GalleyCat Reviews

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker: “When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived.” (January 2012)

The Sausage Maker’s Daughters by AGS Johnson: “The sausage maker’s youngest daughter is heading for the fight of her battle-scarred life. It’s the era of the counterculture and Vietnam. But twenty-four-year-old Kip Czermanksi is nowhere near her home in California. She’s in a jail cell in her hometown in Wisconsin awaiting a court appearance in the mysterious death of her ex-lover, who happened to be her brother-in-law.” (February 2012)

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What’s the one word you wish book reviewers would stop using?

The ‘S*** Book Reviewers Say’ video has arrived, and we saved it for your Friday afternoon viewing pleasure.

Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles starred in the video, reviving his Totally Hip Book Reviewer video series with a satirical exploration of book review jargon.

We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending February 12, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #6 in Children’s Interest) Listen to My Trumpet! by Mo Willems: “Gerald is careful. Piggie is not. Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald can. Gerald worries so that Piggie does not have to.” (February 2012)

(Debuted at #10 in Hardcover Nonfiction) Once Upon a Secret by Mimi Alford: “In the summer of 1962, nineteen-year-old Mimi Beardsley arrived by train in Washington, D.C., to begin an internship in the White House press office. The Kennedy Administration had reinvigorated the capital and the country—and Mimi was eager to contribute. For a young woman from a privileged but sheltered upbringing, the job was the chance of a lifetime. Although she started as a lowly intern, Mimi made an impression on Kennedy’s inner circle and, after just three days at the White House, she was presented to the President himself.” (February 2012)

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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending February 5, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #10 in Children’s Illustrated) Love, Splat by Rob Scotton: “It’s Valentine’s Day and Splat has a special valentine for a certain someone in his class. Her name is Kitten, and Splat likes her even more than fish sticks and ice cream. But Kitten doesn’t seem to like him at all—she always ties his tail and pokes his belly when she sees him. And then there’s Splat’s rival, Spike, who also likes Kitten. Will Splat’s heartfelt valentine win Kitten’s paw in the end?” (November 2008)

(Debuted at #11 in Children’s Illustrated) Bad Kitty for President by Nick Bruel: “It’s time to elect a new president of the Neighborhood Cat Coalition! Who will win the election? The candidate chosen by the kitties on the right side of the street or the candidate chosed by the kitties on the left side of the street? When election time rolls around, one candidate (guess who?) will discover that she never bothered to register to vote and the entire election will be decided by a surprise, last minute absentee ballot sent by Old Kitty.” (January 2012)

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Last night Adam Mars-Jones won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, celebrated for writing the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.”

Follow this link to read Mars-Jones’ scathing review of By Nightfall that earned a golden hatchet and “a year’s supply of potted shrimp.” British journalists Rachel Johnson, Suzi Feay, Sam Leith and D.J. Taylor judged the competition. At this link, you can read all the shortlisted Hatchet Job of the Year reviews.

Leith explained why they chose the review: “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

 

If you like clicking on “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” links to find new books, you will love this homemade Amazon books visualization and recommendation site.

Follow this link to see the search results for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. Created by Andrei Kashcha, the site uses Amazon data to create a flowchart with book cover links to scores of new books you might like. While the interface feels a little busy at first, it is easy to click and explore the book covers.

Here’s more from the site: “Yasiv is a visual recommendation service that helps people to choose the right product from Amazon’s catalog … it shows what people are buying with other products. A link between two products means that they are often bought together. By simply observing the network of products one may guess what has more popularity and what has less.” (Via Reddit)

We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending January 29, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #3 in Hardcover Nonfiction) Quiet by Susan Cain: “At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled ‘quiet,’ it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society–from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.” (January 2012)

(Debuted at #15 in Children’s Interest) Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai: “This is the moving story of one girl’s year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.” (February 2011)

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Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

The Ideal Man by James Conrad: “Twenty-nine-year-old Grace Watts is feeling stifled in her marriage to David Watts, a successful real estate agent. He is financially secure, but is insensitive, unimaginative, sexually inept and sometimes cruel. As Grace seeks meaning in her life, David becomes annoyed at what he considers ‘erratic behavior’ and frustrated that his wife refuses to let anybody dominate her.” (November 2011)

Spies Inc. The Adventures of Dash Danger by John Keilman: “After bully Biff Vermin sends him on a mission to steal a secret cupcake frosting recipe from The Lunch Lady, the boy looks for help inside his Dash Danger book. But he needs your help, too, to pull this off. You get to create a cool spy name, map out a plan, design gadgets and develop a secret code.” (January 2012)

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Over the past few years, video bloggers around YouTube have earned hundreds of thousands of views with book haul videos. Part of an exhibitionist tradition of haul videos that share shopping spree purchases, these dedicated readers show off new books.

Wikipedia has more about haul videos: “By late 2010, nearly a quarter of a million haul videos had been shared on the website YouTube alone.^[5] Some of the individual videos have received tens of millions of views. Many young adults (mostly women)^[3] have displayed their shopping hauls, while including their beauty and design commentary in the narration. The videos are often grouped by store name or by type of product (cosmetics, accessories, shoes, postage stamps, etc.).^[1]”

Below, we’ve linked to the five most popular book haul videos on YouTube.

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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller Listfor the week ending January 22, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #5 in Hardcover Nonfiction) Ameritopia by Mark R. Levin: “what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government.” (January 2012)

(Debuted at #13 in Children’s Illustrated) One Cool Friend by Toni Buzzeo & illustrated by David Small: “On a momentous visit to the aquarium, Elliot discovers his dream pet: a penguin. It’s just proper enough for a straight-laced boy like him. And when he asks his father if he may have one (please and thank you), his father says yes. Elliot should have realized that Dad probably thought he meant a stuffed penguin and not a real one . . . Clever illustrations and a wild surprise ending make this sly, silly tale of friendship and wish fulfillment a kid-pleaser from start to finish.” (January 2012)

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