This Weeks Bestsellers at the Bookstore

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
a novel by Reif Larsen

A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S.Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world.

When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.

T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.

As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.

All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.

T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.

Reif Larsen, author of the bestselling "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet," will lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, March 8, in Montana State University's SUB Ballroom A. The talk, which will be followed by questions and answers and a book signing, is free and open to the public.

You can purchase this novel at the MSU Bookstore on the bestsellers shelf.


Committed
by Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of her # 1 New York Times bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, author Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love in the very best way -- unexpectedly -- with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship, who had been living in Indonesia for quite a long while. The couple commenced a life together and resettled in the United States. They swore eternal fidelity to each other, but they also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get married. (Both were survivors of previous bad divorces, and the mere thought of legal matrimony filled them with dread and suspicion.) Indeed, the two might have gone on living together forever in happily unmarried bliss, but providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who -- after unexpectedly banishing Felipe from American shores -- gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the United States again.

Having been effectively "sentenced to wed", Gilbert decided to tackle her fears of matrimony by becoming a student of the institution, trying once and for all to understand what this befuddling, vexing, and contradictory, yet stubbornly enduring habit of human marriage actually is. Over the next ten months, as she and Felipe wandered haphazardly across Southeast Asia, waiting for the U.S. government to permit them to return to America and get married, the only thing she talked about, read about, or thought about was this perplexing subject.

Committed tells the story of one woman's efforts through contemplation, historical study and extensive conversation with every soul she encountered along the way -- to make peace with marriage before she entered its estate once more. Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, the book attempts to "turn on all the lights" when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, autonomy, family tradition, economic realities, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities. Myths are debunked; fears are unthreaded; historical perspective is sought; and romantic fantasies are ultimately exchanged for vital emotional compromises. In the end, the book becomes a kind of celebration of love -- with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, will always entail for any two people who are brave enough to endeavor it.

You can purchase this novel at the MSU Bookstore on the bestsellers shelf.