Kidsmith Presents: Television Inspired Literature

We're obsessed. It's all we can think about. It's all we talk about. It's all I'm going to blog about today: Reign. CW's drama about Mary, Queen of Scots is a show a few of us children's booksellers discovered and fell in love with. Naturally after we watched all available episodes we sought out other ways to feed our obsession in the form of books. Thus, it has inspired a new monthly feature on the blog brought to you by the kidsmith booksellers.

Television Inspired Literature will go up once a month. We know first hand that book lovers can also be TV lovers and want to share our obsessions with you. Based on popular TV shows, we've come up with some YA book titles that you might enjoy if you like the show. If you have any suggestions for TV shows we should feature or books we may have missed let us know in the comments!

Without further ado may I present the first Television Inspired Literature:

Guilty Pleasures

The other day, one of our book buyers Mark and I were having an in-depth conversation about music. "What music do you listen to that is a guilty pleasure?" I honestly couldn't think of anything. Akin to books, I fully believe that if you like something, you like it, and why worry about what others will think. Just like other traits we can't always pick what lights up our brain's pleasure centers, and if it doesn't hurt anybody then WHO CARES. Embrace what you like! Listen to Sublime and read trashy romances!

But Mark's question resurfaced for me this week when I started watching the new History Channel series Vikings. Vikings is an original series that follows characters based on legendary sagas and set around the time of the first Viking raids on England. There's a badass shieldmaiden lady warrior. There's music from Wardruna, one of my favorite bands. There's handsome men with long hair (perhaps the Achilles heel of this bookseller). I can't stop looking at this show and it makes me feel a little ... guilty. The acting is good. The premise is cool. While occasionally historically inaccurate, the sets and ships and armor and weapons and clothes are cool. Gabriel Byrne is always good. The pacing and dialogue is a bit ... rough, but the show is young and could always improve.

Anyway, it's definitely a guilty pleasure for me. If you're in the same longship here are some recent acquisitions to the UBC to read during the commercials so by the end of your hour you feel like you've done something productive.

Hounded by Kevin Hearne. A series that melds all kinds of ancient mythology into a modern day fantasy adventure mystery quest. Thor makes an appearance eventually. The author also wins my award for best book dedication ever: "Look, Mom! I made this! Can we put it on the fridge?"

The Vikings by Else Roesdahl. A quick and dirty history with lots of pictures.

The Kings in Winter by Cecelia Holland. A historical fantasy novel of Celtic chieftains fighting off their Viking overlords. GOOD LUCK.

Niall Ferguson's book on Vikings, as well as the Sagas are also obvious books you should have already read. Get off the internet and go read them now.

Got any other guilty pleasures to share? Confess in the comments!

Ridiculously, Ridiculously Good

Each person here is ridiculously, ridiculously good at something. We each have our own speciality, possessing an encyclopedic knowledge about nearly every topic or format in the store including but not limited to: small press releases, penguins, math, Finnish authors, travel, dramatic YA books, elephants, French flaps.  Because of this knowledge, we can make some really, really good recommendations.

This is really all an excuse for me to tell you about my specialty, which is events.  Straight-up events.  If you're interested in something, anything! I can conjure up an event you might like.

Do you work during the weekday and wish you could go to a weekend story time with your kids? 
On Saturday, January 19th at 10:30, the vocally brilliant and vibrant Tess will be hosting our monthly children's story time right underneath the tree in our kids section.  If you want more stories (who doesn't want more stories?), come back on Sunday, January 20th at 2pm when local publisher Pinwheel Books brings by a few of their picture book authors for their 2nd annual story showcase.

Do you wish you could go to a Saturday night séance held by Ian Svenonius while a DJ is playing?
Yes. 
Follow-up question, are you free January 26?
Your answer has to be yes, otherwise I'm going to have to do the Charlie Brown walk across Coolidge Corner traffic.  Please say yes. 

Do you like books, history, and alcohol, in addition to being old enough to legally enter a bar?
We're having a Prohibition-themed party the night of January 20th at the Regal Beagle for Stephanie Schorow's book, Drinking Boston.  For a $35 ticket, you'll get a signed copy of the book, hors d'oeuvres, and two complimentary beverages.  It's in conjunction with Union Park Press and Bully Boy Distillery, so you know it'll be a good time.

Are you a teen who likes John Green?
No, he's not coming to sign books (YET.  It's one of my life missions to get him to read here, which would be an interesting sight due to my slightly feverish fangirl crush on him which would probably lead to an episode involving hyperventilating, no biggie, I'M COOL).  I am, however, starting a Young Adult Book Club for teens ages 12-18.  Instead of choosing just one book, we're going to talk about any of John Green's works.  Love Looking for Alaska?  Did you cry at The Fault in Our Stars? Come by, we'll talk about our favorite John Green books and choose what we'll read for next month. This starts Monday, January 14 at 5pm.

I could go on for hours about upcoming events, but I'll pause here.  We have so many great authors coming in this month, so take a look at our calendar or ask me for a recommendation in the comments field.

There's gold in these here walls

The above book may not look like much (unless you've got a hankering for puffed pancakes with sausage, in which case, hurry down to our Used Book Cellar and snap this baby up) but it's something of a refugee. I found it the other day while shifting things around in the art section. Turns out when you take all the monographs off the bottom shelf it reveals a thin little gap between the wooden slats; a passageway to the void from whence this little guy returned to us. Sometime in the murky past (I'd spitball around three years ago if publication dates are any guide, but that assumes some chronolinear laws of reality to which bookstores are often an exception), "100 Meals for $5 or Less" slipped past its bulkier cookbook colleagues and slid away behind the wall. If it weren't so aggressively orange the protruding corner of its cover might have escaped my notice entirely and it would have spent eternity back there with the dust-bunnies and phantoms.

Which kind of got me to thinking. What else do you think might be lurking within the walls? Because I'm a little obsessed with the idea of ruins and buried history. Just think about the bones of this old bookstore. A few decades back we housed our own cafe; the floorboards still creak from a legendary (apocryphal?) coffee-tsunami. And you may have heard that we just celebrated our 50th birthday, but 279 Harvard St. wasn't always a literary landmark. Once upon a time this was a neighborhood grocery, and it still bears a few traces of those days. We have a meat locker in our office and somewhere there is a dumbwaiter, which I vow to find, even if it requires inconveniencing several busy people.

Ye olde-timey Booksmith.

Here, I posit, are a few things that generations to come might find during renovations to expand the store over an entire city block (in utopic future times when the rest of the world tunes in to what Brookline already knows about the critical import of bookstores):

- A colony of very well-read Borrowers.

- A leather-bound first edition of The Scarlet Letter.
- A dog-eared copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos filled with Charles Olson's cryptic but besotted marginalia.

- The loopy signatures of the 21st century's greatest literary minds. (This part is for real. You know all those big-name authors you get to meet and hear read at our store? The illustrious Dennis Lehane started the tradition of signing our bathroom wall and now it's kind of a thing).

- A signed declaration of surrender from the CEO of Amazon.
- Red Sox trading cards.
- All the very BEST used books (with inscriptions and pictures and fold-out treasure maps) that you just know the employees keep squirreled away for themselves even though we swear we'd do no such thing.
- A thousand buttons, earrings and ballpoint pens.
- The body of a Poe protagonist.
- Wistful postcards.
- The Arkenstone.

But enough speculation. My archaeological sense is tingling so I'm off to dig up some real dirt. Stay tuned for more ancient Booksmith updates.

Sole Collector

Used bookshops are the coolest places on the planet. Where else can you find:

• $20 in a Dean Koontz book
• Photos of dog psychologists inside books
• A past-edition of Perfume by Patrick Süskind that doesn't have a chick-lit cover
• The lone, rare copy of Cubisme to complete your Les Maitres set of French art books?

Only in used book shops! Where people bring their rare, cool, out-of-print books and we sell them to you dirt cheap.

It's a cool place to start up collections, too, of things you didn't know you needed. I personally am a Penguin fangirl, and this job keeps me stocked in all kinds of great volumes. I like the old ones with the orange and white horizontal belts, but maybe you should start up a collection of the Penguin Modern Classics mass markets  printed in the 60s in the UK. Observe yesterday's acquisition:

 And we usually get a couple every other week or so. Steady supply for a collector's demand.

Or how about the rough and edgy illustrated Vintage mass markets designed by Edward Gorey? There are a ton and even a few imitators, this would be a great collection to start up, and would really impress both friends and professors when you host brunches in your spare Allston digs.

Or how about another personal favorite of mine, that we seem to get in pretty regularly: 1960s-ish Signet Classic mass markets, with the coolest illustrated covers on the planet:

Any of these individual volumes will run you $2.50-4 a pop, not a bad amount to drop every once in a while, and definitely worth it to feed the thrill of the hunt!

We even have things to satisfy the collector who likes to collect in huge swaths. Just yesterday we acquired 10 volumes of the tiny 1950 French art books Les Maitres, as well as a cool non-fiction series of middle school social studies books printed in the 70s.

Stop on in and see what collection awaits you!

Where Wisdom is Found

Thus commencing weekly tales from the depths of the Booksmith: the Used Book Cellar.

Last week, your faithful used book buyers acquired several titles (as per usual), but the following particularly peculiar finds illustrate the many forms in which wisdom passes our desk.

Dancing with Dragons; Invoke their Ageless Wisdom and Power - for devotees of House Targaryen, or simply those with fire in their bellies, I present to you D. J. Conway's TIMELESS, CLASSIC work of dragon-wisdom. Available now for $8 is a singular volume containing all kinds of stories, rituals and tips on harnessing the dragon energy within you. But that's enough from me, allow the jacket copy to speak for itself: "Call on dragons to brighten your day-to-day life and to solve problems that require timeless wisdom." A great gift for the dragon fanatic in your life, or a charming addition to the library of any academic acquiring the vast wisdom of our realm.

On to Exhibit 2, a young customer (with the assistance of her mother) has outgrown her Dr. Seuss collection and we have benefited. An entire library of Seuss: Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, even the rarer I Wish That I Had Duck Feet can all be found in the UBC now, in great condition, priced at $5 each. The first stop of wisdom for most beings of this world, Dr. Seuss can never be underestimated. Ten Apples Up On Top, a CLASSIC, EPIC tale of perseverance and life-balance should never be forgotten. When any of us feels we have too many apples on top, and that "Our apples all/are going to drop," it serves well to remember that with the help of friends we can have "Ten apples/on us all!/What fun!/We will not/let them fall."

Finally, the UBC has also recently acquired 11 volumes of Will Durant's EPIC, EXHAUSTIVE Story of Civilization, a series of thousand-page (each!) tomes that cover the gamut of world history and culture in stunning hardcovers complete with bold dust jackets. Each volume is priced at $10.50. For all the wisdom contained herein, that's quite the bargain. Randomly opening to page 414 in Volume 1 ('Our Oriental Heritage,') Durant offers a valuable insight on the distinction between the foundations of Hinduism and Christianity: "It is an abstruse heaven, however, that Yajnavalkya [of The Upanishads] promises the devotee, for in it there will be no individual consciousness, there will only be absorption into Being, the reunion of the temporarily separated part with the whole. [...] Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions."

No matter your age or interest, the UBC can satisfy the endless quest for wisdom, and on a budget, too. And if you need to make room for all this wisdom in your collection, we buy used books Wednesday through Saturday, 10 A.M. - 4 P.M. E-mail us at ubc@brooklinebooksmith.com for more.

History class

I'm almost finished reading Erik Larson's new book (it comes out in May,) In the Garden of Beasts, about the American Ambassador to Germany and his family as they experienced Berlin in the early 1930's when Hitler was rising to power. It is fascinating, engrossing, and just as I did with Devil in the White City, I am really learning about this particular slice of history. Larson is filling in gaps for me, changing my perspective.

He's also leading me to want to read more about this era, especially Hans Fallada. Turns out, the daughter of the Ambassador knew Hans Fallada through some friends and wrote a particularly detailed diary account (as it seemed everyone did at that time) about a visit she made to his house in the countryside. As I was reading this chapter I thought, Oh, hey! It's that Hans Fallada guy! He has a book on our Books We Love table! I haven't read anything by him but now I most certainly will. How could I not be interested when Larson and his diarists paint such a vivid picture of this world famous author about to live through one of the worst times in modern history? Now I need to know!

Erik Larson is the best. Not only do I love his book, but he's got me wanting to absorb as much as I can about everyone he mentions. I want to go to Berlin and walk down Tiergartenstrasse where the Ambassador lived. I want to read everyone's diary. I dare say he is the best teacher I've ever had.