The Staff Shelf: The Last Bookstore
What are booksellers reading?
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 Last Bookstore staff what we should be reading.
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SLIDESHOW: The Last Bookstore Staff Shelf
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- AZA RECOMMENDS: Ohanesian weaves a rich narrative out of her family’s tragic past, plunging the reader deep into a story of sacrifice and survival, love and redemption. Orhan’s Inheritance is a heartrending expression of the pain that lingers from a moment in history unfamiliar to most. It was my first time reading about the Armenian Genocide and Ohanessian’s debut novel was as illuminating as it was captivating.
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- EMMA RECOMMENDS: Joyce’s slow burn of a thriller is a perfect tribute to the novelist himself, who passed away last year. Set in a wintery world that isn’t as idyllic as it first appears, The Silent Land is the story of a couple making sense of a dramatically altered world after an avalanche devastates their ski resort. As the tragedy brings them closer together, sinister forces begin moving against them, threatening to tear them apart forever.
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- JUSTIN RECOMMENDS: Wright’s lines & images form poems that sing the songs of the unsung: the others: the disenfranchised. His work reminds you that the human spirit cannot be extinguished—urging you to embody carpe diem so that you may not waste your life.
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- INGRID RECOMMENDS: Detective Roy Dodge and his “confidential assistant” Gus Twintig are on a hunt for twelve emerald-encrusted clock-face numbers that have been stolen from each story of a thirteen-floor apartment tower, and buried in twelve spots across the country. So where are they and whodunnit? The left-hand page tells each tenant’s story while the right-hand page illustrates it (the floor). If you pick this up, have fun! And caution: do not resist the flow of Pun but do not drown in its eternal recurrence either…
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- TAVIS RECOMMENDS: Brisk and enlightening, this treatise on the ‘artless art’ examines the author’s five year quest to achieve the ‘everyday mind’ through mastery of the bow and arrow.
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- LACY RECOMMENDS: Inspired by Poe’s masterwork “The Raven”, Edgar Gets Ready For Bed is a clever new picture book telling the story of a mother guiding her disobedient son through his nightly ritual. It’s simple text and high-contrast black and white illustrations will appeal to little lovers of literature everywhere!
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- KIM RECOMMENDS: Definitely one of my favorite books to read this year, or maybe perhaps EVER! This books takes you through a weird rock n’ roll dream filled with appearances by Buddy Holly, Beyonce, Etta James, Ian Curtis, The Beatles, Phil Spector, Amy Winehouse and so many more. These stories were so much more personal than what you might read on the internet or in a magazine. Greil Marcus delivers a not-so-typical history of music that you weren’t expecting, but so thankful to have read.
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- LISKA RECOMMENDS: Your antidote to those craft books, Levy’s slim treatise on writing is more focused on why making literature is important, what it actually does for the writer. Written as a response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I write’ Levy probes the emotional life of the writer. Books it’s like: Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love and Other Demons.
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