Lemuria Bookstore Blog

When I went home for Thanksgiving my dad told me he’d been trying his hand at bread baking. His loaves, a sort of sourdough born of the book Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, came out golden, with a crunchy crust and a crumb that was both chewy and fluffy. In other words, he [...]

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Maggie triumphantly paraded her latest review acquisition at the desk last week: she got a copy of Mark Dunn’s new book, Under the Harrow. After she read aloud to us the description (it sounds great: some sort of social experiment where orphans are left to create their own society when the only books available to [...]

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This is book nerddom at its finest. I fell in love with Vladimir Nabokov after reading Lolita in college (no chuckles, now). Humbert Humbert’s perversion notwithstanding, Nabokov’s prose is like a kick in the head for me — when I read a single sentence by him I want to throw the book down and write [...]

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Black Swan Green by David Mitchell Though there’s been so much David Mitchell Love at Lemuria over the past few months I’ve just now ventured to read him. After listening to the relative merits of each of his books — I’m pretty sure between the two, Susie and John P., they’ve read them all — [...]

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When asked to consider how memory works, do you tend to think about how the smell of oatmeal cookies triggers a vivid memory of your grandmother or how a song takes you back to that high school dance? When I think about memory I think of Proust and his madeleines. I think about the nights, [...]

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I somehow overlooked it on the longlist for the Booker prize — it was somewhere there among other titles that caught my attention, The Slap, Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s controversial novel in which eight characters share their stories after an inciting incident (guess what?) occurs at a barbecue, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, [...]

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Growing up, my family’s culinary experiences were limited. Whether it was a sign of the times — I feel like bologna, instant mashed potatoes, fish sticks, toaster pastries, and other “convenience foods” had their heyday in the nineties, and my family took advantage of their kid-friendliness — or because when feeding four kids you’re bound [...]

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Moving is painful whether you’re moving across town or across the world. I recently moved across the neighborhood, which can be the worst sort, I think, because you’re fooled into thinking you don’t have to do much preparation, just run your car back and forth a few times right? Well if you’re not organized those [...]

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As CNN correspondent Kathleen Koch covered the Katrina aftermath on the Gulf Coast, she made a promise to the hurricane victims in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The day she left, she told them, “I promise I won’t let anyone forget what happened here.” Rising From Katrina is not just a story of destruction and disaster; it’s [...]

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I spied a good looking book on Joe’s desk a few months back; it was the review copy of Howard Norman’s new book, not due out till July.  Well, it’s July!  And not only has his book arrived at Lemuria, but Howard Norman himself will be here on Friday, the 30th! I really enjoyed reading [...]

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