I Like This List!

We’re members of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, the regional trade association for independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Arguably, SIBA is the strongest of the regional associations and although we are on the fringes of its territory, it is the region we feel closest to.

SIBA just announced the 2007 Book of the Year awards. These will be presented at our annual trade show, this year in Atlanta, Sept. 28-30. FYI, the 2008 show will be in Louisville at the Galt House, and we’ll be seeking volunteers to help executive director Wanda Jewell put on the show. As a special treat, at least one other regional association will be meeting concurrently at the Galt House, making next year’s show possibly the biggest regional show ever held.

We’re prepared to take any of you willing to be trained to serve on our advisory board, so if you’re interested in a fall trip to Atlanta to meet the authors and publishers of the year’s best books, please give us a call at the store. Each of the award-winners will be on hand for the presentation of the SIBA Book of the Year awards, so that list alone should be enough to encourage you to come with us.

Regional shows are a great opportunity for us to spend time with the authors, including a very special moveable feast where dozens of authors spend ten minutes having lunch with a table full of booksellers. Past shows have featured James Patterson, Tim Dorsey, Jim Webb, Karen Slaughter, Lorraine Dupree, and other top names, but much of the fun is in meeting famous authors BEFORE they become famous. Ann and I obtained the first copy of “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” right out of the box. Even the author, Susanna Clarke, had never seen the book until that moment in Atlanta, and it is one of our treasured books. We’ll provide you with the list of authors later as the commitments come in, but I guarantee you’ll have a number of memorable encounters and get to see all the great books coming out later this year.

So, here are the winners of the SIBA Book of the Year for 2007*:

Children’s book – Alabama Moon by Watt Key (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Cookbook - I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris (Warner Books)

Poetry - Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers (Univ. South Carolina Press)

Fiction – Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Random House)

Nonfiction - Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (Henry Holt & Co)

I’ll let you know that I voted three of those as my picks – the books by Sedaris, Frazier, and Shields – and have previously recommended them on these pages or in our newsletters.

*Each year, hundreds of booksellers across the South vote on their favorite hand-sell books of the year. These are the Southern books they have most enjoyed selling to customers; the ones that they couldn’t stop talking about; the ones most often pushed into a customer’s hands with the words “You have got to read this!” The SIBA Book Award was created to recognize great books of Southern origin, as determined by people whose business it is to know great books—the independent booksellers of the South.

Books are nominated in several categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cooking and children’s. For a book to be eligible, it must be set in the South, and it must have been published within the calendar year. In order to promote diversity in the award, no author can win the award in the same category twice. Only SIBA-member booksellers can submit nominations, and only SIBA booksellers can vote on the finalists and winners of the award.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

Just a Tease

June will not be a month to miss. In the coming weeks we’ll have some exciting news to announce – about events, new books, and a very special piece of news that was confirmed just today. I’ll tell you more about these in the coming weeks.

Our Harry Potter 7 plans are coming together and will kick off at 7 p.m on Friday, July 20, at Track Nine and Three-Quarters. Will we find a Horcrux? Will a special spell allow us to experience Hogwarts the way Harry, Hermione, and Ron do?

This weekend we’re excited about hosting local author Bev Lozier Jackson, who will introduce her beautiful new children’s book Mommy, Is God a Superhere? Bev will be at the store at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 16, to read from and sign her first book. That’s the same day our representative to Book Expo America will be coming to town with an armload of goodies. Join us.

And mark your calendar for Thursday, June 28. I can’t reveal the details just yet, but what happens that day will be very big for Destinations Booksellers and our patrons.

Finally, if you’re just a casual reader of the blog you may have missed the announcement about our e-mail lists. All patrons were unsubscribed from our newsletters and our specialty e-mails as of June 1. If you want to keep up with everything going on in the books world and the store, you need to go to our primary Web site and re-subscribe. With our new program, we have streamlined e-mails for children’s interests, new books just in, the blog, and an expanding list of specialty announcements. If you’ve been missing your news, that’s why. Why not click http://www.destinationsbooksellers.com and sign up now?

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

A Reader’s Delight on Public TV

Those of you closest to Ann and me know our dream of someday helping to bring about something for Southern Indiana along the lines of the U of L Kentucky Author Forum. Kyle Ridout at IU Southeast’s Ogle Center has ambitions in that vein, too, and someday we hope to have a regular schedule of top authors here in NA.

Now we just need the endowment that KAF has!

We, and many of you, admire the Kentucky Author Forum programming, whether you enjoy it live or during later broadcasts on public TV.

This Sunday, KET2 will rebroadcast a conversation with the late David Halberstam, with Roger Wilkins serving as the interviewer. They discuss the author’s The Children, the five-year chronicle of a group of students who set out to change the world in the early 60s. That’s at 10 p.m. on Sunday, June 10.

The following two Sundays will also bring treats. On June 17, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lawrence Wright will be featured, discussing his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. He’ll be interviewed by CNN’s Peter Bergen. And on June 24, Bill McKibben is on tap, discussing one of Ann’s favorites, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. As an added treat, Wendell Berry is the interviewer.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

Ray Bradbury Disavows Accepted Wisdom

Everybody knows about Fahrenheit 451, right? You know, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic (also made into a movie) about book-burning, where the “Fire Department” comes out when called to set contraband books on fire?

A couple or three generations now have been indoctrinated about the book as a morality tale warning against government censorship. Well Ol’ Ray is here to tell us we were wrong. He once walked out of a seminar at UCLA when the students in the class insisted on telling him what his book was about.

It turns out that Bradbury was writing about the vacuity of television and how it would destroy literature. Don’t believe me? Watch Ray say it on video here. He says the culprit isn’t the government…it’s the people.

By the way, Ray recently declined to attend the presentation of his Pulitzer Prize for Literature, but if you want to read a little, we have Farewell, Summer, his unexpected sequel to Dandelion Wine.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

Oprah and Literature in the Same Sentence?

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is release day for the 58th book in the Oprah Book Club program and being the good boy that I am I will comply with the embargo requirements laid down in order to get the book before release day.

That said, I have to say that Ms. Winfrey’s staff has dramatically ramped up its standards with its last few selections. The current selection is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; no one will deny that McCarthy is an excellent writer and storyteller, and The Road, while typically gruesome, is certainly a book that can capture the imagination of a large cross-section of the 20% of us who admit to reading fiction.

If anything, Oprah’s crew has made an even more literary selection for this summer. As is usual, to make the book accessible, the book has been repackaged (slightly) with the “O” sticker on a recognizable quality trade paperback at $15. We’ll revise this posting tomorrow morning with a few words about the newest selection…aaand, we’re back. Those of you who subscribe to our blog e-mail already know that Ms. O’s team selected Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.

The novel captured the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, indicating that it is not a light book, but a rather good book. The next 500,000 sales of it are probably going to be purely on Oprah’s recommendation, but this story of three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family is destined to be a classic.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

Keeping the Com-Lines Open

I’m sleepy, so I’m going to “cheat” tonight. Instead of writing, I’m reading, and it’s reading that, in the end, is designed to make me a better bookseller to you.

Join me in reading Salon magazine’s summer reading recommendations. I will tell you this – I’m listening to Dick Estell on NPR’s Radio Reader while alternately browsing the Web and reading the first recommended book on Salon’s list. I’m halfway through The Book of Air and Shadows, by Michael Gruber from HarperCollins. It is very, very good…the book Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) wishes he could write. I just finished reading The Fabric of America, about the way that government and the mapping of boundaries was an essential part of America’s frontier expansion. For a history of the U.S. from 1780 to 1850, you’d be hard-pressed to learn more from between the covers of a single book. It synthesizes nuggets from many of my favorite history books over the past few years and provided new insights into the character of the founders.

Read the Salon piece here.

NOTE: Salon is ostensibly a “premium” site. If you have any problems accessing the link, just type in www.salon.com and sit through 15 seconds of advertising to gain a site pass.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.

Book Focus: Parenting Teens

Tricia Goyer, a minister from Kalispell, Montana, is releasing a book this summer based on what she calls “Life Plotting.” It’s called My Life, Unscripted, and it may serve you well if you’re a parent of a pre-adolescent or teen girl.

From personal experience, Goyer knows the perils of rushing through life without a “script” to work from, and in this book she tries to help parents guide their daughters by “teaching them to have a plan of attack before temptation or hardship come.”

Goyer would LOVE to have you write a sample script from your teen years and post it along with information about this book! It could be where you make a good choice … or a not so good one. Then share brief how God’s Word helps you as you script YOUR life!

Feel free to tell your stories, whether you worked from a script or merely “improv-ed” those dramatic, emotional teen years, and we’ll pass them on to the author, who will be doing a national “blog tour” this summer.

These are the comments of Randy Smith, proprietor of Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, Indiana.