All you have to do is stroll over to our Staff Recommends case to see that the booksellers of Booksmith have widely varying reading tastes.  And so, when a customer comes in the front doors asking for a “summer read,” they should not be surprised to find that while one bookseller’s idea of a book for the beach is a slim novel that simultaneously traces the lives of two murdered lovers forward from the moment they meet, back from the moment they die, and again forward, in enthrallingly specific scientific detail, from the very moment of their death (Being Dead by Jim Crace), another’s may be Me Write Book, by Bigfoot.  What I mean is, don’t hesitate to ask us for suggestions.  We pretty much live for it.  And we're probably going to surprise you.
 
Some heavy stories will be told in the Writers & Readers Room this week, with Dick Lehr (of Black Mass fame) turning up with his charged account of events inside the BPD; Joan Wickersham with her utterly unique index of her father’s life and his suicide; and Boston-based PEN Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh with The Condition. Read on for all the details.
Check out this historic photo-op from last week's event with Nelson George.
 
We’ve got plenty of new engagement calendars, including The Jewish Calendar from The Jewish Museum in New York, a calendar that sells fast every year.  Calendars are now at the head of aisle 3 on the left...just ask a bookseller if you can't find a section in the store. We realize how big the changes are now that we have all those new bookcases!

And for those Dan Brown fanatics among you who can't wait for September 15th to roll around, you can check out the twitter page for his next novel, The Lost Symbol.

Almost enough reputable people have told me that Jincy Willett’s Jenny & The Jaws of Life is a comic masterpiece to make me crack it open, but to be honest, I won’t read it until it shows up on The Daily Show.  But I encourage you to, especially at only $4.99.  A reviewer in the Chicago Tribune puts it, “She uses words with devastating preciseness.” devastatingly precise humor is right up my alley...maybe I shouldn't wait any longer.
 
The Professor and the Housekeeper has been a mainstay on our bestseller list here in Brookline for weeks and weeks, and if you are one of the multitude who have been moved to wonder by the elegant prose of Yoko Ogawa, why not pick up a different kind of summer read from the same author, a book comprised of, as Aimee Bender says, “three beautifully drawn and genuinely eerie” stories? 

Time magazine's art critic for more than a quarter century and renowned art historian Robert Hughes' book American Visions tells the story from the very first invaders and settlers of the New World, all the way up through the 1990's. Weaving together the movements, the artists, the buyers, and the world events that both shaped the work and was shaped by it, to call this five pound book "epic" is almost an understatement.

It began as a Photoshop mistake on my part, but now, looking at the book cover displayed upside down, it feels appropriate, and I don't think I'll fix it. Robert Sullivan's amazing book does a lot to raise the lowly rat up to glory, or something close to it, anyway. Rats, along with pigeons, are our fellow city dwellers, and they deserve the sympathetic reportage that is provided within this amazing book. It takes a certain kind of investigator to live with one Manhattan alley's rat colony for an entire year. I applaud Sullivan, and would give him an award, if it didn't mean I'd have to also shake his hand.

>>>around town