Top 10 Books We Wish Customers Would Request

The country may be focused on Love of Reading this month, but for Bookmans peeps it’s ALWAYS Love of Reading time. We recently posted our customers’ most requested titles, all of which are excellent requests. Working among books all day, every day, we are entrenched in great titles with no restrictions about hot new releases, critical acclaim or movie tie-ins. Bookmans Speedway asked employees to name their top 10 books we wish customers would request. These are not necessarily our personal favorite titles (listing those would take way too long), but novels we most want to recommend or believe are unsung heroes of literature.

FICTION

Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
As you might expect, the story centers around a circus that only performs at night. Technically a fantasy novel, the story is thick with intrigue and a possible star crossed romance. This 2011 novel is in the development phase for a movie adaptation.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
This National Book Award finalist is also about traveling entertainers. Dunn creates a family of “carny geeks” with physical characteristics such as flippers or hunchbacks because of drug exposure in utero. Dunn explores concepts of normality in our culture.

Fan Girl by Rainbow Rowell
Fan Girl explores how fandom fits into life outside the conventions. In this case, Cath finds solace in writing fan fiction after the abandonment by her mother, through the mental disorder of her father and during the transition to college.

CLASSICS

Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
A “Memory Play”, as coined by Williams, means that this story is representative of characters’ memories and therefore not realistic. The semi-autobiographical play brought Williams to fame in the 1940s.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Probably Woolf’s most well-known piece of writing, this book follows Clarissa Dalloway on a single day in post-World War I England as she prepares for and hosts a party. The stream of conscious style employed by Woolf allows her to introduce characters and history within the restrictions of a one-day timeline.

The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer
Published the year of his death in 2007, this is Mailer’s last novel. The story is told through the voice of Dieter, a demon who influences Adolf Hitler. In this book Hitler is the product of incest and has no Jewish heritage.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams
Most of our staff has read Adams. Honestly, anything by Adams or Tom Robbins is genius. Hitchhiker’s Guide is the first in a trilogy of five or six books, depending on whether or not you accept the final book by the fantastic author Eoin Colfer to be part of the trilogy. As weird as that sentence is, we stand by it. Grab a towel and get ready for your journey.

NONFICTION

Borrowed Time by Paul Monette
This moving memoir documents the rise of AIDS in the United States and one man’s struggles with this devastating disease. It is a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the PEN Center West literary award.

The Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison
Unquiet Mind is the memoir of Jamison’s struggle with manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder. This book goes beyond voyeurism because Jamison not only lives with her mental illness, her career in academic medicine puts her in the position of healer as well. In so doing, it creates a powerful tension.

Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan
Morgan returns us to fiction, kinda, with a fictionalized account of her walkabout as an American in the Australian outback. It’s a New Age-y adventure narrative. It made news in the publishing world because as a self-published title, the book sold more than 370,000 copies before being picked up by HarperCollins.

Apparently Bookmans Speedway employees favor fiction while most of the titles you ask for are nonfiction. We love nonfiction too, but it is interesting to note that the books we treasure are largely, though not completely fiction. We apparently also like the strange or the unconventional, with a healthy dose of classics. Next time you come in to Bookmans Speedway, maybe you will make our day and ask us for one of our top 10 books we wish customers would request? We will be happy to help you read any of these titles!

* Bookmans can not guarantee stock. If there is a specific title mentioned in this post that you are interested in, give your favorite Bookmans location a call and a staff member will be happy to assist you.