Lemuria Bookstore Blog

In getting ready for the long-awaited release of 1Q84 on October 25th, I was pleasantly surprised to find evidence of Lemuria-Staff-Past who have also been devoted fans. Walker (Lemuria Class of 2006) said he would be happy if we shared some of his thoughts on one his favorite Murakami books and a recommended first read. [...]

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I had never heard of Haruki Murakami before I started working at Lemuria about four years ago. Our wonderful foreign fiction section became mine to take care of and there were Murakami’s books. I couldn’t take my eyes off a hardback copy of After Dark. It had just come out that year in 2007.  Finally, [...]

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I was walking through the Fiction Room and saw a book that I was unfamiliar with, but the cover just drew me to it.  I did a little investigating online and decided that while We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen was not the genre I usually read, it was to be my next book. This [...]

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On a Saturday night, when I was a teenager in 1970s Ireland, my pals and I would go to the school-kids’ disco at the Presentation College, Glasthule. ‘Prez’, as it was known, was fairly grimy at the time, but fantastically exciting, too. Deep Purple were in vogue. The girls wore cheesecloth and denim. When Status [...]

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Several months ago, I smiled happily when John and Joe placed an advanced reader’s copy of Joseph O’Connor’s new masterpiece Ghost Light in my hands. In the fall of 2007, I had been one of the lucky ones to hear the Irish author read from his novel Redemption Falls. Those of us who were at [...]

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Festooned by a calligraphic black spill across the dust jacket, white block letters announce that this book is “The International Bestseller” written by a very young Italian who just happens to also be a physicist. Against a stark pure white background are two slightly wet peas in a green pod and the title in uneven [...]

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When I learned that Norwegian writer Per Petterson had written a new novel, I was so excited, for I just loved Out Stealing Horses, released in 2007. In fact, I liked it so much that I chose it for our book club to read and discuss for one of our meetings. It’s hard for me [...]

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i saw this book come in a few weeks ago and immediately fell in love with the looks of it and had to have it.  they say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover but i say phooey.  cover judging is how i’ve found most of my favorite books including this little gem. the [...]

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Attention all you readers out there who love a good story, I have one for you. I’m talking no fancy-shmancy writing techniques; nothing experimental. I mean a good yarn. A story that can transport you to a different place even if you have no frame of reference to this place. A few years ago Kate [...]

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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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