Lemuria Bookstore Blog

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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I like the idea of giving big books for Christmas — big glossy books seem slightly extravagant, something you might not buy for yourself very often, but would be happy once you owned it. DK books make some of the best “big books” on the market, and I often can’t help but flip through them [...]

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True Grit is one of those books that I’ve picked up and put back down over and over. It has hovered near the top of my reading list, but somehow it kept getting leapfrogged. I think I had even set it aside as a possible vacation book, but when it came time to pare down [...]

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Just wanted to take a moment to highlight a book we got in recently. I’ve mentioned Thomas Sowell’s books here before. His last few books each tackled a particular topic (Intellectuals, or The Housing Boom and Bust), but this new title, Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays, is a collection of shorter pieces. Sowell is [...]

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The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie I’m not going to say much about this book here, for a couple reasons. First, John, Joe, and Lisa have all been posting excerpts and thoughts on the book and the event — I don’t know that I can improve much on what they’ve already [...]

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