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Welcome to our books of the month for December. This month we're featuring Schott's Almanac 2008 by Ben Schott, The Gum Thief - Boxed Set by Douglas Coupland, The Book of Dave by Will Self, and How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
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 SCHOTT'S ALMANAC 2008
by Ben Schott
Heralded by the media and reviewers as one of the most original and readable Almanacs ever published.
In the modern age, where information is plentiful but selection and analysis elusive, Schott’s Almanac presents a must-have analysis of the year: from the crowded field of presidential hopefuls to the declining popularity of George W. Bush, from marriage and crime statistics to the incidence of shark bites worldwide, and from the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Bad Sex in Fiction award. Schott’s Almanac critically distills a world of information and opinion, presenting readers with a fascinating biography of the year.
Practical, entertaining, and painstakingly researched, Schott’s Almanac eschews endless lists and tiny type to present an elegantly designed and utterly compulsive selection of the year’s events. Readable from cover to cover, and completely updated each year, Schott’s Almanac redefines its genre.
Buy Schott's Almanac 2008 here |
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 THE GUM THIEF - BOXED SET
By Douglas Coupland
The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore.
In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious new novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?— we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life; and Roger’s co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.
One day, Bethany discovers Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she realizes that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right.
These two retail workers strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief reveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life.
Buy The Gum Thief here. |
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 THE BOOK OF DAVE
By Will Self
“[A] phantasmagoria of savageries…The satirist Will Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell.”—Harper’s Magazine
When East End cabdriver Dave Rudman’s wife takes from him his only son, Dave pens a gripping text—a compilation about everything from the environment, Arabs, and American tourists to sex, Prozac, and cabby lore—that captures all of his frustrations and anxieties about his contemporary world. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife’s Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age.
Five hundred years later, Dave’s book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in postapocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization. Only one islander, Symum, remains incredulous. But, after he is imprisoned for heresy, his son Carl must journey through the Forbidden Zone and into the terrifying heart of New London to find the only thing that will reveal the truth once and for all: a second Book of Dave that repudiates the first.
The Book of Dave is a profound meditation upon the nature of religion and a caustic satire of contemporary life.
Buy The Book of Dave here.
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 HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ
by Pierre Bayard
The runaway French bestseller hailed by the New York Times as “a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes.”
If civilized people are expected to have read all important works of literature, and thousands more books are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those awkward social situations in which we’re forced to talk about books we haven’t read?
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn huge attention from critics around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Bayard argues that it’s actually more important to know a book’s role in our collective library than its details. Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, and even the movie Groundhog Day, he describes the many varieties of “non-reading” and the horribly sticky social situations that might confront us, and then offers his advice on what to do.
Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them. It’s the book that readers everywhere will be talking about—and despite themselves, reading—this holiday season.
Buy How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read here |
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