Around the Bookstore: Clock is ticking for summer

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And just like that, it’s almost over …

Suddenly, amazingly, summer is winding to an end. And what a summer it has been!

While Kate Feiffer was signing copies of her new book, “Morning Pages,” on our porch, a lovely Sunday afternoon, word spread like wildfire, Biden had stepped out of the race, Kamala Harris suddenly the de facto frontrunner.

Tim Walz of my home state of Minnesota is her VP choice, and, as Sherlock would say: The game is afoot.

J.D. Vance is Trump’s running mate, resulting in a run on his “Hillbilly Elegy,” catapulting it back onto the bestseller lists: 750,000 copies in five weeks. Everyone, it seems, wants to know more about him. One wag of a customer said dryly, “I think the title says it all …”

You be the judge.

We live in a world facing an uprise in fascism. Where did that word come from? Latin, of course. Fasces, a bundle of sticks with an ax embedded. Adopted by Mussolini, it took hold. “Hitler’s People” looks at the people who followed him down his wormhole to destruction.

Clara Bingham came to town, having her first event for her newest book, “The Movement,” at “Edgartown Books at the Carnegie.” [“Rollicking,” according to the NY Times.] It’s a history of the women’s movement from 1963 to 1973, corresponding with my entrance to high school and the conclusion of my first year teaching high school English. Momentous years for me and the world, with Kennedy’s assassination, Viet Nam, Woodstock, rock ’n’ roll, drugs, sex, and everything else. I can’t wait to read.

Island legend Cynthia Riggs is out with her memoir, “Wait Spring,” filling in all the gaps we didn’t know about the woman who launched a successful string of Vineyard mysteries when she was 70.

Being August, the crowds are here, and yet, for retailers, the clock is ticking; “the season” is at its height and is winding down. Labor Day is within sight (how is that even possible?) and the dance is on to have enough but not too much.

But we must have enough of the books breaking this month.

Casey McQuiston, of “Red, White and Royal Blue,” a two-year phenomenon (complete with successful movie spawning a sequel), returns with “The Pairing,” also promising a new bestseller. Brad Thor’s newest, “Shadow of a Doubt,” is poised to fill the needs of those who have finished David Baldacci’s “A Calamity of Souls” and Daniel Silva’s “A Death in Cornwall” (at least for our bookstore, his biggest in several years).

And for those of you who liked (and are there any who didn’t?) “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” there’s “The Seventh Veil of Salome,” a Hollywood story of love, lust, envy, and revenge set in the same period as “Seven Husbands” (still a bestseller!).

Nancy Pelosi’s “The Art of Power” was a heavily “embargoed” title, not allowed to show it, promote it, Instagram it, Facebook it, nothing until its August 6 release date. Which means Simon & Schuster, its publisher, thought it was going to be a blockbuster. This is a woman who has broken the rules and risen in the ways the era chronicled in Bingham’s “The Movement” foretold. Like her or not, Nancy Pelosi has gone where no woman has gone before.

Speaking of people who have shaped the past century, there is a new biography out of Bill Gates, “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World.” While mostly an Apple kind of guy, I have to admit Microsoft has changed the world. Maybe we’ll now understand what the Gates Foundation has done and is doing.

James Baldwin was a man who more than fluttered through the 20th century. A Black gay man, he transcended two of the 20th century’s greatest stigmas to become a literary legend. It is the 100th anniversary of his birth, and literature is so much better for him.

“Go Tell It On the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room” are triumphs; to read Baldwin is to explore the bitter pain of a Black, gay man in midcentury America, to know the desire to be free, which led him to Paris, where being Black was not as hard as in America.

The Booker longlist is out. We’re delighted “James,” by Percival Everett, is on it. Haven’t read it? Get it.

It’s been a rich summer for reading, and there’s still time to grab a book, read it for its escape, its joy, its ability to grow your knowledge. Don’t let the summer end with you looking at a book and saying, Darn, if only I had …