by Sophie If these Bookbits appear a little disjointed, please forgive me: I've been counting books for the past 3 days on account of inventory and may still have little flashbacks (2-15-3 times). - Perhaps a little unsurprisingly, Publishers Weekly reports a spike in US sales of dystopian novels in January 2025, [...]
by Sophie Happy 2025! I hope it will be a gentle year for you, filled with literary treasures. -- Can't start the year without rounding out the old one of course! Besides all of our Staff Top 5s to fluff up your TBRs, here are the best books of 2024 according [...]
We are back with our 5(ish) favorite reads (and games) of 2024! We try very hard to keep it to five, but it’s simply not always possible. So, per staff member there may be more or less than five titles, but there can also be an A and a B list, [...]
by Sophie Gift season is fast approaching, and you, as a registered bookworm, probably have quite a to-be-read list. But how to communicate your coveted books to your loved ones in a subtle and gentle way? By sending your ABC Wishlists directly to them of course! (Subtlety is overrated.) Now, most [...]
by Sophie Congratulations to Samantha Harvey, who won this year's Booker Prize for Orbital! Chair of this year's judging panel, Edmund de Waal, had this to say about the book: "[...] Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to [...]
by Sophie A special day today: it's my daughter's birthday! (If you thought I was going to talk about the U.S. Elections, see below.) - First up: ABC's co-director Martijn was a guest on the Bookshop Podcast! Listen here to hear what he has to say about working in the best [...]
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?
We played the Q&A game with the ABC staff, and asked all sorts of bookish questions. In the coming weeks we will be posting their (sometimes cheeky!) answers here on the blog, so you can learn a little more about us. Enjoy! This time around we talk to Sophie, the main [...]
by Sophie One of the more popular things we sell, across all three ABCs, are our Blind Book Dates, or BBDs, as we call them. (Technically they should of course be called "Blind Date with a Book", but why use that when you can use a TLA, right?) A BBD is a [...]
by Sophie Congratulations to Han Kang, who is this year's Nobel Prize laureate for the Literature category! We all probably know her from her International Booker Prize winning The Vegetarian, and thankfully since then quite a few of her other works have been translated into English as well. The Nobel Prize [...]
