Here is a list of the most popular books sold last month at Books Inc. in the Marina.
HARDCOVER FICTION
1. Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
2. The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong
3. Great Big Beautiful Life, by Emily Henry
HARDCOVER NON-FICTION
1. America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Own Immigration Story, by Felipe Torres Medina
2. Abundance, by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
3. Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins
PAPERBACK FICTION
1. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
2. One Golden Summer, by Carley Fortune
3. Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt
PAPERBACK NON-FICTION
1. The Age of Grievance, by Frank Bruni
2. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon
3. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder
YOUNG READERS
Young Adult: The Summer I Turned Pretty, by Jenny Han
Middle Readers: Wild Robot, by Peter Brown
Picture Book: Wild Robot on the Island, by Peter Brown
Kid Graphic Novel: Sidekicks, by Dan Santat
NEW AND NOTABLE RELEASES
Mendell Station, by J.B. Hwang
In Hwang’s striking and understated debut, a Korean-American woman becomes a mail carrier in San Francisco, hoping the work’s solitary nature will help her deal with her grief. Miriam, 33, has been teaching scripture at a Christian high school and remains devout to the faith she grew up in, unlike her best friend Esther, who nevertheless still accompanies Miriam to church. The two became close as teens, and Esther helped Miriam through a rough patch in college. After Miriam learns Esther has died from a two-story fall, she quits her job at the high school and loses her faith. She dives headlong into her new job and begins writing letters to Esther, in which she reveals a mild attraction to her friend and recounts her monthslong obsession with sex following her dad’s death when she was in college. Much of the narrative describes her daily routine carrying mail, which mirrors the ebb and flow of the grieving process (a small triumph in the form of a new uniform, the devastating anxiety of a deluge of packages). Along the way, Hwang delivers glimmering insights into the nature of grief (“A loss didn’t happen just once; every day afterward was a day the lost ones weren’t there”). This leaves a mark.
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, by Tim Weiner
In this triumphant follow-up to Legacy of Ashes, National Book Award winner Weiner continues his history of the CIA. He begins at the turn of the 21st century, when some believed the agency, sunk into post–Cold War listlessness, “was at the point of failure” and might only be resurrected “after some appalling catastrophe.” That catastrophe arrived on Sept. 11, 2001, in the form of a terrorist attack all but predicted by then CIA director David Tenet, who had failed to convince the Bush administration to take Al Qaeda seriously. By November, American bombs were killing Taliban foot soldiers, but, beyond that, “no strategy was in place.” Bush’s preoccupation with Iraq and failure to order a military dragnet for Osama bin Laden created a strategic vacuum into which the CIA fatefully stepped. Looking to extract intelligence on bin Laden from detainees, the agency implemented a set of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” codifying torture as a “government institution.” After Barack Obama’s 2008 election, “to the muted astonishment” of the CIA’s leaders, “little would change,” Weiner writes, noting that Obama “closed the secret prisons,” but in exchange “chose to incinerate America’s enemies, rather than incarcerate them,” expanding the agency’s drone strike program. Weiner chillingly concludes by asserting that the CIA’s repeated legal line crossing has turned the American president, who gives the agency its “marching orders,” into “a king above the law”; he quotes “CIA veterans” who speculate that the president could even “deploy a paramilitary group” without repercussion. It’s a crucial document of the present times.
Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz
A cozy near-future novella about a crew of leftover robots opening their very own noodle shop, from acclaimed sci-fi author Annalee Newitz. You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food — the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around-for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community, and each other-and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them
Chris Hsiang can help you find your next book at Books Inc., 2251 Chestnut St., 415-931-3633, booksinc.net.
