Island Books

When we heard that Sally Rooney had a new book coming out at the beginning of September, we couldn’t wait to stock our shelves with it! 

Niteeka Narayan, bookstore friend and Island resident, graciously gave us her opinion of this fall’s highly anticipated release, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

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When a customer comes through the door looking for a recommendation, we are often asked for a book that is an escape. This can mean different things to different readers, but for some of us, myself included, one genre that reliably provides an escape is romance. Saturday August 21st is Bookstore Romance Day and in honor of celebrating romance authors, with their happy endings, witty dialogue, and love in all its forms, several of the Island Books staff are offering their personal recommendations of romances they’ve loved!

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

Recommended by Lillian

I am not in the mood for surprises. I haven’t been for several years, but I’m really not in the mood these days. I want to know how things will go, but I also don’t want to be bored. That’s a tough combination. Enter - the well-written, romance novel. I’ll tell you right now that the two main characters will be together in the end. I haven’t even told you which book I’m recommending, but I still promise you a happy ending. It’s an added bonus if the book makes me laugh. All of these things (happy ending, lack of boringness, and humor) are fully present in Talia Hibbert’s trilogy about the Brown sisters.

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Thanks to the recent Seattle Times article with the reminder that listening to an audio book constitutes reading a book for the purposes of Book Bingo, I was able to use some of my recent audio book “reads” to fill in a few Book Bingo squares!

For me, audio books have been a fun way to squeeze in a few more titles per month. I listen when I work out, on my way to and from work, when I’m knitting, and, when I’m really into an audio book, on my lunch breaks. I especially like listening to YA (bonus points if they have dual narrators, so fun!), romance, and some nonfiction, which is often narrated by the author, as you’ll see below. Every so often I’ll add in a literary fiction, like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. The pleasure of truly excellent prose spoken aloud adds a depth to my experience of the story. I can’t listen to an audiobook as fast as I can read a book, so it gives me more time to think about the characters, what is happening in the plot and speculate about what might happen next. When I listened to The Dutch House (read by Tom Hanks) I was continually surprised by the twists of the plot. When I listened to Gold Diggers, I was able to step away long enough to remind myself these were fictional characters, because I thought they were making so many bad choices!

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