Turning the Pages Together: Boulder Bookstore’s Legacy & Top Books of 2025 Transcript

Today, we are stepping into the heart of one of Boulder, Colorado's most beloved cultural landmarks, a place where stories live on every shelf, conversations are around every corner, and imagination is sparked every day. I am so honored to bring two folks that are leading the Boulder Bookstore into its next chapter. Boulder Bookstore is more than just a bookstore. It's a place that fosters creativity, imagination, community building. This episode, we are going to learn about some of the 2025 titles that may spark your imagination and curiosity. It's for avid readers, folks looking for a new book recommendation or the perfect gift. I invite you to turn the page with us as we explore, not only Boulder Bookstore, maybe some book titles that you haven't heard of before. I'd like to have our guest today. If you can introduce yourselves, tell us what you do at the Boulder Bookstore, how long you've worked there, so we can get a little insight to your lives.

Hi, I'm Arsen Kashkashian. I'm the head book buyer at the Boulder Bookstore. I started the bookstore in September of 1992, so I'm 33 years at the store. And my main job is selecting the adult books that we carry and reordering them and bringing them in. That's what I've been doing for a long time. I really enjoy it. And I also run the Poetry Book Club at the store. And I'm the co-host of the Boulder Bookstore KJNU Radio Book Club that airs once a month.

My name is Stephanie Schindhelm, and I have been at Boulder Bookstore since August 2006. So I'm coming up on 20 years at the store, and I've been setting up our author events for the past 15. So that's the main thing I do at the store. My official title is Marketing and Promotions Manager. But the main thing I do is I write proposals to publishers and get emails from authors wanting to set up events. And I set up our events for the store.

Thank you so much for being here today. What an amazing thing to have two instrumental people here that have really been a part of the history of Boulder Bookstore. It founded in 1973, and both of you have been there for multiple decades, leading the community as they explore not only books, but connection to authors, connection to artists. Today we're going to talk about some titles. But before we get into that, I'd love to know a little bit more about yourselves. And maybe you can answer this question. Can you tell us the book that sparked your first love of reading?

I remember in middle school, or maybe late elementary school, I loved The Phantom Toll Booth, which is a book a lot of people will know. But I also loved a book called The Pushcart War. And this was a book that was written like it was futuristic, which I think that year has passed. It was probably 2016 or 2020 or something. And it was written as if it was newspaper articles about this war going on between the push carts in New York City and the big, big trucks. And the push cart vendors used pea shooters to shoot darts into the tires of the big trucks and disable them. And I just loved that book and read it over and over again.

For me, one of my main inspirations for loving books is when I was a kid, before I could read, my sister, who's three, four years older than me, she couldn't wait to share these books with me, and she didn't want to wait for me to have to learn to read so she could read them to me. So she would read to me. And I remember the first, the book I remember the most is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine Lengel. And I've always loved that book. But I think that was the first time where it was like, I felt like it was a kid who seemed like me and going on this, like this crazy adventure and just having it, it just, it really sparked a love in me for fantasy and sci fi. So that was my early reads were mostly in that vein.

Can you tell us what makes Boulder Bookstore special? Why have you stayed there? What has inspired you to keep being a part of this institution?

It's just a fabulous place to be. It's a beautiful space, you know, to go to work in that space every day is a real gift. I feel very lucky to get to spend my time in that space with the we work upstairs. So, we have the natural light and it's beautiful and I love books. I loved books before I worked there and to have all those books at your beck and call and to be the person now who determines what a lot of the books are that are in the store is just a lot of fun. And so, I didn't think I'd work there 33 years. I thought maybe I'd work there a year. It's just worked out that I couldn't imagine what would be better to do.

For me, it's just book people are great people. I got my start in loving independent bookstores in particular. I went to school in Asheville, North Carolina. My junior year of college, the indie bookstore in Asheville, Malaprops, at my school, they were offering credits for being an intern at their store. So I was like, Oh, that sounds interesting. So I got three credits for basically like stocking shelves and pulling returns and just learning about indie bookstores. And I just completely fell in love with the whole thing. Unlike Arsen, I started at the bookstore feeling like this is what I want to do with my life. So when I moved after college, when I moved out to Boulder, I was like, the only place I applied was Boulder Bookstores. I was like, I want to work in independent bookstores just because book people are the best.

Yeah, I think at the store, we have such a great community of people. You know, over the years, the people have changed, but there's the culture of kindness and giving and literacy and talking about the ideas that are in books that you don't get in that many other workplaces. You know, I talk to my friends about their work and they're, you know, maybe you talk about the TV show, but we're talking about these kind of complex ideas that are in the different books that we read all the time. And we really care about each other. And we care about the business and the, you know, people reading in America. And that's all important to us. We share these values and that's really nice.

Parks & Open Space started 50 years ago. We've been celebrating our 50th anniversary of this year and really thinking about the legacy. The bookstore started in 1973, so around the same time. How do you think Boulder Bookstore has evolved over this past 50 years?

David Bolduc started it, and he's still at the store all these years later. He's still at Presence. When he started it, it was down the street in a much smaller location, and it was only part of that location. And then it grew to that whole thing. And then in 1991, the store moved to where it is now. And I think it started as kind of, you know, somewhat of a small specialty store, had a few categories that probably did really well. But then when he made that move in 1991 to the location we're at now, we became this kind of big full service store. One thing I've been doing, you know, I took over the inventory in 1997, and you know, we're trying to have really the best inventory of any bookstore in the country. That's kind of the goal. I don't know whether that's realistic, but we try. And I think the other piece, and Stephanie can speak to this, is we didn't really do events in a big way till the early 90s, when we had that space in the ballroom. And now, events are such a critical part of the store.

In the smaller space, we didn't really have a space to do events. So I know it's a problem that a lot of smaller bookstores face, is you want to have these big gatherings, but it's hard to do a gathering with more than 10 people than a lot of other bookstores. So that was a really big advantage of the space that we moved into, because it has this big, gorgeous ballroom. I mean, it takes a little bit of work to get it set up. We got to move some cases, we got to set up some chairs, but it's worth it to be in that space. And I mean, I hear all the time from authors saying, like, I grew up coming to this store. I've been coming to events at your store for years, imagining myself up on that stage, and now I've got that chance to do it. And it's a really special thing to be able to help our local authors do something like that. And in a space that we do a lot of local events, but also a lot of traveling authors, we get people from all over the country come to the store to do events. So, it's a great way to bring community together, and especially for more specialized things, it's like specialized topics. It's like, here is a room full of people who are also into this trail running or into this particular genre fiction, or it's fun to be with other people who like the same fun thing you do.

Yeah, I feel like we've lost in our kind of digital fast age this third place. People go home, they go to work, but where's the middle place? And it sounds like the Boulder Bookstore has really curated a space for people to come to find like minded folks that enjoy the same things they do. And of course, the amazing selection of books and other items at the bookstore to, I'm sure, draw in such a variety diverse group of people.

Yeah, I mean, we want to be a place where if people are shopping, everybody finds something, you know, whether it's the mom is looking up for novels and the kids are in the kids room and the father, you know, maybe he just buys a couple of bars of chocolate. I mean, we have so many different items that we hope we can reach everybody. And at the same time, we do all sorts of different events. So if you're into science, there's going to be events. If you're into psychology, there'll be an event for you. If you read horror novels, they bring just many different aspects of the community together. And sometimes it's just fun to see how people relate to each other in the store.

So today, you're bringing a selection of books. I'm curious how you chose these books to highlight. Is there something that brings them together, or was it the best books of the year? How did your selection process go?

I wanted to bring in books that came out in 2025, but I also wanted to pick a mix of books that I was excited about. I wanted to have a focus on some of our amazing local authors because we are so fortunate in this area. Like I was saying, we do a lot of events with local authors, but we've got so many amazing authors in this area, from people who write and illustrate books for kids, all the way to adult novels and non-fiction, and just books all over the spectrum of ideas and thoughts. So it was a little difficult actually to narrow it down. We had to talk like, all right, what are we going to bring? Because there's a lot of great books. But yeah, these are all books that I thought were, that either I was excited about or I know our children's buyer Barry was very excited about.

So yeah, and I picked, I guess two different ways. One, I looked at the books I had read in the past year and what I really liked and kind of skewed that towards again, the local authors. I have some national authors, but I thought this podcast is for Boulder County. And I want to highlight those authors who either live here or nearby and have written great books. And also, I did pick out a few kind of national bestsellers. You know, you don't know what's going to catch on for sure. You know, you take a lot of chances as you hit November. And I do feel there are a couple books now that are really resonating with people. And so I brought a couple of those as well.

Wonderful. Do you want to start by giving us your first one?

I'm going to start with a Boulder author, Stephen Graham Jones. He is a horror author. He writes horror novels and novellas and short stories. I mean, he is very prolific. He writes, you know, usually a couple books a year of his come out. It's unbelievable.

We had three events with him this year.

He does graphic novels as well. But earlier this year, he released a book called Buffalo Hunter Hunter. And this was a historic horror novel. And it revisited a terrible massacre in the history of the United States. And I kind of imagined if there was a vampire there and stretch that through time. And it was just an amazing book. And it did make the New York Times Top 100, which is not the most common thing for a horror novel to do. But I think this was the right book for sure. In this book, you get that historical perspective of what happened to the Native Americans in the West and how that still reverberates till today. But you also get this kind of revenge, this horror aspect where some of those wrongs, it's almost like fantasy fulfillment. So some of these wrongs can not quite be righted, but there can be some violence that can come to bear on some of the evildoers. I just think it's a really interesting read. Stephen's got an amazing style. I thought this brought together all his strengths in a book that not just horror readers but anybody can enjoy.

My first book that I will talk about is Once Upon a Kwanzaa by Nyasha Williams, and she is a local author. We've actually had a number of events with her over the years. She does a lot of picture books, but she's also done like a tarot deck and some like spirituality books and this is just a really beautifully illustrated book and a beautifully told book about just educating and in an entertaining and fun way, young kids about what Kwanzaa means. Given that she's a local author and Kwanzaa is coming up, I thought this would be a really fun and beautiful book to highlight and Nyasha's really wonderful author. We work with University of Colorado's School of Education every year to put on a children's book festival, and Nyasha was part of our Children's Book Festival this year to celebrate this beautiful book.

I'm going to go to a nonfiction book that I really enjoyed. So I'm recommending David Barron's book, The Martians. He's the author of The Beast in the Garden. And The Beast in the Garden was very a local book about mountain lines and how they interact with people as probably issues that you deal with in open space as housing and people encroach on the natural habitat of these different animals. You know, and he was really writing about mountain lines, but certainly the same is true of bears. This book is much different. This book is a historical look about around the turn of the century that people really believed there were people on Mars. And there were articles written in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, through very, what we would think of as rudimentary telescopes that they had at the time. They thought they were seeing canals on Mars. These looked like straight lines. And so they thought, oh, there must be canals on Mars. They would see things change around the canals depending on the time of year. Oh, that must be vegetation on the canals. They had built this whole fantasy up that they're really Martians. And of course, you had like the HG. Wells at the time, War of the Worlds came out. Nikola Tesla was trying to... So he brings in science and literature and history. And it's just a fast-paced, really wonderful book.

My next book is also nonfiction, picture book by Andrea Wang called Worthy, The Brave and Capable Life of Joseph Pierce. Andrea Wang, her book, Watercress, won the Caldecott a number of years ago. And she also won Newberry honors as she lives in the Denver area. But this is nonfiction about a young Chinese boy, Joseph Pierce, who was sold to American sailors in like the late 1800s and was brought to America and became part of the sailors' family and went on to do amazing things. He learned how to read and write. He fought in the Civil War. Obviously faced a hard life in many ways. But this is another beautiful book by an award-winning local author, really worth highlighting. Actually, we had Andrea Wang as one of the first authors at our Children's Book Festival when we first started it in 2019. Gorgeous illustrations, beautifully told. This is definitely for an older kid who's more interested in learning real stories and can kind of sit through a lot of a longer story. As you could see, it's a bit longer. But I think this is a really great way to get the kids who are just learning how to read more into nonfiction.

And I noticed that both the books that you've recommended, Stephanie, are autographed copies. So you do these book events, but then you also have a certain selection of books at the store that are...

When we have authors come to the store, we usually ask them to sign extra copies so that we can have them in the store, especially during the holidays. It's nice to have a signed book, you know.

Yeah, I love that.

Who doesn't love having a signed book?

Yeah, that's a little extra special.

Yeah, a little extra treat.

Yeah, and there's some authors that were the hub for their signed books, like Stephen Graham Jones, who I talked about earlier. He comes by the store once every month or two, and he signs whatever we have. If people have sent in requests for personalization, he does that. We do that with John Crackauer. You know, it's something we like to do. It's something that allows readers to get these personalizations without the authors having to field all these emails and trying to do it on their own. So that's been a nice thing. We've started doing that during the pandemic, and it's really worked out well. I guess my next book, I was going to do something that wasn't local. It's a book by a woman named Maria Reva, and she is a Ukrainian author, and it's a novel called Endling. Endling is a term that's the last, something's the last of its species. Her main character is going around the Ukraine collecting the last snails of these species, and she has this like camper van that she's outfitted as a biological thing. So that's one aspect of the story. And the other aspect of the story is these two women who are kind of reluctantly participating in what's going on in the Ukraine where they have these parties with all these women, single women, and men from England or the United States come and see if they can find a wife. These two women are the two daughters of the main person who objected and protested this practice. But their mother has disappeared. So they feel somehow if they're participating, she'll have to come out of the woodwork and object and they'll find their mother. But what's really amazing about this book is you're about a third of the way into the book, I think, and then the war breaks out and the war broke out in real life while Revva was writing this and the war broke out in the book. And she breaks the narrative. She's like, how can I write this novel when the war is going on? And there's a piece of that the book where it seems like you're not going to get back to the story of the snails and the sisters and all right. But what she does is life goes on like it even goes on in wartime. And so after a bit, the novel starts going on. But now the war is a character as well. And I thought she did this beautifully. It was nominated for the Booker Prize. It didn't win, but I was rooting for it. But I really think it's an interesting book. I think it's a pretty easy read. And I think she's an amazing author. And I just love that kind of break with I can't just keep writing the novel, you know, and how she did that.

I don't think I've read a book like that where it kind of like brings in this modern event in real time. That sounds so interesting.

Yeah, I thought so.

This is also not a local author. I want to build a little silly with this one. But Or Face is a really fun series. It's kind of exactly what it looks like throughout. They show you pictures of animals and you have to say if it's a but or a face. And the next page will always tell you, you know, if it's, you know, it's a face. But what is that? I don't know. But it's so this is I thought with open spaces. And this is a really fun one with animals. This is the third book in this series. Super gross. But this is by Carrie Lavelle. I gave this one to my niece a few years ago for Christmas and she loved it. So this is a really great book for for kids who are into nature. But maybe they want to laugh a little bit and also learn a little bit at the same time. Just it's a really fun book. This is like a great book to do with your family, just like sitting around the table. It's like keep track, like who guesses, is it a butt or is it a face? I don't know. A fun one for the holidays.

As a parent of two small children, I can imagine the hilarity that that book could create. I'm going to have to put that on my list.

So my next book is Little Mercy by Robin Walter. And Robin is a poet who's based in Fort Collins. And I like to have a poetry book because sometimes the season, especially Christmas season, obviously, is so frantic. And this is a great book to just quiet you down. This was written during the pandemic and Robin was up in Montana, was kind of isolated, and was writing about what she saw out her window, looking at the prairie, looking at the mountains. And the poems really go together beautifully to form the whole. She came to the store recently to the Poetry Group, and she talked about thinking about the book and how the poems fit together as a nest. And there's tons of bird imagery. I just think it's a beautiful book. Sometimes we do need to slow down, and I think poetry is really good for that. Poetry invites close reading, rereading, contemplation. This is really a book that has that capaciousness for all those things.

I'm an avid poetry fan. Every year at Christmas, I try to put a new poetry book on my wish list, so I'll have to check that one out.

Also picking sort of with the idea of in mind of open space, Bud finds her gift by Robin Wall Kimbrer, who's well known for writing Braiding Sweetgrass. This is her first children's book, and it's a really sweet story about Bud, who is part of her family, and everyone has their important things they do, and she wants to find something important for herself. And being that it's Robin Wall Kimbrer, obviously her important thing is being in nature and learning about how nature works and how to grow and how to be a part of things. And unsurprisingly, the paired her with an artist who does just really gorgeous work, especially the illustrations of nature are just really lush and pretty. And seeing her little bud growing, little tree, it's really a really sweet book, especially since I know there's a lot. I mean, based on how many copies of Braiding Sweet Cress we've sold, I think there's a lot of people in the Boulder County area who are big fans of Robin Wall Cameras. So I think this would be a really sweet book for families to share during the holidays.

What age do you think would this book be for?

I would guess at least four, just since it is a little bit longer of a story. I'd say all the way up to like six or seven, you know, especially if you're a family that does storytime reads together, really take it in because it is a little bit longer of a story.

So, the last book I recommended was Poetry to help you calm down. But let's say you just can't calm down and you just need to escape. So, the book that I recommend is a book called Wanderlust, A Travel Guide to the Globe. It's put out by Moon Publications, which just does travel guides. This is a big oversized book with tons of beautiful pictures, and it's kind of divided into different types of travel, whether it's adventure travel or food cities. And what you get, say you turn to a page and you might see the best dives in the world, right? And so then they might have a snippet with a picture about Belize, and they might have a snippet with Australia, and it's just something to get those juices flowing, and you'll pick it up anywhere and get into it and read it and get some ideas. You might want to go further and decide to get a full guidebook. It's not going to be the book you need to be in Belize with, but you might find some places you never realized existed or didn't realize that this is a great place to go hiking or a great place for eating cheese, which is what Stephanie likes to do on vacations. So it's big and it's beautiful. And it's only $45, which for this type of book is very inexpensive. I was shocked when I turned it over and saw what the price was. And so it's a beautiful gift. But also, if you just need to escape yourself, you might just want to buy it for yourself.

Dog Man Big Jim Believes by Dave Pilkey. We actually had an event with him last week, which is, I think, the biggest event that we've ever put on. It was super fun. Oh, Dave Pilkey is a very, very sweet human. And he did actually sign stock for the store for us. We do have some signed copies, but the Dog Man series is super fun. My niblings were just over the moon to get to see this event. They also had their minds kind of blown, because I did the intro for it. So when I got up on stage to introduce him, my sister told me later that they turned to her, and they're like, what's Aunt Stephanie doing up there? She's like, I tried to tell you, like she set this event up, but that was very special for me. Going to be forever thankful to Dave Pilkey for letting me have that special moment. But the Dog Man books are super fun. So if you've got four-year-olds, I don't know, it's my nephew's 10, so and he still totally loves this series. So any kid should be reading Dog Man, because it's really fun and very positive, and it's about not letting anyone dictate your story. Every character has really fun arcs, and it's also really silly.

It is a crowd favorite with my nephews who are in elementary school. Would you consider this a graphic novel?

Yeah, it's a great book to start kids learning how to read too, because it's like you could read it to them, but then it's like, this was definitely for my nephew when he was like, this is one of the books that encouraged him to learn how to read so that he could stay up late at night under the covers reading more.

Well during the event, I thought it was really interesting. Dave Pilkey said, how many out there know what ADHD is? And so many kids raise their hand. How many people know what dyslexia is? And so many kids raise their hand. And he talked about how he had those issues as a child. And he wanted to write books for that kids with those issues could really get into reading. The way he connected with those kids was really amazing. And I think what it meant for them to be seen like that was a great thing. It was a powerful event. You think you're going to these events, it's going to be silly. It's going to be Dogman. It's Dave Pilkey. And I have a tear in my eye watching this.

Well, for the ADHD, one of the things he was saying is like, you do know what that is. I'm not going to say what the words stand for because I don't agree with them. Because I think it's delightful or something. Attention delightful. I don't think it's deficiency. We have a problem paying attention to boring things is what it is.

It's probably why the books resonate so much for young people. And what a great, like you said, a way to encourage people to read more, maybe especially those reluctant young folks who are struggling with their own issues and just trying to get into reading. So I love this recommendation.

So I'm going to bring things down. So I want to talk about Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book, which is called 1929, probably the big nonfiction book of the season it seems to be emerging as. And he wrote Too Big to Fail, which was really kind of the main history of the 2008 crash. So here he's going back to 1929 and saying what really happened and how does it impact us today? What resonates? What's echoing with what's going on today? But it's really, it's a pretty fairly straight history about 1929. And I was not sure how it was going to sell. You know, I bought it up front and I bought a decent amount of copies, but not huge. I thought, well, this is not going to be the big Christmas book. But lo and behold, it seems to be the big Christmas book.

Nothing says Happy Holidays like 1929.

But he's a great writer. He tells a good story. He really can make these financial things so you can read them. You can understand them. You don't have to have some sort of financial background. You know, he can really humanize these things. And it seems to be something that people are gravitating towards.

Yeah, I think a lot of times when people go to books, when they're looking to resonate with like what's currently happening. And I'm sure, even though it's not the most uplifting subject, it is intriguing people to kind of look back and see how did we get where we are today.

Yeah.

For my next selection, going back to a local author, Katie Nelson and Olivia Mickle. Olivia lives around here and this is Tales of Pirates, Adventures on the Seven Seas. And this is nonfiction for kids, so probably 8 to 12. And this is just going all over different kinds of pirates from different ages of the world, from the Roman times up through more modern times. People like Francis Drake and Grace O'Malley, and more classics like Blackbeard and that sort of a thing. But as you can see, it's illustrated as well, which makes it more fun for kids. It's told in a, I don't know if lighthearted is quite the right word, but I feel like I know a lot of kids who really like pirates and pirate stories. So I think this is a fun way to, if you have kids who are into learning about pirates or they like Pirates of the Caribbean, or Treasure Island or things like that, this is a fun introduction to the actual history of real pirates from all over the world.

My next book is not a new book. It's an older book. It's called Portrait of Boulder. It's a photo book. It came out several years ago. The photographs in it are Steve Mullencamp and Sylvia Pedum wrote the text. The reason I'm bringing it up is it's a really beautiful book, but we had the opportunity a little while ago to get lots of copies of this at a very reasonable price. So we have one of the better books of Boulder that's been put out in the last 20 years on our sale table. So you don't have to buy an expensive book. This book goes for like $11.98. It's got pictures of the Flatirons. It has pictures of the mall. It has pictures of the band shell. It has pictures of all your iconic things. And Sylvia Pedum, who's probably our best living historian just about, right, is writing the text and telling you what's what. And so it's a beautiful book. We're giving it away almost.

It sounds like a great gift for someone that loves Boulder, wants to have a coffee table book. I always appreciate a good price. So I bet it's going to be appealing to folks.

Got another local author. We have so many great local authors.

It's amazing.

So Stan Yan, this is his graphic novel for it's like eight, again, like eight to 12, The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang. Eugenia Wang is American. Her mom has this Chinese superstition about the number four, and Eugenia Wang's birthday is April 4th. So she's never been able to celebrate her birthday. But this year, she wants to celebrate her birthday, but things start to go wrong. I think she gets hit in the head with a shoe during PE, and suddenly she starts to get these premonitions, something is going to go wrong. You could tell from the cover that maybe something's going to go wrong, but it's really fun illustrations, Stan Yann does really great comedy, but also really great kid-friendly horror. So it's a really fun story that it's middle grade, so it's going to end. Everyone's going to be fine in the end, but there may be some misfortunes along the way. Middle grade graphic novel has been a really booming category across the country for the past several years. I think there's been a lot more acceptance from parents and librarians that it's okay for kids to read graphic novels. They have really taken to it, so we love it. Having Stan Yan being local really helps in having it be a really fun book.

And you write the cover with the flames and the red and the black. It's very intriguing. It looks like ominous things are going to be afoot.

So I have another local author, RL. Mazes, who is a novelist, and her new book is called A Complete Fiction. I really enjoyed this book. It's about a writer who's about to put out a book, a Me Too book. He's accused of plagiarism from another writer. What she does is alternating chapters. You get the two writers' points of view. It becomes a much more complicated story. She delves into issues like who has the right to tell a story, who owns a story. It's just never that cut and dry. She also dives into very much into what it's like to try to get a book published, working with an agent, working with your publishers, sending these books out, trying to... So people always seem to want to know what's behind the curtain. Like I feel like every time I go to a party or anything, they want to know how the machinations of the business. She does a really nice job here in kind of pulling over that curtain and letting you see into what it's like to get a book published, what it's like to have it edited, what's it like to be dealing with difficult issues that maybe bring up all sorts of questions that authors don't have ready answers for. And it's fun. It's a fun, quick read. I really enjoyed it.

Another local author, Megan E. Freeman. This book I picked in particular is This is Away. It's a companion novel to her first book Alone, which is set along the front range. So in Alone, a girl who's, I think, 10, and she plays a prank. She hides away. She gets basically she secretes herself away for like a night thinking that she's going to upset her parents. What ends up happening is that she comes back out and discovers that everyone is gone and she's all alone. And it goes for a number of years. The whole story is told in poetry. So this is the other side of the story where it's everyone has been ordered to evacuate and there are these four kids in this evacuation camp and nobody really knows why. And it's their story of trying to find out what the authorities are hiding and what's actually happening. But so it's also set in Colorado. So I know we sold Alone like crazy. Like this is a national best seller. So the companion novel that came out this year.

Does it stay in Alone? Do you need to read Alone to read away?

I don't think you do because they're kind of two separate stories. I think Alone will be more of a mystery if you don't read this. But if you have read Alone, I would definitely say, or if you've got kids who really, I mean, getting them both together, I think would be a great gift.

And I love that it's set here in the Front Range of Colorado. So that could resonate with young.

It always makes it extra creepy when it's like, oh, I know that place. So one of the creepy things about reading Dog Stars, because it's all like set here.

The Longmont Airport, right?

Oh, Erie. It's the Erie Airport.

Where he's held up. I want to talk about a book. You talked about Alone being written in poetry. The big fiction book for the season that we are just selling like crazy is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. And this is an epistolary novel, so it's all written in letters. And so the main character is an older woman, and every day she sits down to write a letter. And sometimes she writes to her sister or different people she knows. Sometimes she writes to celebrities. Sometimes she writes to the president. The story is told through these various letters. But there's one person that she writes to quite a bit, but she never sends the letters. It's kind of intriguing. And so people are really gravitating to this book. We were selling it pretty well. I was somewhere and I wasn't with a bunch of book people, and somebody grabbed my arm and they're like, you have to read The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. So anytime I get a very passionate book recommendation from somebody who isn't in the business, isn't in books, isn't regularly reading, she wasn't even part of a book club, you know, she just loved this book and wanted to tell me about it. You know, and so I was like, okay, okay. So I ordered like 60 copies the next day based on this person's recommendation. And they've been flying out. It really is the big book of the season. I think people are really kind of identifying somehow with this person who's sending missives out into the world, hoping for an answer or maybe just hoping to express themselves.

I love that. I think the letter writing itself is a lost art. I was talking to a young person today who was like so excited because they got a piece of actual mail and not a bill, but an actual letter in the mail. So I could imagine a whole novel that's like that uses that as the form of storytelling. It's a really interesting idea.

Moving into teen fiction for me, this is the next book, is it? Legendary Frybread Drive-In, Inter-Tribal Stories. So this is a collection of stories that are all written by indigenous authors, that are all set around the idea of Sandy June's legendary Frybread Drive-In. So all of the stories are loosely connected to that, but they're all written by different authors who are all indigenous, and it's Hartrum, that's the name of the press that puts this out. They publish specifically stories by indigenous authors. This is aimed at teenagers, but anyone can read a teen book, so it doesn't have to just be teenagers, but we keep it in our teen fiction section, so.

Is it all short stories?

Yeah, they're all short stories, so you can see there's a ton of people who collaborated on this. Some of them are more poetry, some are more prose, so they kind of bounces around a little bit in format as well. If you're feeling like you've got a teen who wants to explore something different than what they've been reading, or they just want to read a really fun collection of short stories, I think this is a great pick.

One of my favorite novels of this year is Ian McEwen. He wrote Atonement. A lot of people know him for that, and he's been writing for a long, he's in his 70s. He's one of England's great writers. He has a new book out, What We Can Know, and it's kind of a literary mystery. The book is being told from the perspective of people that are living, I can't remember exactly, but maybe 70 years in the future, 100 years in the future, somewhere around that time. And you know that a disaster has happened. Partially climate, it's partially governments falling apart. There's water where there shouldn't be water, like so. Parts of England and Great Britain are, there's many more islands now, and some places you can't travel to because they're too dangerous. There's pirates, as you mentioned, different types of pirates. But at heart, the main character is an academic, and he is trying to find a poem that was written in like 2015 or so. It's written by a character that's kind of like a Seamus Haney type character, like one of the great poets of his time. And he had written this poem for his wife on her birthday. And he read it out loud, and he gave her the only copy of it and said, it's yours to do what you want to do with it. And it was a party with like 10 people there. She never published it. After they died, it never came out. People at the party have different memories of it, but they all seem to claim it's one of his great works. So he's on this mission to try to find it. And so it's kind of interesting. You're getting his story in this kind of modern world that doesn't look that much like our world anymore. In some ways, it doesn't look like our world. In other ways, he's trying to like get a PhD or whatever, you know? So the second part of the book, you get the narration from somebody who was at the party, a journalist discovered basically. He's had all this surmising about what happened at this party, this legendary day. It's kind of like comparing it to like, if we could suddenly have a true account of what it was like to be with, you know, Byron and Shelly and Keats and Mary Shelly maybe on the night that Frankenstein was happening, you know, if you actually could. The first part, you have kind of the supposition of what happened in this legendary time, and then the second part, you have a first-person account of what it was really like to be there. It's just really interesting how the book unravels, and even though it doesn't purport to be about climate change and things like that, it's all over the book because it's the background of the story. So you're not getting hit over the head with it in a way, but you can help but think, like, wow, if we keep going, we're going to end up in the situation this narrator is in, this character is in. I thought maybe it was perhaps the strongest book since Atonement, which is about 25 years ago now.

All right, I've got one more teen pic for you. This is The Coven Tendency by Zoe Hanna-Makuta. She is not currently local, but she grew up here. She graduated from Fairview, and she's still very young. She's in her early to mid-20s, and this is her fourth teen novel that she's published with major publishers. I think that's really amazing. And this was also a very dark and fun and creepy book. So it's a bit like Wuthering Heights, but it's a lot more obvious that these two people are not good for each other. Basically, it's set in some sort of nebulous future, alternates between a sort of post-apocalyptic and almost-apocalyptic era, where there are witches, and the witches are kept in cages, and they're basically in a large park that's like an amusement park, and these three witches are, they're teenagers, and their parents are the ones who like perform, but they all know that they're going to be taking their parents' place when they die. They're all kind of obsessed with one another, and that's one of the things about the witches, is that they're supposed to be kept apart because if they become a coven, bad things are going to happen. But of course, they're obsessed with each other, so they find ways to get together, and it's very creepy and really well done. And if you've got a teen who is kind of tired of all the romance books that has been in the teen genre for a while, this is kind of an anti-romance. But I just thought it was super fun as well, that it's by someone who grew up right here in Boulder County.

I love how both of you have brought books today that kind of explore the darker horror genre, or covens, or vampires. Yeah, I think it's a good for all to the rom-coms and the things that, especially towards teenagers that get pushed.

It's good to have the rom-coms, but it's good to have options as well.

I think the big story of the bookstore in the last five to ten years, or the book industry, is the rise of kind of what we call genre fiction. You know, horror is so big now. In the 90s, we got rid of both our horror section and our romance section. They just seemed to be fading out. We just mixed them with regular fiction. And then during the pandemic, we broke them both out again. And people, they've done really well. And I think that, and I would add science fiction is really doing well right now.

We've expanded that section by three, four cases since the pandemic. It's just really done. Like people are gravitating much more towards it.

And we're seeing an influx of younger readers. You know, we're seeing lots of readers from their teens to say their early 30s in a way that we were not seeing pre-pandemic, a lot of them. And they're driving this boom in publishing for horror books, or for romance books, or for science fiction. I think it's really a young audience bringing a whole new energy into it. You can feel it in the store. Don't you think so, Stephanie?

Oh, yeah. I mean, romantasy, that's the thing, you know?

Even like you were mentioning graphic novels earlier, like it's become more acceptable. These maybe traditionally...

I think it's the same with romance and some of these more genre fictions that people who are book people used to look down on. Like, oh, if you're a reader, then you should be reading literature.

Right.

Whereas I think during the pandemic, I feel like a sort of a side effect of the pandemic was people feeling like, you know what, I like this thing and that's fine. I can like this thing and it's okay. And I think a lot of people are like, you know what? I've got my thing. I like to. Yeah.

And I think it's been such an optimistic time for us coming out of the pandemic to see all these young people in the store. We're approaching 2020. You wondered like, you know, 20 years ago, our audience was like in their 30s. Then it was like in their 40s or 50s. Now the audience seems to be in their 60s and 70s, which is still a key part of our audience. But you were definitely starting to wonder, where is this going to go in 10 or 15 years? Is our audience going to be in their 80s? Like, how's this going to work, you know? And suddenly to get this influx of young people that are really, really enjoy reading, really know what they want to read, and are also willing to take recommendations. Our recommended cases fly, you know, and the people are learning new stuff. It's really wonderful.

I think that's one of my favorite parts of the Boulder Bookstore, when you walk in and there's all the recommendations. I usually have, like, the books I want to read, but it is the one story I stop and I'm like, let me look at these. So I really appreciate that. And I'm, it's great to know that other people are being drawn to those recommendations as well.

One thing we haven't talked about yet is we have a great gift section, and all sorts of gifts are flying out this this season. But one is a special one in particular. So why Stephanie, you want to talk about this?

This is the Monopoly Boulder Edition, which came out this past September, which we're particularly proud of, because we have a square on the board. The company that made this, they really put a lot of care into this. Like we were a little nervous at first. They're like, oh, what if it looks really cheap? But we broke it out, we looked at the board, we looked at the pieces, and it's like they really tried to capture the essence of Boulder on the board. Got a prairie dog right there. I mean, you can't, you don't have Boulder Monopoly and not have the Flatirons and Chautauqua and just the gorgeous area surrounding Boulder. So that plays a really big part in it. And then a lot of the chance cards are things like, you went for a hike today, get $20 or whatever.

I think that's what I noticed the most on the cover of this is that it has a lot of green space. And as someone that works for Parks & Open Space, it's certainly something that we know resonates with our community, the trails, the parks, and it's displayed right there on the cover. What a fun gift idea for folks this time of year especially. When did this come out?

September.

Oh, perfect.

We've got it for sale at the store for $39.99.

Arsen, do you have any last recommendation?

No, I think I recommend it as much as I can at this moment. I mean, there's always another goal.

Maybe we could go on and on, but...

But there are a few other things that are happening in the store that I think it would be fun to get into quickly before we finish up.

Yeah, absolutely. Let us know what's coming up, what big events do you have, or small events, or community opportunities.

We have started two things that are new to us. One is the Boulder Bookstore Literacy Foundation. We're trying to get books in the hands of as many people, often children, as possible, maybe children who can't afford their own books, or families that can't do that. And so we're doing a couple of different things. We've been working with the Netherland Middle and Senior High School Library to try to get that library restocked. They haven't been getting new books up there for a while. And so we did a book drive. We're going to continue to try to work with other schools in the area, but we're happy to work with adult organizations Part of the impetus for this is that we've always given books away, especially to the school district. I feel like more and more the community also wants to participate, and it would allow us to do more. So I think this is a great opportunity. And so it's the Boulder Bookstore Literacy Foundation. You can donate to a tax-deductible donation if you want. We'll also be putting up wish lists for organizations that want books. You could just buy a book off the wish list. They'll go to the organization. We'll put the link on so people can link directly to our page on our website. But we're excited about this. And again, we just want to be as connected to the community as we can be.

And if your organization that would like to receive books, is there a way for them to reach out as well?

Yes, we have an email and that email is... So we'll have the email in the link. It's on the page. You can always contact us at the bookstore as well.

But just sending an email to info at boulderbookstore.com will get things to the place they need to be.

Yeah. And the other things we're trying to do is, especially for schools like Title I schools, we're trying to bring authors into those schools. And working with the publishers, you know, they're great. They send us authors, but they often want to have like...

They want book sales.

Yeah. They want... So bring it to a school, but we need you to sell 50 to 100 books. And so if you bring that to schools that don't have those resources, you can't... So you end up almost forced to bring some of these authors to the better off schools, you know, because you want to make that quota. But through the foundation, we could buy those 50 books for the schools. And then we don't have to worry about, you know, keeping the publisher happy. You know, we can get the author, the foundation could buy the books. We could get a great author into a Title I school, which might not have that opportunity.

I love the innovation to make sure that you're getting books into maybe parts of the community that don't have the same access.

And then the other thing we're doing, it's a reader's retreat with Chautauqua. And the idea is it's three days, two nights, a reader's retreat. We're going to have a few different authors there. People will stay at Chautauqua for two nights. All their meals will be paid for. We'll have book clubs, we'll have an author reception. We're going to bring in the publishers. They'll come down to the bookstore and just kind of have this immersive two and a half day, you know, reading experience. But I think that's going to be a great program as well.

And Stephanie, tell us what's happening in January.

January 15th at the Boulder Public Library, we're having an event with Peter Heller. The Orchard was originally published only as an e-book. It's just come out as a physical book. So we're doing an event to celebrate that book in mid-January. And that's super exciting, especially as he wrote The Dog Stars. And that's, they're making that into a movie that I think is coming out in April. And so that's really exciting because Peter Heller is one of our beloved local authors. And I think you were, Arsen, you were saying earlier, you've had him on your radio show for, I think, every book except The Dog Stars.

Yes, all his fiction books. Yeah, we started with a painter. And we will be at the library who, you know, we're great partners with. We're going to record the radio show in front of the live audience. So we'll be doing with KGNU, the radio book club for this. So it's fun. The event is going to be free at the library. You do have to register. We'd love to pack the Canyon Theater there.

How does the community of Boulder impact what books you carry? What events you host? How does that relationship work?

You know, I'm always looking at data of the past. Like, what has worked well in the past? You know, what has sold well? Not just the authors, but the subjects. You know, we do well with science, we do well with psychology, and you know, then we buy more widely in those areas. And those are being determined by people coming in the store, and that's what they want. That's what they're buying, you know. So, there's not some centralized office, you know, in New York or something, just determining what we're going to have. It's a direct reaction and relationship with the readers who come into the store.

I always feel like our aim as a bookstore is to be a reflection of our community. When I'm traveling somewhere, I always want to go into that place's bookstore, because that will tell me everything I need to know about that town. Like, it's like, oh, okay, so that's what this town is about. They've got these are the books that they're selling. These are the subjects that the people who live here are interested in. And I think that's very true in our story. It's like we've got a lot of spiritual communities in our space, in Boulder. So we've got a big Buddhism section. We have a whole case of shamanism. Not many bookstores in the country have a whole case of shamanism books, but we also have a lot of science labs around here. So we do a lot with science and with nature. And people tend to move here because they want to be outdoors on the weekends. So we try to not host events on weekends. I always tell publishers there's too much competition from the mountains. Oh, absolutely.

The parks, they're coming to us.

Yeah. So do you want to sit inside on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, or do you want to be out in the mountains on the trails? It's got to be a pretty big author to draw people away from that. So it's like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or tend to be our event nights. You know, I read all of our local papers, and I try to keep up on local news, because I want to, as for setting up events, I want to make sure that I'm bringing in events that I think will be of interest to the community. It's like, what are the subjects that are really important to people in Boulder County? Those are the things that I want to focus on with bringing in events.

You know, our booksellers play a large part of that. You know, the recommended cases, we have three and a half of those cases are basically bookseller recommendations, you know, that they're coming up with what they're reading, they're members of the community, and so I think we are a reflection, but also I think sometimes you can lead people in the community to new things, and I think that's part of our job too. We're not just leading them to random new things, we're leading them to new things that it seems like will resonate with them based on what has worked in the past. But maybe it's an author they've never heard of, or maybe it's a certain subject that has not been quite broached in the same way, but seems adjacent to what we do well with.

I love the idea, Stephanie, that you brought of like how a bookstore, or independent local bookstore is like a window to the community. I think that's a really great suggestion for people when they're traveling to use that little window to see where they're at, where they're going. And I really appreciate all the book suggestions that you brought today. I felt like to your point, it was an eclectic mix where you're stretching the community, but also reacting to the community, bringing things that you hope that resonate with folks, but also maybe try new genres, read new writing styles. And I think especially your emphasis on local Colorado authors, that is really inspiring. And how lucky we are.

We're so lucky. There's so many great writers in this area.

And also how lucky we are to have a place like Boulder Bookstore to be able to have those author talks, to have these events, to create this space, to have the foundation that could really connect to the community in a different way. So I really appreciate both of you coming on today, sharing your passion for Boulder Bookstore, for books, for inspiring our community members to hopefully try something new in the coming year. Try a new genre or buy a new book for a loved one that maybe they hadn't considered in the past. Do you have any suggestion that you provide today that they should maybe look into in the book world in the future?

I always think you should try something different, an author you haven't read, maybe a genre that's not normal. And I think that's why those recommendation cases work for so many people. You can really try something new but with feeling like maybe it's a bookseller that you read a previous recommendation you really like. So why not read another one and see where else on the journey that same bookseller can take you. I think it's good for people to, you know, they know what they like, but also to be willing to expand a little bit.

I always like the idea of, instead of doing like New Year's resolutions, doing reader's resolutions, kind of have a goal for yourself for reading for the next year, be like, all right, once a month, like read a book, like kind of you could pick different genres for yourself, like this month, I'm going to read something in this genre, or this genre. I mean, I personally always like to alternate my reading, just like I like to like, okay, I read a romance next, I'll read a mystery, or a nonfiction, or, you know, just kind of mix it up. I had a friend told me about how he and his family, they did bingo cards for each other for Christmas, where they each like picked, like you had to throughout the whole year, like they gave each other these like reading bingo cards, where they had like little blocks with different genres, and you had to like fill in like that, or like sort of all over the map, like read a book by an author you've never read before, read a poetry book, or, you know, read a, you know, it's just like kind of all over the map, and it was a thing they did as a family. Fun way to expand your reading horizons.

And of course, this episode's going to air during the holiday season. I know there's that saying out there, it's like, buy folks something they need, something to read, something to want. So I invite folks to go to the Boulder Bookstore, find that loved one a new book, or themselves. Is there any other ways that people can connect with the bookstore? We'll be able to drop all the links in the podcast episode description.

Yeah, I mean, if they can't get to the store, they can go to the website. And on the website, we're putting your recommendations, the events are there. There's a lot of stuff on the website, and they, you know, they can order through the website and either come in and pick up the book, or we can send the book to you. We can gift wrap the book before it gets to you. We can do whatever you need.

Full service.

If you want to interact with us in other ways, our Instagram page is really fun. We do a lot of author Q&A's and videos of people in the store on our YouTube channel. I think those are our two most exciting social media platforms.

Well, thank you, Arsen, thank you Stephanie for joining us, for sharing your expertise and knowledge. We also like to thank Long Mountain Public Media. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Voices of Open Space. Please check us out on our social media channels or wherever you listen to podcasts.