Saturday, December 6, 2008

More news from Gibson's

Yes, books are great holiday gifts:
It's a great holiday season for books. Below are a few of our gift suggestions. With our new website design, you can view them online and reserve them for store pickup. Please let us know any suggestions you might have, too!
While we're talking about gifts, we'd also like to recommend a new service made possible by the American Booksellers Association. Indiebound (formerly Booksense) is providing a way for you to generate your own wish list of books and to see the wish lists of friends and family. You can specify at what bookstore you'd like them to shop, and you can find great independent bookstores where they live as well. Check it out!
Here are some of our recommendations for this holiday season:
1) The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane. To our minds, Moby Dick is still The Great American Novel. But Lehane has given us The Great Boston Novel, and that's saying something. The opening chapter, featuring none other than the young Babe Ruth, is a tour de force. But it's the purely invented characters that we remember the best, especially the young hero, Danny Coughlin, the willful scion of an old Boston police family.
2) Hallelujah Junction, by John Adams. You have to know a bit about classical music to truly appreciate this warm and engaging memoir. But if anyone on your list is a music buff, please try this book out on them. From Mozart to the big band era on Lake Winnepesaukee, from Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles to Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, this book describes the love of music better than any book I can recall. By the composer of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and other modern classics.
John Adams, who grew up in East Concord and attended Concord High School, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003.
3) For young adults, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Far and away the best YA novel of the season, this futuristic tale combines the best of Harry Potter-style fantasy and characterization with the worst excesses of today's reality-show culture. And it's the first of a series, so the kids will be left wanting more.

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