Pegasus Downtown Staff Picks

As booksellers we have favorite books of the year.  Wells Tower’s first book is my favorite book of the last three or four years.  I had heard great things about this book but it took me a while to crack it because I’m not the biggest short story guy in the world.  But when I did… holy crap!

These are mostly long stories, so you can really sink your teeth into them.  The characters are American people, young and old.  The stories are subtle yet intense.  They’ll haunt you like a strange childhood memory.  Tower‘s stories will swirl around in your head long after you’ve finished them.  I can’t wait to read his next book. --Tim

This is the saddest book in the world. There's this thing in literature for the last decade or two coalescing into a New American Magical Realism (think Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Judy Budnitz) which basically says, there's magic in pop culture, advertising, Norman Rockwell, 7-11s and- y'know- mythological America; what if we use that power for good instead of evil? My boyfriend Joe Meno's third novel The Boy Detective Fails is one of the most graceful pieces of this sort of writing: cartoonish without sacrificing depth, it's the saddest thing in the world, but also maybe the prettiest.--I

Others have commented on the parallels with fascism and political chicanery, the feminist reading of L. Frank Baum’s classic, with its surprisingly real heroine/villainess. Why did I reread individual chapters, as I did with Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum? Was it the literate, questioning tone it shared with that brilliant novel? And why read it for a second time after Son Of A Witch and A Lion Among Men were published? (Except to refresh my memory of the chronology…) Going back twice to Maguire’s Oz, as if it were a well-beloved hometown? I don’t know; some things in life you love without fully knowing why- your sister, your first favorite novel, tiramisu, etc. Sue me.

I am a Westerner—properly born and raised on Western principles, and so as a true Westerner, I feel the painful dichotomy of body and mind.  I wake up, feel a dull head ache and once again prepare to face the multiple hurdles that inevitably come my way.  Life seems to be this endless procession of tribulations and a mad attempt to stay afloat long enough to breathe.  no fun.  I acknowledge the problem, but no, I don’t want to join the masses of people following Oprah’s spiritual advice and read Eckhart Tolle (who may be awesome…but no, not for me now) nor do the esoteric ways of my fave Western thinkers seem appealing to me on a day to day basis.Alan Watts is different.  Every paragraph in this book is loaded with elegant and critical thinking.  Plus, mr. man is a Westerner as well and a cheeky one.  There are certain moments when he straight up calls out the Western tendency toward skepticism.  this is a potent, little book that I foresee myself reading time and time again, cuz yes, I’m insecure and anxious. --I