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Movers & shakers

Goodreads can tell you what's hot! These books have been racing up our most popular charts in the last month.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
Like all women in her eccentric family, Towner Whitney can foresee the future by reading signs hidden in handmade lace. When her beloved great-aunt disappears, she returns home to Salem, MA, after 15 years of exile to unravel her family's twisted history. Jackie says, "The imagination of Brunonia Barry seems limitless: she creates a whole history and methodology of divination...and the cast of characters could keep a book club busy through many pots of coffee."

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
The bizarre but true story of how crime novelist Preston joined forces with an Italian journalist named Spezi to investigate one of Italy's most notorious unsolved serial murder cases. After asking too many questions, they find themselves indicted and charged as suspects for a string of grisly homicides. Michael says, "This book is downright fascinating. It quickly turns from an exegesis on the crimes and their investigation into a real-life thriller where the authors' freedom is at stake."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
In post-World War II London, a journalist overcomes her writer's block by exchanging letters with a man she's never met. Then she sets off to the isle of Guernsey (the only British isle under Nazi occupation during the war) to meet the letter writer in person. Debbie describes the book's epistolary style: "I dare anyone to turn the final page without a sense of satisfaction and just a little melancholy."

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
The final installment in Meyer's bestselling series at long last reveals what kind of life the teenage Bella Swan will choose: immortality at the side of her vampire lover, Edward Cullen, or a human life with her werewolf best friend, Jacob Black. James says, "This book is the best evidence that Meyer wasn't really writing a sloppy romance saga for misty-eyed girls but was instead telling a story about the eternal power of love and self-denial."

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
A new generation digs into Moore's landmark graphic novel that illustrates why comics are not just for kids. Set during the Cold War, the story of costumed adventurers "examines how ordinary people might become involved in vigilantism," says Goodreads member Nicholas. And David says, "Moore has that ability of all great writers to chastise and console in the same breath. He tells his readers that superheroes are a pathetic refuge from reality, but then invites you to share in that fantasy."

What book got you hooked?

When did you fall in love with reading? Do you remember the first book that opened your eyes to a mysterious, magical, imaginary world? Well, then help send 50,000 new books to low-income children! Now through September 15, vote for the book that got you hooked by visiting First Book, an award-winning children's literacy nonprofit, and join the campaign to give books to places that need them. Vote and make a donation now!




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The Never-Ending Book Quiz

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10 Questions for Selden Edwards — Goodreads Exclusive

It's a classic plot: A man spends his days teaching The Great Gatsby to high school students and his nights writing what he hopes will be the next great American novel. But this isn't a book—this was Selden Edwards' life for 30 years. Fortunately, the last chapter of his adventure ends happily. After dozens of rejection letters, Edwards' opus about a rock musician turned time traveler (aptly named The Little Book), scored a publishing deal and is now earning rave reviews on Goodreads. Edwards, 68, is retired now and working a second manuscript. He hopes it will take a lot less time to finish.

Goodreads: You started The Little Book in 1974 as a student at Stanford, and now 34 years later, after persevering through countless drafts and setbacks, you get to see it on the shelves of bookstores nationwide. How did you react when you received the news of your book's publication?

Selden Edwards: When my agent called to say that we had an offer, a significant one, I was totally surprised and sort of overwhelmed. I still am, really. After all those years of writing and rewriting, crafting and recrafting, all with no encouragement or success, I had become highly doubtful, with at least part of me, that my story would ever be published. To see it now on bookshelves is an absolute dream come true. I pinch myself daily.

GR: What inspired the story, and how different is the finished version from your original concept? You started the book in your 30s — has the book and its characters grown with you through various phases of your life?

SE: My idea for a "hero" waking up in 1897 Vienna came to me in 1974, when a friend was reading a book about the period, and I became fascinated with the idea of traveling there. I began doing research and reading and became more and more enthralled. Originally, Wheeler Burden (his name from day one) was 33, my age at the time. Over the years, he got older and older until I finally fixed the "precipitating event," his launch point, at 1988, freezing his age at 47.

GR: The concept of time travel appeals easily to the human imagination, but as a story element, it is extremely difficult to do well. How did you handle this tricky element in the story?

SE: From the very beginning, I had Kafka's Metamorphosis in mind. The main character, Gregor Samza, just wakes up and finds he is a bug. No explanation. That's what I wanted. I did not want to discuss the mechanics by which the time dislocation had happened. Although, the reader learns in the end an explanation of what caused the dislocation in time, there is no explanation of how it all worked.

GR: The book's fictional protagonist, Wheeler Burden, encounters many real historical figures, including Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Gustav Mahler, and even Adolf Hitler as a child. Why did you decide to weave a fictional story around these real men and events?

SE: I did not want to create a story in which all the famous historical characters of the period traipse through in cameo roles. I did create some very significant encounters, but each one has a very real reason (justification) for being in the plot. Wheeler's encounter with Buddy Holly is simply a pure fantasy of the author's. Actually, all the encounters were just plain fun to write and think about.

Read the next six questions »

Poem of the month

Four Drives in the Heart of the Desert by Louise Mathias

Went out to the edge of my life. Tumbled soft,
by wind and by sun, by ocean, by elsewhere, Anza

Borrego—
Less of a schism

between man and sky; less democracy really.

Remembered the terrible theatre

of the rental car, that summer, my father
turning slowly into lava. This is the country

they say, where no one can live. Shed it

like shale. Where stars will refuse

to fasten themselves to the sky,
will stream down in contrails

& stammer.

Read more poetry »

With love,

Jessica, Elizabeth, and the Goodreads Team

ps. Goodreads is hiring developers!