Lemuria Bookstore Blog

Be forewarned–this is a book for the bike geek. As the title, It’s All About the Bike suggests, the bicycle itself is the subject, the story, not just the background for a morality tale or narrative of human struggle and inspiration. Avid cyclists are prone to imbue their bikes with mythical qualities, to treat them [...]

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Last time I said I would be back with a post all about the new baseball books this year. I’ve decided to postpone that for another week or two – there are just so many new baseball titles that it’d be a shame to leave any out, and I want to read and check out [...]

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My plan for this post was to cover as many of the new baseball books as possible, as I’ve done the last few Aprils. But this year, as I was reading and preparing, I realized that one book stood out and deserved to be discussed in greater detail. So the revised plan is cover that [...]

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There’s a particular danger when one works at a bookstore: the standard for which books are and are not worth reading becomes impossibly high, or at least, complicated. It goes something like this. For one to commit the time and energy to read a particular book, the book must: Have won a major award, or [...]

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A couple years ago, my wife purchased this book at a local church book sale for $5. The lovely binding and cover design caught her eye, and she discovered that it was a volume of poetry from a set by Sir Walter Scott published in 1822. She has recently done some preliminary research on the [...]

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Whenever I see the first example of a current events title arrive in the store, I tend to assume that it’s not a very good book. This probably isn’t entirely fair — I’m sure that some very good books have been written very quickly, and I have read enough of them to know they exist. [...]

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Sometimes, despite our best efforts, books just fall through the cracks. I suppose the sheer volume of books that pass through our hands makes this inevitable, but it’s never too late to make amends — so that’s what I’m doing now. When The Best of Zane Grey was released in May of last year, we [...]

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There’s a particular criticism of devoted readers that I hear occasionally — a challenge to just stop reading about things and to go out and actually do them instead. I’ve often wondered if those who make this challenge have ever read a really, really good book. I wonder this because my experience has been that [...]

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Well, you can read the introductions, I guess. But no reading is necessary to enjoy these two books. The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930 by Richard Minksy (George Braziller, 2010) Richard Minsky has collected the best of the American book covers and compiled them here in a book that, fittingly, has a lovely cover [...]

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With just a few days left in the year, I decided that it’s a good time to review my favorite books of 2010. I’m probably forgetting a couple of good books here, but as I thought back over what I’ve read, these are the books that stuck out in my mind. Intellectuals and Society, by [...]

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