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We hope this site will give you the same enthusiasm and knowledge you expect from a community bookstore. We review a broad range of genres, choosing those titles we believe worth reading.
The book club meets here at Bookin’ with Sunny every day, and the second Monday of each month at the Clayton CA Community Library at 7:00 p.m.
AN ARTLESS DEMISE I initially encountered Anna Lee Huber’s mysteries in 2012 when her first novel featuring Lady Kiera Darcy, The Anatomist’s Wife, was published.
A BANQUET FOR HUNGRY GHOSTS – REVISITED I am a huge fan of Ying Chang Compestine, which makes me happy to publish an updated review of
A SECRET SISTERHOOD Almost every page of Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s book, A Secret Sisterhood, inversely took me back to my college studies.
THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR A simple precis of Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor cannot do justice to the mystique of this very
THE MEMORY OF OLD JACK With the Stay-at-Home admonishment still in place for those of us well-beyond our 60th year, I’ve begun reaching for books
RUSSIAN WINTER Years and years ago, I was served a roasted onion. I’ve never forgotten the crisp softness as I peeled away the layers, the
THE SECRETS OF WISHTIDE The Secrets of Wishtide is another Victorian murder mystery with a smart, articulate sleuth and dark Dickensian overtones. The premise of
MEMORIZING SHADOWS, INSPIRATION FROM THE ARIZONA TRAIL AND STONE WISHES ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU Because we couldn’t go hiking together in red rock country this
IN DEPENDENCE The title of Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s novel, In Dependence, captures the thematic subtleties presented in its pages. Is twentieth-century Nigeria seeking independence, or
SPEAK NO EVIL Occasionally I encounter a novel that leaves me speechless. Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil left me not only speechless but breathless, too.
Hollow Kingdom Are you a nature lover? A hiker? A botanist? A stargazer? A bird watcher? If so, please consider Kira Jane Buxton’s debut book,
BLACKOUT You probably shouldn’t read (as I did) Marc Elsberg’s thriller, Blackout, while cable news is concentrating on the catastrophic outcomes of a spreading coronavirus.
REBEL CINDERELLA Adam Hochschild renews my faith in biographers and the art of biography. Rebel Cinderella models the very best of this sort of intellectual
THE PAINTER OF BATTLES A book worth reading is a book worth talking about, but not always. Arturo Pèrez-Reverte is Spain’s popular author of literary
THE FENCING MASTER Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte and his translator, Margaret Jull Costa, have created a novel that may best be described as a
ORDINARY WOLVES Not long ago in Bookin’, I described Susan Orlean’s nonfictional achievement, The Library Book, as a moving meditation coupled with journalism and research.
ONLINE AUTHOR EVENT – BAD INDIANS Today’s pandemic stay-at-home order means many families must deal with online schooling for their children. Back in April 2013,
The Poet’s Corner — Poem by Poem Storm Warnings The glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument What
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Is it true that Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad “traces the terrible wounds of slavery,” as Michael Schaub wrote
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