Weekend Wrap
Happy Monday!
Since your mind may be a little clouded from Oscar night (see our roundup of Oscar tie-ins), here’s a quick wrap-up of what else you need to know from the weekend:
Hurrah! This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson gets a great review in the 3/7 NYT Book Review and rises to #150 on Amazon (it’s now at #170 and, dare we say, that’s an amazingly high position for a book about a profession generally not considered that fascinating by the general public. We may actually see it on the 3/21 NYT Nonfiction best seller list).
The cover of the NYT BR features Angelology by Danielle Trussoni; remarkable because the BR rarely features a new popular-interest title with marketing muscle behind it (in what may be a first, both the NYT BR AND the People book section lead with a review of the same title). Despite some serious reservations, reviewer Susann Cokal calls it a “rousing story.” The book rose to #44; it’s destined for bestsellerdom.
In a brilliant move, the Book Review assigned Alexander McCall Smith to review Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he loves this updating of the English village novel (too bad about the goofy illustration). The book has been receiving accolades from all over (we’re expecting it to be a sleeper success).
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland topped the box office and Dorling Kindersley’s Disney’s Alice in Wonderland: The Visual Guide hit the 3/17 NYT BR Childrens Picture Books best seller list. Another Alice-related title rising on Amazon is The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, John Tenniel (W.W. Norton). Interest is coming from a different source; last week Lost featured the book. The original has been featured many times before on the show.
Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) hits the 3/17 NYT Nonfiction list at #14. It has been bringing tears to many reviewer’s eyes; including this one in Sunday’s L.A. Times.
Little Bee goes to #1 on the Paperback Trade Fiction list, surging ahead of The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks (although it’s still at #1 on the Paperback Mass-Market Fiction list). Congrats to Santa Monica for making it their One City pick.
The NYT Magazine cover story “Building a Better Teacher” mentioned the following books, which rose on Amazon as a result:
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ebook available on OverDrive |
The following titles also rose over the weekend on Amazon (this information is from Saturday; on Sunday, a computer glitch caused graphic novels to dominate the list):
#2 (now at #23) — Now Eat This!: 150 of America’s Favorite Comfort Foods, All Under 350 Calories by Rocco DiSpirito (Ballantine Books)
#11 (now at #35) — Courage and Consequence by Karl Rove (Threshold Editions)
#21 (now at #52) — The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson (Crown Business). It was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Thursday.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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#50 (was 962; now at #107) — Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman (S&S) — WSJ review
#59 (now at #190) — The Coming Insurrection
As Publishers Weekly reports, Glenn Beck has been giving unwitting support to this book since he began ranting against it in July.
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#65 (was 215; now at #86)
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Martin was on NPR Weekend Edition Sat. (listen here) as well as on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report the week before (watch here). USA Today wrote about him on Wednesday — Jesuit priest James Martin moves in Mass, mass media.