Booksellers' Picks for the Holiday Season
Susan Stamberg Takes Her Annual Book Store Tour

Dec. 14, 2001 -- From a philosophical take on The Simpsons to a brawl involving the philosopher Wittgenstein, bookstores are offering a wide range of reading this holiday season. NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg canvasses booksellers every year to find out what people are reading. She highlights some of this year's picks on Morning Edition.

Books & Books: Coral Gables and Miami Beach, Florida

Books & Books The owner's son Jonah Kaplan Photo: Daniel Portnoy

The big draws at Books & Books shops in Coral Gables and Miami Beach include Winston Churchill's biography by Roy Jenkins, V.S. Naipaul's Half Life, Isabel Allende's Portrait in Sepia and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat. Owner Mitchell Kaplan also recommends these:

• Havana features lots of photographs of contemporary Havana by photographer Robert Polidori. The book is a combination of interior and exterior shots, showing the once majestic elegance of a city by capturing the beauty within the decay.

• Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath offers a print anthology plus a collection of three audio CDs.

• Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. This mix of biography, journalism and philosophy covers an argument between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper came to Cambridge to lecture at a seminar hosted by Wittgenstein. The event took a turn for the worse when Wittgenstein supposedly accosted Popper with a fire poker.

• Love Among the Ruins by Robert Clark. This fictional coming of age story focuses on star-crossed lovers in the summer of 1968. Emily is a good Catholic girl and Bill is a distracted yet highly political teenager. Together they run away to the north woods of Minnesota.

• Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle is a great book for a father to read to his daughter. In it, a girl asks her Papa for the moon and he sets out to fulfill her request, only to find that the moon is too large to carry home.

Harry W. Schwartz Book Shop: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Harry W. Schwartz The store in 1949 Photo courtesy David Schwartz

David Schwartz now runs the store his father opened in 1927, and has four others in the Milwaukee area. Selling well at Schwartz's shops are Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Leif Enger's Peace Like a River and Joseph Kanon's The Good German. Books about the Taliban are also popular -- in particular, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks. And Schwartz picks these:

• Building a Masterpiece: Milwaukee Art Museum by Russell Bowman (introduction) and Franz Schulze. This book showcases the striking Milwaukee Art Museum -- the only U.S. building designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava.

• The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer by editors William Irwin, Mark Conard and Aeon Skoble. This book of tongue-in-cheek essays looks at the Simpsons characters through the philosophical lenses of Aristotle, Plato, Nietzche and others.

• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai, features two young Chinese men sent for "re-education" during Maoist China in the 1960s and 1970s. It emphasizes the power of literature to free the mind. The author was himself sent to a re-education camp in the 1970s.

• Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens, presents the author's reflections on what it takes to be a critical thinker vis-a-vis American society.

• I'm Not Bobby by Jules Feiffer, is a children's book about a boy who puts the adult world at bay by pretending to be a lion, a dinosaur, or a monster.

Annie Bloom's Books: Portland, Oregon

Annie Bloom's Books Watercolor by Kaye Synoground

Bobby Tichenor opened Annie Bloom's Books 23 years ago near the Lewis & Clark College campus in Portland. Her customers, educated and fairly liberal, have been snapping up books about Islam and the Taliban. Also selling well is Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr. Tichenor also chose these:

• Complete Works of Isaac Babel by Peter Constantine (translator), Cynthia Ozick (introduction) and Nathalie Babel. This collection of Babel's plays, short stories, diaries and screenplays is edited by his daughter Nathalie.

• A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell by Jonathan Safran Foer (editor). Artist Joseph Cornell is famous for his diorama-like bird boxes. While still in college, Jonathan Safran Foer started writing to poets and authors asking them to respond to Cornell's work. The book alternates color reproductions of Cornell's work with the writings of 20 authors.

• Earth From Above: 365 Days by Herve Le Bras. French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's exquisite color shots taken from high above Earth cover the world: a French chateau, a field of farmers in India, a Mexican garbage dump, a highway interchange in Japan.

• Gandhi by Demi. This simple, moving story of Gandhi's life is probably best for children aged 7-10. It features beautiful artwork -- pen and ink drawings with gold and splashes of color.