Big Brother Book Club: Buy Indie!

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Before we begin, we’d like to point out that in this edition of the BBBC, links to purchase books go to Powell’s instead of Amazon. We don’t have a problem with the ‘zon – maybe we’ve mentioned our love for Kindle, blogger issues aside? — but they seem to be doing just fine, while independent bookstores are dropping like flies. We may love Kindle, but we also love bookstores and the people who run them, and they need our book buying dollars a hell of a lot more (plus e-books occasionally skimp on features, like Benji’s map of Sag Harbor). Yeah, we know Buy Indie Day was May 1st and that Powell’s is one of the most famous independent bookstores in the world, but we’re reminding you that there’s nothing wrong with buying indie every day, online or locally. On to the books, after the jump.

Everyone on the subway was reading something famous this week. Which would make sense if we’d never done this before, but usually the commuters of New York City display a wider variety of taste. Lots of folks are reading Elizabeth Edwards’ new memoir, Resilience. In these trying times we can probably all use some “reflections on the burdens and gifts of facing life’s adversities,” in spite of what HuffPo has to say. We also saw Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld — and here we must admit that we actually remember when she won a fiction contest in Seventeen magazine, because we were the kind of dorks who actually read the fiction in Seventeen. Which might be why Prep‘s creepily accurate portrayal of high school gave us such intense flashbacks. We spotted The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the truly awesome Haruki Murakami as well as some non-fiction: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s Random Family, and Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.