Some books do not need sequels; they are perfect as is. The author did a great job the first time around, and the reader needs no more from the author. Then there are other books that lend themselves perfectly to companion novels. I am not talking about things like the Warriors series, or any of these other incredibly long “stop, the first ten were enough” series.

No, the book series that I am thinking of have become as timeless as they are classic: Anne of Green Gables, Betsy-Tacy, and Pippi Longstocking to name a few. These series are more character driven, and it is these characters that are written so deftly by their authors that make us yearn to know more of their story. Whether the reader is a child discovering a character like Anne for the first time or an adult reminiscing about her childhood, these series resonate with us, remind us about the truth and beauty within ourselves, remind us of who we wanted to grow up.

Shannon Hale has given us another great character in Miri Larendaugher of Mount Eskel. We first meet Miri in The Princess Academy. She is a sparky daughter of a quarry worker who loves making people smile. Her opinions of the world are very black and white. She longs to help her family in the quarry, but her father forbids her from being in the mines. When the king’s decree comes and the Princess Academy is set up for all the girls from her village, Miri eyes are opened to world around her and the multitude of differing views and perspectives of others. She absorbs so much in the year and a half the first book covers and grows in many ways in this coming of age story.

What is amazing about Miri’s new story The Princess Academy: Palace of Stone, is that is is also a coming of age story. The first book focuses on Truth and Fairness, but it is Ethics that play a big role in the second novel. Hale weaves this tale in such a way that the reader begins to redefine her own views and discover new things about herself.

Thank you Shannon Hale for giving us another perfect book collection to add to the list of timeless books. If I had read these as a teenager, they would have changed my world. Then again, reading them as a twenty-something, they have affected me in a completely different, possibly more defining way. And it is this alone that make these feel classic to me. No matter what age the reader is when she reads about Miri, she will be touched and will glean something different. I love it!

Shannon Hale will be here Wednesday, August 29th at 4:00 (tomorrow!). I can’t wait to meet this fantastic storyteller.

Last summer, when my blog on The Keeper of Lost Causes posted, I was relaxing on the beach in Dauphin Island.  Unfortunately, there was no beach trip this summer but luckily a new Jussi Adler-Olsen was published!! The Absent One is the second book of the Department Q series, and I enjoyed it as much as the first!!  I will recommend reading them in order because I don’t think this is a series that you can just jump into the middle of, hence my display of  the paperback of Keeper on display right next to The Absent One.  Oh, did I mention that The Keeper of Lost Causes was my favorite mystery of 2011?

When Carl and Assad return to Department Q, the cold case division, they find that Rose has been assigned to work with them and a file about the murder of two siblings in 1987 is laying on his desk.  Both have totally confounded Carl, especially the case, since technically it has been solved, with the confessed murderer sitting in jail.  Why and how did this file land on his desk in Department Q?  The more Carl reads the file the more he sees things that just don’t add up.  During the original investigation, a group of boarding school students where under suspicion but there was not enough evidence to charge anyone.  Carl finds it very interesting that nine years later, Thogersen, the scholarship student of the group, confesses his guilt to both murders while Pram, Florin, Jensen, Wolf (deceased) and Lasson (missing), all silver spooners, are off the hook and go on to lead successful lives.  Unbeknownst to the higher ups, Carl, Asaad, and Rose start a new investigation and begin to get close to truth.  The remaining group of school mates realize that if they don’t find Kimmie Lasson before the folks in Department Q do then their lives will be forever changed.  What they don’t know is that Kimmie is aware they are looking for her and has plans of her own.

Y’all, it is going to be a long wait for next summer’s publication of the third book but I know whether I am on the beach or not I will be one happy reader!

David Byrne is a founding member of Talking Heads.  He has won Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards.  He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  He has written books.  Now he has written  a book about music.  I for one think he is qualified.  

How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with the journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.  A brainy irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.

It seems to me, Byrne has written the book for music nerds who don’t play music, or get to tour, or get to record on a grand standard.  He discusses everything from digital and analog recording to business and finance to public image.  There’s a good chance I would be writing about this book regardless, but I would like to point out that it is a McSweeney’s book.  Lacking a dust jacket like McSweeney’s are wont to do, it has a lovely white squishy cover with simple black lettering.  The formatting is pleasing.  Pictures are scattered on pages, the colors vibrant.  The chapter and contents text is color coded.  For real book lovers, it is very pleasing.

It’s great timing for this cool music book from McSweeney’s, fitting right in to our neat display!

Here are a couple other new books from the music section.

Is he Jumpin’ Jack flash? A Street Fighting Man?  A Man of Wealth and Taste?  All this, it turns out, and far more.  By any definition, Mick Jaggeris a force of nature, a complete original – and undeniably one of the dominant cultural figures of our time.   Swaggering, strutting, sometimes elusive, always spellbinding, he grabbed us by our collective throat a half century ago – unlike so many of his gifted peers – never let go.

For decades, Mick has jealously guarded his many shocking secrets – until now.  As the Rolling Stones mark their 50th anniversary, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Christopher Anderson tears the mask from rock’s most complex and enigmatic icon in a no-holds-barred biography as impossible to ignore as Jagger himself

Based on interviews with friends, family members, fellow music legends, and industry insiders – as well as wives and legions of lovers – MICK sheds new light on a man whose very name defines an era and candidly reveals:

 

The Man Who Sold the World is a critical study of David Bowie’s most inventive and influential decade, from his first hit, “Space Oddity,” in 1969, to the release of the LP Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980.  Viewing the artist through the lens of his music and his many guises, the acclaimed journalist Peter Doggett offers a detailed analysis – musical, lyrical, conceptual, social – of every song Bowie wrote and recorded during that period, as well as brilliant exploration of the development of a performer who profoundly affected popular music and the idea of stardom itself.

Dissecting close to 250 songs, Doggett traces the major themes that inspired and shaped Bowie’s career, from his flirtations with fascist imagery and infatuation with the occult to his pioneering creation of his alter-ego self in the character of Ziggy Stardust.  What emerges is an illuminating account of how Bowie escaped his working-class London background to become a global phenomenon.  The Man Who Sold the World lays bare the evolution of Bowie’s various personas and unrivaled career of innovation as a musician, singer, composer, lyricist, actor, and conceptual artist.  It is a fan’s ultimate resource – the most rigorous and insightful assessment to date of Bowie’s artistic achievement during this crucial period.

by Simon

Writer Susan Cushman shared a portion of this story with us in a comment on our first Miss Welty blog. She has graciously allowed us to republish her original blog post from June of 2012. I love this story! Enjoy. -Lisa

What I didn’t see coming at this past weekend’s Murrah High School mega-reunion in Jackson, Mississippi (classes of 1968, 69 and 70) was the joy of sharing childhood memories. It seemed that most people were (finally) over needing to talk about how successful we are (10th reunion), how great our children are (20th reunion), how great our grandchildren are (30th reunion), and the latest surgery we had or were planning to have (40th reunion). Sure, there was some talk of those things this year (*guilty*) but my favorite stories were those shared from our Mississippi childhoods.

Like Sally McClintock, who lived on my street in first grade. I think she’s the person I’ve known the longest of anyone from my senior class in high school. Sally reminded me of some funny things that happened back in 1956-7 on Belvedere Street in the Broadmoor neighborhood. Most of us didn’t have air conditioning yet, so we spent a lot of time outdoors, looking for shade trees and sneaking out of the neighborhood to get ice cream at Seale-Lily, which was dangerous because we had to cross the railroad tracks. Can you imagine letting your 6-year-old walk a half mile and cross train tracks without any adults? (Of course our parents never knew, and thankfully we lived to enjoy those memories.) The air-conditioning was on full power at Seale-Lily. We sat at those tall bar stools with the plastic covers, which felt cool on the backs of our legs. They served ice water in little paper cones that sat inside aluminum holders. We drank and ate slowly, not wanting to leave the comfort of the air-cooled building.

Seems like lots of our memories from the 1950s involve ice cream. Or Popsicles. The heat plays a huge role in our memories growing up in Mississippi. Another of my classmates, whom I knew not only from school but also from church, told me about going to visit the Popsicle Lady, who lived near her family in the Belhaven neighborhood. The Popsicle Lady lived alone in a big Tudor house, and had lovely gardens.  She was always surprised when she would invite her in for a popsicle and let her eat it inside the house, something our mothers never did back then.

One day she noticed that the Popsicle Lady was often sitting at a typewriter when she was there, so she asked what she was doing. I’m writing stories—would you like to read one? And then she would let her read one of her freshly typed stories. It would be many years before my friend would realize that she had been reading the unpublished manuscripts of Eudora Welty. -Susan Cushman

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Susan Cushman was director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop, co-director of the 2010 Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference (Oxford, Mississippi) and a panelist at the 2009 Southern Women Writers Conference (Berry College, Rome, Georgia). In June of 2011, she was one of the first “colonists” at the Fairhope Writers Colony in Fairhope, Alabama. Susan is a six-year “alumni” of the Yoknapatawpha Summer Writers Workshop in Oxford, Mississippi. She lives in Memphis, where she will soon be seeking agent representation for her novel, Cherry Bomb, which made the Short List for the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Susan’s essay, “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” appears in the anthology, Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (University of Alabama Press, 2012).

You can read more from Susan Cushman at Pen & Palette

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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“A river is like a narrative. You flow through country and there is a beginning and an end. When you come around a tight corner, anything could be there.” –Peter Heller

When Peter began Dog Stars, he began just with the first line: “I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks.” He didn’t know what was going to happen next. He had no idea he was writing a post-apocalyptic novel.

We had a great time with Peter Heller last night.  If you weren’t able to come by, we have signed copies of Dog Stars at the store. We would love to talk to you about the book, so just come in and ask us some questions!