Book News
New One Book rules.
The rules for the annual One Book, One Denver program are changing. Rather than a committee recommending books from which Mayor John Hickenlooper chooses the book to be read — as has happened over the five years of the program’s existence — this year YOU will get to select the book. Well, sort of.
You didn’t think you were going to get to choose just any book, did you? There will be 27 works to select a winner from, both classic and contemporary. (The options weren’t available at press time. There will be a variety of themes and authors.)
Voting begins on Monday and ends June 15 at the website . Voters will also be able to read a summary of the selected titles, hear the first couple of paragraphs read by Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick and learn about the authors.
The winner will be announced at a Sept. 1 launching of this year’s program, which typically includes author readings, dramatic presentations and audience discussions. The idea is to cultivate a culture of reading in Denver.
The Denver Post
First Lines
Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James
The day begins wrong. Melvin feels it upon waking, as though he has slipped his right foot into his left shoe and must shuffle along with a wrong-footed feeling all day. That today is Christmas Eve brings no comfort at all.
It is not the first morning to begin this way. Throughout his 45 years, Melvin Vallara has periodically awakened to a nuisance in his stomach, an inner itch of ill portent that could bode anything from a bee sting to a gruesome bull-on-bus accident. Both events occurred on his seventh birthday, and he still has not forgotten that bull, how it bounced on its back before landing on its side.
This is what the Bible says: I tell you the truth . . . no prophet is accepted in his hometown. Nor, Melvin would add, in his own family. His mother believes that the inner itch has more to do with gas than foresight, and like her mother before her, Ammachi calls upon an arsenal of unwritten remedies. She prepares a murky white goo from the boiled grounds of a medicinal root, while her granddaughter Linno watches from the doorway of the kitchen.
Independent best sellers
Fiction
1. Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith
2. Dead and Gone, by Charlaine Harris
3. Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk
4. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
5. First Family, by David Baldacci
Nonfiction
1. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way, by Ruth Reichl
3. Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, by Michael J. Fox
4. Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley
5. Liberty and Tyranny, by Mark R. Levin
indiebound.org
