of publishing a book a year and came to dominate the bestseller lists year after year. The book also touches upon changes in both publishing and bookselling, but ends without touching upon Amazon or other online retailers, and just briefly mentions e-books and how they might change the landscape. Korda devotes a chapter to each decade, introducing it with an essay that points out the highlights, then providing the lists by year. In the early years there was only a fiction list, but nonfiction was added in 1912. Both the fiction and nonfiction lists were expanded from 10 titles to 15 in 1978.