We read a lot. These books, purchased from the Carlos Museum Bookshop, are the ones we recommend to friends, purchase as gifts, and return to over and over again.
Send your orders by email, with phone number and shipping address, to Bookshop Manager Mark Burell at mburell@emory.edu.
Recommendations from the week of June 23, 2020
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
This beautifully designed small gem just arrived in our store, and I was immediately taken with it. Iceland has almost one museum for every 10 citizens, and the author/artist Kendra Greene visits some of the best. It’s a dreamy combination of travel writing, history, and museum studies, and completely unique. $22, hardcover.
Confessions of a Bookseller
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
As a bookseller, I must forcefully promote this funny/droll and surprisingly compulsive memoir by somewhat cranky but endearing Scottish used bookstore owner Shaun Bythell. His first book, Diary of a Bookseller, has already sold out in the US, but we still have copies of this, a second year of adventures in the trade. You’ll want to visit Wigtown after reading this. $25.95, hardcover.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
A recent New Yorker article has made this book a must-read, and for good reason: it's a fascinating look at a world of fungi that surrounds us and influences our lives and environment more than you’d think. $28, hardcover.
Surviving Autocracy
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
I will read anything Masha Gessen writes. She spent years warning the world about Putin and the slow erosion of the fragile state of democracy in Russia, and in the New Yorker and other media outlets she now warns us that our current leadership is following the same playbook. As The Nation says of this, her newest book, “Gessen shows us that having the language to understand what is now happening is the first step to surviving, and ultimately resisting, an autocratic future.” $26, hardcover.
Circe
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
Now in paperback, this brilliantly written novel inventively expands on the story of Circe from Homer's Odyssey and brings ancient history and mythology to life with an almost cinematic effect. Madeline Miller’s earlier novel The Song of Achilles has become a modern classic, and this book may well sit next to it on that shelf. $16.99, paperback.
Cultural Amnesia
Recommended by Mark Burell, Bookshop Manager
I think this is the perfect coffee table/nightstand book for our anxious times, something to dip into for brief, brilliant bursts of insight. Clive James created his own encyclopedia of the core of Western humanism, with more than 100 short and highly personal essays on key thinkers, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Author/critic Simon Schama perfectly captures the charm of this collection: “It crackles with epigrammatic mischief.” $19.95, paperback.
