Let's Talk Books

Tuesday is New Release Day

Did you know that Tuesday is new release day in the book business? It's not a hard and fast rule (as it is with CDs and DVDs), but most new book releases hit the street--"lay down", as we say in the biz--on Tuesday.

Today's Tuesday!

We're at the beginning of the fall publishing season, so each successive Tuesday brings more and more great releases. Here are a few of this week's:

• David & Goliath is the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Outliers) to tackle a cultural/societal phenomenon--in this case "underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants"--and present it in a uniquely accessible, eminently readable way. 

• One Summer: America, 1927. Look up the word "polymath" in the dictionary and you'll find Bill Bryson's picture. Well...you should. Bryson's written gorgeously on walking the Appalachian Trail. He's given us the story of English--American in one volume, British in another. He's written a compact history of, well, everything. Now he's narrowed his focus to concentrate on a single season in a single year. It was the summer of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth, the summer that Gertrude Ederle broke swimming records right and left, and the summer that a secret cabal of bankers made the decision that would start the Great Depression. And that's just the stuff that's well-known...

• Chris Matthews' Tip and the Gipper is a personal history about an epoch he knew intimately, one which--as evidenced by the book's subtitle, When Politics Worked--resonates in the here and now.

• If you haven't read Eat, Pray, Love you've at least heard of it. It was, after all, on various national bestseller lists for, oh, a billion weeks. It's been a few years since Elizabeth Gilbert published Committed, the second installment of her memoir, and she's finally gone back to fiction. The Signature of all Things is a sprawling historical novel that spans the better part of the 18th and 19th centuries, and it's getting all kinds of great press.

• One of my favorite books to be released so far this year is Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, a delightfully quirky love story. Set in Simsion's native Australia, it follows the fortunes of Don Tillman, a socially maladroit professor of genetics who sets out to find a wife. It's beautifully written with fully realized characters who go beyond their (admittedly pretty adorable) quirks.

• You've probably read The Hobbit. You may even have a dog-eared paperback copy sitting on your bookshelf. But you don't have this edition of The Hobbit, and if you love beautiful books you should treat yourself. 

• Jennifer Chiaverini is best known for her Elm Creek Quilts series. The Spymistress is her second (after last year's Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker) historical novel set during the Civil War.

Come see me at The Book Frog and let's talk books! I'll show you these and other recent releases, and we'll find something perfect for you.