In the introduction, Pollan explains the reason for the condensed (some of his rules are simply a sentence) nature of the book — food science is yet a very young science, and though there is much discussion about the benefits of this or that nutrient, “foods are more than the sum of their nutrient parts, and those nutrients work together in ways that are still only dimly understood.” So some of the best advice on how to eat can be found simply by looking to other, healthier cultures, such as with rule 48; French people “seldom snack, eat small portions from small plates, don’t go back for second helpings, and eat most of their food at long, leisurely meals shared with other people,” or by following the advice of your grandmother — rule 42: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

While researching his book, In Defense of Food, Pollan says he realized that the best food advice could be boiled down to a phrase of only seven words. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” So Food Rules is divided into three sections based on this maxim:

One that helps us distinguish between real food and what he calls “edible foodlike substances:”
Rule 13 — Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle

One that advocates for what to eat, beyond “food:”
Rule 27 — The fewer the feet, the better the meat

And one that gives us some guidelines for the habits of a healthy eater:
Rule 76 — Place a bouquet of flowers on the table and everything will taste twice as good

Sounds great, right? But I haven’t told you the reason why, even if you already have Pollan’s earlier version, this book is a must. Maira Kalman’s illustrations are amazing. Pollan’s wife suggested they ask Kalman to illustrate his new version after seeing her art show, and she said two things:

He did not hold that against her.

My roommate and I made wonton dumplings, sashimi, and maki (rolled) sushi for the first time last night. The thing about that meal experience that I will always remember is the camaraderie of it. We steamed the dumplings, we sat and ate the dumplings. We stood in the kitchen and fished out of a bowl bits of tuna and sticky rice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. We rolled the sushi, each of us adding different fillings and producing rolls of different sizes and shapes. Then we sat again and ate the sushi. We ate slowly over a long period of time, listening to music, chatting, and even doing the dishes as they were used.

But the rule that sticks with me the most is rule 65: “Give some thought to where your food comes from.” Now, before I eat, I try to say or think this Zen blessing: “This meal is the labor of countless beings. Let us remember their toil.”

On the blog there are tons of step-by-step DIY projects for crafting and improvements around the house and decorating ideas in many formats. The book is largely comprised of the most popular features of the website: the “Sneak Peek,” the “DIY,” and the “Before and After.”

In the “Sneak Peek” part of the book, we get a two or four page tour of the homes of some of the designers that have been featured on the Design*Sponge blog, including its editors. These glimpses, just like those on the blog, are packed with photos accompanied by captions that almost always say “refurbished piece from thrift store.” That’s one of the best things about Design*Sponge — all of the amazing design ideas are completely doable on a budget.

The “Before and After” section rivals the “Sneak Peek” for being the most fun to look at: before and after photographs that people have submitted to Design*Sponge of refurbish or repurpose projects.

This is a project I’ve been inspired to undertake, from the “DIY” section, the rolling storage bench.

I found this crate at an antique mall, and couldn’t pass it up because it was marked with the location where whatever “goods” it originally transported were delivered: Crystal Springs, Miss. I decided to pass on the “rolling” part of the project; for now, at least, I think I’ll prefer a stationary bench. The previous owner already made “improvements” on this crate to make it functional — the lid has a hinge. So all I have to do is create a cushion for the top and I’ll have a rustic entryway or foot-of-the-bed storage bench.

I’m not sure why we haven’t talked much about the book publicly yet, because for months now we’ve certainly been talking about it in the store. We had a couple of advanced copies back in May, when John and Joe went to BEA (the big book conference in NYC), and came back telling us that everyone there was talking about the book. For a new author, whose book is months away from publication, to be buzzed about at a bookseller’s conference like BEA, that’s huge!

Lisa had already quietly read it in April (due to the savvy work of our Random House rep, Liz) and by the end of the May conference our advanced copies were hot as they passed from reader to reader. To date, these are the Lemurians who have read and loved this book:

Lisa, Kaycie, Zita, Emily, Kelly, Anna, Claire, Quinn, Ashley, Nan, Maggie. That’s just about everyone on our staff.

Erin Morgenstern visits with followers of The Night Circus at BEA in May.

On Erin Morgenstern’s book tour you can expect some enthusiastic events. One reason for this is because the book lends itself so well to creativity. The circus is the foreground of a behind-the-scenes duel between two magicians who at first don’t know each other’s identities, so they have to be content to “one-up” each other through the medium of the circus attractions. They create an ice garden, an enchanted clock, a cloud maze, and many other nifty no-limit-to-the-imagination things.

Lemuria’s event with Erin, which is October 3rd, starting at 5, is no exception. Most everything is in the planning stages still, and it’s also hush hush, but suffice it to say that you can expect to walk into a circus in the Dotcom building that Monday evening.

The Night Circus is our September pick for First Editions Club. Though Erin won’t be here till October 3rd, some of the copies that arrived this week were pre-signed. Come pick up your copy of the debut novel that’s got everyone talking this fall — The Night Circus is a thrilling, magical tale from beginning to end.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Random House, September 2011)

His last visit was in 2009 for the novel Hell, a tongue-in-cheek romp through an underworld which is populated, it seems, by everybody who’s anybody, including Anne Boleyn, Humphrey Bogart, Shakespeare, and Dante’s Beatrice. His two books before that, Severance and Intercourse, were comprised of vignettes examining, respectively, the last thoughts of just-lopped heads, and the fevered thoughts of couples while they, well, couple. In these collections, like in Hell, Butler let his imagination play with the details of well-known lives.

His new book, though, is a departure from these entirely. A Small Hotel is a look back at a marriage from the vantage point of its ending, and its characters are nobody we recognize. It’s the day Michael and Kelly Hays, who met in New Orleans twenty-five years ago when he saved her from some drunk ruffians, are finalizing their divorce, though Kelly doesn’t show up at the courthouse to sign the papers. Instead, armed with bottles of scotch and pills, she drives to New Orleans to the Olivier House, to the same room in the hotel where she and Michael spent their first night together, and to where they have returned many joyful times since. It’s been a place of happy nostalgia for the Hays couple, but for Kelly, on this day, it’s a place of despair.

Through his and hers flashbacks, seamlessly slipped into and out of as the characters go through a single day, Butler reveals the fissures in the couple’s relationship. If this basic plot description sounds quite gloomy, I actually found the novel to be too full of insight into relationships to be depressing. Michael and Kelly for twenty-four years have participated in that most vulnerable of relationships, a marriage, each trusting that their spouse understands implicitly their intentions, feelings, and thoughts, and each has ended up realizing that they’ve been completely misunderstood.

So I take it back that we don’t recognize the characters in A Small Hotel. They remind us of ourselves, of course.

Mr. Butler will sign and read at Lemuria on Tuesday, the 13th of September, beginning at 5 pm. To order a signed copy of A Small Hotel, click here. 

When I was little my dad took me to the library every weekend, and he remembers “graduating” me from picture to chapter books with The Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis Whitney, a book he read as a child.

I think I must have liked it; I don’t really remember the story or anything, but I was at least convinced that I was ready for more meaty reading fare because I went back to that section to find another chapter book. I picked Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, and loved that so much that I think I must have checked it out several more times that year. I remember that story well; as an adult I now own a copy and recently reread it.

One Christmas I unwrapped boxed sets of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries and plowed through them, thrilled that they belonged to me and could be read again and again. My dad continues to be an avid mystery reader, and because of his influence I enjoy them as well. From mysteries like The Green Cat and Hardy Boys I graduated to Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson. Now, along with the rest of the world, I’ve been on the Swedish mystery kick, enjoying Larsson’s Girl books and, most recently, The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler.

But I really love to read all genres of fiction, a preference which I believe is directly related to the variety of books I devoured as a child. From the word play of The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, I grew up to love books like Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn and Adverbs by Daniel Handler.

Being immersed in the fantasy worlds of The Neverending Story, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia drew me to Neil Gaiman, and I think even my adoration for surrealist novelists like Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell comes from this influence.

When I was young I read Little Women and The Secret Garden, more “straight” novels, and as an adult I love the novels of authors like John Irving and Jeffrey Eugenides.

As a youngster the library’s amount of books was overwhelming. I know ours was a rather small library in a rather small town but to me it looked like this:

The first time I set foot in Lemuria I thought the same thing; we do have an incredible amount of titles, considering our space. I’ve overheard kids tell their moms as they walk through Oz, which is really the smallest space in the store, that there are more books there than they’ve seen anywhere. “Books and books and books and books,” one little girl happily sang. It’s really a store unto itself, where readers of any age can find something to nurture their love of books.

A year later, Adam Ross is back with a book of short stories. In an interview with Dan Coxon on CultureMob, Ross talks about how the stories in Ladies and Gentlemen came to be:

The stories that comprise Ladies and Gentlemen were written during breaks that were thrust upon me while drafting Mr. Peanut, because there were stretches where I was simply stuck, quiet and quite anxious times when I was figuring out how to link up its disparate narratives. Meanwhile I had all these other ideas that presented themselves on what seemed like a much more manageable scale and I desperately wanted to get a taste of The End of something, so I’d honor inspiration at these times; and when my agent was ready to shop Mr. Peanut I also had thirteen or more stories under my belt which we boiled down to seven and which, we discovered, orbited similar themes as the novel.

The first story, the longest at 62 pages, is about an out of work middle aged man who, coming to realize that his desperation connects to his lifelong lack of ambition, attempts to take a neighbor’s son under his wing when he sees him choosing the same path. But just like in Mr. Peanut, that’s only the surface of the story. The connection between Ross’s stories and his novel is evident in his, well, storytelling. After all, doesn’t “telling a story” essentially mean “lying,” in order to beguile (Ross’s stories do this), instruct (yes, this too), or entertain (yes, without a doubt)?

In both books, the reader is being told a story, first and foremost, and if he ever forgets it, the outcome of Ross’s stories may shock him. As the narrator in “The Suicide Room” says, “I’m free to embellish, to treat memory as fact or shape it to suit whatever I’m working on. My primary responsibility, I suppose, is to set you dreaming. If that requires me to alter things, then I will.” But there is much truth among the lies (excuse me, stories) of Ladies and Gentlemen, and for that Lemuria will always be glad to listen to the stories of Adam Ross.

Adam Ross will be signing and reading at Lemuria Thursday, July 14th, beginning at 5 o’clock. Ladies and Gentlemen, New York: Knopf (2011), is available for pre-order here.

FEC members: If you received a signed first edition of Mr. Peanut last year and would like to add a copy of Ladies and Gentlemen to your First Editions Club shipment this month, email zita@lemuriabooks.com

We’re also enthusiastic book collectors; we salivate over signed first editions of the old standbys as well as those of promising new authors – this year, among many others, I’ve collected signed firsts of Tea Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife (we sold out of the signed copies) and Geraldine Brooks’s latest Caleb’s Crossing (still available!).

I am a fanatic book collector, yes, but I was first simply a reader. So in the midst of reading all the newest books, I mix in the old ones I’ve always wanted to read. I get them in paperback, and I like to abuse them. Well, as much as it’s possible for me to abuse a book. I just finished The World According to Garp on the Fourth, and the copy ended up looking not read. But sometimes I do this while I’m reading a paperback:

and it’s extremely satisfying. I just enjoy books. I enjoy John Irving too, can’t tell you how much. I haven’t read anything new of his, just the old big ones. They’re some tasty books.

Now I’m reading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I’d never read anything by him, and it was beginning to make me ashamed. I love it so far; I was just in New Orleans at the end of June, and because it was my third visit I’ve started to remember my way around, recognizing neighborhoods, able to picture where Magazine is in relation to Elysian Fields, which is fun when reading Percy’s novel.

Several of us have read through many of Haruki Murakami’s books. Kaycie’s expressed Murakami love, I recently devoured The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I think Joe’s reading through them all in order. I may read Kafka on the Shore after I finish The Moviegoer.

During the summer, whether relaxing in the sun on the beach or in the backyard, isn’t greasing up a paperback with sweat and sunscreen is just the greatest? Come in, if you can, for more summer paperback recommendations. We’ll set you up.

It wasn’t the language that impressed me as the most foreign thing about Paris, though knowing a bit of French from school helped with that; for many Americans it is the architecture, its decadence and age. A few years ago, my dad took me and my sisters to Paris. We were there only a few days, but that was enough time for Paris to enchant us. Standing in front of Notre Dame Cathedral I experienced an awe no building in the U.S. could ever hope to inspire.

In David McCullough’s new book, The Greater Journey, he writes about Americans who spent time in Paris from the 1830s to 1900. The tale he weaves is yes, about their experiences in Paris, about what they gained there and were inspired by, and the differences they returned to America to make.

Charles Sumner was inspired by his time at the Sorbonne, studying side by side with blacks, to be a major voice for the abolition of slavery.

Emma Willis, a schoolmistress, was so impressed with the freedom of the young ladies who studied painting at the Louvre, that she went back to revolutionize higher education for women in the States.

William and Henry James came to Paris as young boys, and it shaped their sense of “foreignness” early on, which would figure greatly in Henry’s novels. These stories and many more McCullough weaves together to present a grand history of Paris during the nineteenth century that is from a very different perspective — one that is distinctly American.

As I read, I couldn’t help but keep referring to maps of Paris, reminding myself of the experiences I had shared with my dad as Americans in Paris. Some of the places McCullough evokes, like the Palais des Tuileries, no longer exist, destroyed by fire in 1871.

When we walked down the Champs-Élysées to the Tuileries Garden, the open Louvre courtyard, with the imposing glass pyramid at its center, was our view. Some, though, like the Pont des Arts, the first metal bridge in Paris, constructed by Napoleon I in 1802 solely for pedestrians, still stands, though it was reconstructed in 1981. My dad and I walked that bridge from the Louvre to the left bank, gazing at the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame which was just visible upstream.

It is these experiences of Paris, brought to life through the eyes of the American characters McCullough highlights using their letters and journals, that work his magic for him, bringing Paris to life so vividly. This is Paris before it was a moveable feast, and it will appeal to the history lover / traveler (armchair or otherwise) dad in your life. For as Oliver Wendell Holmes was fond of saying, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”

The cool thing about that is we sometimes think up new ways of grouping the books. This time, I’m working with memoir. Memoir’s not a new category by any means, but it is one that Lemuria’s done without for quite a while. We had a biography section years ago, I’m told, but it eventually got distributed throughout the store, so Faulkner bios got shelved with Faulkner’s books in southern fiction, so the Churchill biography was able to be with the British history books, so the Patton biography was placed in World War II.

But what about the memoir? What about those biographies that, though they aren’t about remarkable figures in history, nevertheless speak to everyman by either carving out a fascinating though little-known life, or fascinatingly carving out an ordinary one?

Well, now they have a place. (It’s in the psychology and business nook behind the front desk.) And just to prove how much we needed this grouping of like-minded books, now I’ll show you how much we love ‘em.

Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr both came to Lemuria in the past year. They were brilliant! Here are Lisa and Norma on Jeannette, and Billie on Mary Karr. We’ve had visits from Andre Dubus III and Mark Richard (click here for Lisa’s blog), and though their memoirs still live in the fiction room with their novels, you may find a copy or two in the memoir section. Rodney Crowell and our own Teresa Nicholas — the new section is six shelves and growing! Come in to get a peek at someone else’s dirty laundry, find out about that ill-fated relationship, read that story of hope despite the worst odds.

First up, on Tuesday, May 10th starting at 5pm:

Araminta Stone Johnson presents And One Was a Priest: The Life and Times of Duncan M. Gray Jr.

Duncan M. Gray Jr. served various Mississippi parishes from 1953 to 1974, when he was elected bishop of Mississippi. But the story of his life is more than a story of his religious commitment to the Episcopal Church in Mississippi. Gray was a devotee of civil rights and a great player in the fight for racial equality. During our event, not only will Araminta Stone Johnson speak about her book and the life of Gray, but Bishop Duncan M. Gray Jr. will also be here to answer questions and sign the book. Book Friends of the University Press of Mississippi are hosting the event.

Then on Thursday, May 12th starting at 5pm:

Suzanne Marrs presents
What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

Marrs is best known as Eudora Welty’s friend and biographer, and her new book contains never before published letters between Welty and William Maxwell, the editor of The New Yorker, of whom Welty wrote, “For fiction writers, he was the headquarters.” Reading their letters gives one a personal peep into the life of writers of the time, including James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, and John Cheever.  There will be food and wine and lots of good literary talk.

And to end the week with a bang, on Friday, May 13th starting at 5pm:

Roger Stolle presents
Hidden History of Mississippi Blues

Stolle’s book focuses on the blues musicians who shaped our music heritage and those who keep it alive. Cathead Vodka, born in Mississippi and a proud supporter of live music, is co-sponsoring the event, which will include performances by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes before and afterwards. Come out to hear the blues, talk about music, and drink our famous $1 beer.