Ask a Bookseller

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Alena Bruzas of Francie & Finch Bookshop in Lincoln, Neb., has a recommendation sure to appeal to weather heads and fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series alike. It’s called “Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish.” Author Barbara Boustead is a meteorologist, climatologist and Wilder scholar. She brings her passions together for this nonfiction work, published by South Dakota Historical Society Press. Readers who love Wilder’s tales of growing up in the Big Woods — and on the shores of Plum Creek, etc. — know how dramatically the weather affected her daily life. Droughts, tornadoes, locust plagues and bitterly cold winters determined whether her family would have enough to eat throughout the year. Those stories offer exciting drama, but Boustead was able to verify that most of Wilder’s weather accounting was true. “She goes into great detail about her methodology, about the science behind gathering this data, how people have gathered data about weather since the 1800s.” Bookseller Bruzas, who says she is generally more drawn to historical fiction than meteorology, still found the book fascinating. “The way that she describes the Ingalls family dealing with this weather — some of it was unprecedented. It makes me realize that now we're dealing with a lot of unprecedented weather events, and it feels relevant, almost eerily relevant. She really brings it to the present."

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.It’s that time of year when readers start to catalogue their favorite books of 2025, and for bookseller Kelly Evert, that book is “Mona’s Eyes” by Thomas Schlesser. Evert works at Village Books and Paper Dreams, with locations in Bellingham and Lynden, Washington. When a young girl named Mona, living in Paris, learns she’s going to go blind, her grandfather determines to show her as much visual art as he can while she can still see. Once a week, over the course of a year, he takes her to the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and other French galleries, where they focus on a piece of art each time. Evert appreciated both the art discussions and the relationship between Mona and her grandfather. “It’s just very beautiful and loving,” says Evert, who added that the dust jacket of the hardcover book includes images of all the featured artwork. Art lovers will immediately recognize that the famed eyes on the cover belong to Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” not the Mona Lisa, though Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is one of the 52 works of art featured in the book.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Mary Williams of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Calif., recommends a nonfiction book that will appeal to readers who find joy in the natural world, including the plants growing on their window sills. It’s called “Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings” by Myriam Gurba. It’s a book that’s deeply rooted in the author’s California home and landscape. “It's a perfect example of how a great writer can make even a subject you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards be fascinating," said Williams. She said the book was beautifully written, with an inventive format: "[Gurba’s] combining memoir, botany, little bits of history from California and Mexico, family history, photos, and little bits of newspaper articles, and putting together all these puzzle pieces. She’s basically telling a story about our relationship to nature — and how we cultivate plants and land — can, in turn, heal us. “The author talks about how she's been healing from some past traumatic experiences and some previous violent relationships. She doesn't get in too much into those stories — they've been covered in prior books — but [she’s] talking about how creating the sort of jungle of plants, including literally growing corn in her apartment, allowed her to reconnect with nature and kind of reconnect with her soul.” Williams says she found herself surprised and delighted, as well as entertained, by the comparisons the author drew with her observations of the world.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.What would the contents of your purse or backpack say about you? Bev Newton of Innisfree Bookshop in Meredith, N.H., recommends a novel about a Parisian bookseller who is so taken by the contents of an abandoned purse, he sets off on a quest to find its owner. Newton calls it “the biggest little book you’ll read this year — a delightful little book." Laurent Letellier discovers the purse, stripped by a mugger of all its valuable or identifying objects. Inside, he discovers a red notebook along with a key chain, a hieroglyph and perfume. Newton says the notebook is full of fragmented “memories and wishes and fears,” adding that readers who wish they kept journals will take comfort in how much can be conveyed in dashed-off remarks. Laurent, with help from his daughter, sets off on a quest to return the purse. But how to find a faceless, nameless woman in all of Paris?  The novel has been available in Europe for years, but it was recently translated and made available to the American market. 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Feeling too busy lately to finish a book? Kimberly Daniels of The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina, would like to make an argument for reading short story collections. Specifically, Katrina Denza’s new collection "Burner: And Other Stories.” Daniels raves about these tightly crafted contemporary short stories, in which she says a single paragraph conveys the weight of a chapter, and a short story contains a fully realized fictional world. “The economy of being completely transformed and having your mind blown for such little time — [the time it takes to read a short story] — and to be so affected and to return to your life changed — [that’s] a pretty good value for your time.” These are stories that explore aging, technology and the gap between what people do outwardly and what they express inwardly. In one story, a woman gets an AI hologram so she can continue to speak with her husband, who took his life due to depression. “This is a beautiful, hopeful story. I just love how brilliant it is, because it takes what might be the obvious thing, which is fantasy-versus-reality and technology-versus-humanity, and then flips the switch. “It's like, no, is the fantasy that you can love someone out of a depression? And I'm not giving anything away, because the joy of reading the story is so rich. Every story is like that: just taking it up a notch.”