Holiday tips from Greater Boston booksellers
Just about everyone, no matter how tech-enamored or word-weary, appreciates receiving a book as a holiday gift. So, we decided to ask local booksellers which titles have been flying off their shelves — and see whether they had any special recommendations for hidden gems.
Mary Cotton at Newtonville Books said she's been selling a lot of "all the big books you'd expect," from Lauren Groff's "Fates and Furies" to Mary Gaitskill's "The Mare" in new fiction to the hit hip biography "Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg" by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. Her hidden gem is "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsy, a reprint of a whodunit written by Soviet-era sci-fi writers.
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Sarah Rettger of Porter Square Books has seen brisk sales of Barbara Abdeni Massaad's "Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate our Shared Humanity," Mary Beard's "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome," Randall Munroe's "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words," "100 Years of Best American Short Stories," and two memoirs: Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" and Patti Smith's "M Train."
Her off-the-beaten track recommendation is "Mitford at the Fashion Zoo" by Donald Robertson, a picture book she describes as " 'The Devil Wears Prada' meets Richard Scarry."
Jane Stiles at Wellesley Books added that the novels "The Japanese Lover" by Isabel Allende and "Avenue of Mysteries" by John Irving were popular gift choices this year. At Papercuts J.P., one of the area's newest bookstores, owner Kate Layte said nonfiction has been very popular this year, including many of the titles already mentioned, along with Helen MacDonald's memoir "H Is for Hawk."
In addition, Layte said, "there are some great paperback originals I've been selling lots of like 'An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States' by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 'The Best American Infographics 2015' — the editor, Gareth Cook, lives here in JP — and John Brockman's new collection of essays, 'What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence.' " A special favorite in fiction is "Katherine Carlyle" by Rupert Thomson. "When folks see the blurbs from James Salter and Phillip Pullman, they can rest assured they're holding a treasure," she added.
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Over at Harvard Book Store, the hot ticket is "Between the World and Me," with many buyers nabbing multiple copies. "They are buying one for each member of their family along with the book they've specifically chosen for them," said bookseller Katherine Fergason. "I've never seen that before, and I've seen it three times in the past two weeks."
Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.