BookStories: Liked that? Try this.

Once I arrive for my bookstore shift, I meander the shelves to see what titles and covers are out there waiting for the right reader. And I consider how I might tie some of these titles together to attract attention and sway the buyer. For example, when someone comes in and asks for Stephen King, I also suggest a more demanding, and rewarding, novel by Barbara Kingsolver. How about Poisonwood Bible or Prodigal Summer? I have displayed together The Paris Wife (Paula McLain novel on Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson) with The Pilot’s Wife (Anita Shreve thriller about a secret an airline pilot is keeping from his wife), and added in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife on the left-behind wife whose husband’s genetic disorder causes him to occasionally disappear. If someone is interested in Civil War nonfiction from our military shelves, then I suggest the Charles Frazier novel, Cold Mountain.

And how about three novels on orphans: Kim Van Alkemade’s Orphan #8 about medical experimentation in a New York City Jewish orphanage, Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer 2013 winning novel Orphan Master’s Son on North Korea’s power and propaganda, and Christina Baker Kline’s The Orphan Train on welfare programs that delivered abandoned immigrant children from East Coast to midwest farmlands. One day I saw that we had all three Stieg Larsson novels of the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, an addicting threesome filled with sex and violence. And in the Biography/Memoir section, we had Jon Axworthy’s Final Mystery: Stieg Larsson, the exploration of Larsson’s career, untimely death and subsequent controversy over family and inheritance. Displaying novels and biography together seemed timely and serendipitous.

But perhaps most eye-catching for the so-inclined reader was the array of naked male torsos, at least from the waist up, on the covers of what might be called chick lit (editor's note: ah, no, that's not chick lit). This Fabio-inspired display featured Amanda Quick's Lie by Moonlight, and three novellas —Vain, Gone and Rise — by Deborah Bladon. Bladon obviously prefers terse, manly one-word titles for her bare-chested books, including Solo, Ruin, Fuse, Trace, Chance, Ember, Haze, Shiver, and Torn. Some of these are series; others are, so to speak, standalone. 

Ben Wiley, one of our Creative Loafing film reviewers, is also an advocate for paper and print. Dead trees, if you will. He volunteers at a local library bookstore and enjoys engaging with readers and their books. Our series BookStories will highlight some of these Ben, Book & Beyond encounters.

This article appears in Feb 8-15, 2018.