NCIBA Bookstore Bestseller Lists

Top Shelf Picks: Pegasus Books on Solano, Berkeley

Fiction

• Four Freedoms by John Crowley, perfectly captures an era—WWII America—when the chosen are overseas and the left-behind are granted a rare moment of possibility. Crowley’s extraordinary characters and the poignant, funny, disturbing ways they find to connect with one another make you wish this war would never end.
• The City & the City by China Mieville, an inventive thriller set at the edge of Europe in the complex borderland between two mirror cities, entwines the real and uncanny so skillfully you’re left brimming with questions and a craving for more.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, scores another for the Swedish Invasion (cool mysteries, not pugilistic blondes) with this compelling mix of Nordic bleakness and briskly paced intrigue that will satisfy the most dedicated Swedonoir buff. Now in paperback.
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, conjures New York the way Dickens conjures London—it bristles with personality and moods. Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers unites the exquisitely realized characters in McCann’s searing, redemptive, masterpiece of a novel.
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano, purporting to be an encyclopedia of Fascist writers, entertains even as it indicts the world of art. Bolano’s sly humor and the compassion that informs his irony makes him heir to Calvino as well as Borges. Now in paperback.

Nonfiction

• Farm City by Novella Carpenter, aptly chronicles the trials and victories of hardcore urban farming. What began with a few plants and chickens in a vacant lot in grittiest Oakland burgeoned into a thriving farm replete with ducks, turkeys, bees, rabbits, pigs and an Eden of vegetation.
• Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco by Philip J. Dreyfus, tells the engaging, never scolding, story of how its environment shaped San Francisco, how the emerging city shaped its environment, and how a viable, sustainable marriage of the two benefits us all.
• My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, is at once a an inspiring chronicle of her odyssey from the first symptoms of stroke to her full recovery and a fascinating peek at some the most arcane of our mental functions. Now in paperback.
• West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State by Mark Arax, is both rigorously researched and deeply personal-like the best cultural histories.  What emerges is his vision of California which can’t help but enrich ours.
• Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë, argues that contemporary neuroscientists have built their research on an unexamined assumption: that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Noë enjoins us to view consciousness rather as a dynamic interplay between sentient beings and their environments.