The Staff Shelf: Newtonville Books

When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at Newtonville Books what’s on their shelves.

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SLIDESHOW: Newtonville Books Staff Shelf

: MELISSA RECOMMENDS: The first time I read this I was 15 and had snuck it off my father’s bookshelf. The story captivated me entirely, and my father never saw the book again. Part spy story, part love story, this novel consists of four overlapping narratives that describe an Israeli secret agent’s solitary life and his obsessive love for an English girl. It’s complex, intriguing, and original.

: NICOLLE RECOMMENDS: In a future where we’ve run out of natural resources, a teenaged boy named Nailer must break down old ships in order to reuse the material. Nailer is still small enough to fit into tight ducts and collect copper wire, but soon he’ll be too big and everything hangs on his ability to join a group of adults or find a pocket of crude oil within the belly of the ghost ships. A perfect gift for the teenager in your life.

: MATT RECOMMENDS: The narrator of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is Ben Lerner. But Lerner as a writer (and a narrator) is witty, acerbic, self-deprecating, and exceedingly intelligent. We follow him as he writes this novel (meta!) tutors a third-grader, tries to help his best friend conceive, and lives through two superstorms that hit New York City. By turns novel, poem, science project, and philosophical manifesto on art’s relation to its own commodification, Lerner’s book is an absolute pleasure.

: BETSY RECOMMENDS: An ominous yet hopeful tale of a young girl grasping to find her way. Haunted by her traumatic past, twenty-year old Joy is surviving an epidemically-ridden America, immune to the outbreak though surrounded by casualties. We follow Joy through the halls of a sinister research hospital nestled in rural Kansas as she endures mysterious treatments; we break out with her, clues in hand to locate her estranged mother; and we get lost along a cross-country route, weaving through fellow travelers all confronting sickness, death, memory, legacy, and God.

: MARY RECOMMENDS: I first encountered Calvino in college when a cute boy mentioned him and I pretended to be a fan, though I had, embarrassingly, never heard of him. It didn’t work out with the boy, but I fell in love with Calvino, who is weird and wonderful. The stories in this collection — some translated from the Italian for the first time, some re-united here with their thematic brethren –are strange and lovely tales that unite a search for cosmic understanding with a human warmth and humor.

: DEB RECOMMENDS: In about 200 pages (including notes and acknowledgements) Eula Biss presents a clear, cogent, measured and brilliant exploration of a perplexingly controversial topic: vaccination. Beginning with the ancient homes of our darkest fears, mythology and fairy tales, Biss opens doors to history, reason and experience, including her own as a first-time parent. The acuity with which she makes connections by means of allusion, drilled-down research, and metaphor made me reread many lines and pages just for the wonder of their words.