Elephant on a Trampoline

Buyback Today!

Did you miss the Fall Buyback before you left for break? Beat the crowds today and sell your books back at the Buyback window in the lower level hallway of the SUB until 4:30 PM today.

Here's some Friday fun for you:
Singing Horses

This Week's Bestsellers

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Stephen King, who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies, delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything's Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications.

Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating-- and then terrifying-- journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, "The Gingerbread Girl" is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable--and resourceful--as Audrey Hepburn's character in Wait Until Dark. In "Ayana", a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, "N.," which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient's irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside... or keep the world from falling victim to it.

Just After Sunset-call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.


Why We Suck by Dr. Denis Leary

Do you SUCK?
Would you like to not SUCK?
Do you know other people who SUCK?
Would you like to tell them how to SUCK less or
how to possibly become totally SUCK-free?

Then buy this book, because inside Dr. Denis Leary is ready to help you overcome all the sucky things that make you such a suckass. Not to mentiona all the fat, loud, lazy and stupid suckholes you have to deal with at the office, family gatherings or while using public transportation.

Part memoir, part self-help tome but definitely a full-time funny assault on all the posers, politicians and pop culture icons who have sucked in public for far too long, this book is a call to arms for everyone who feels the way the good doctor does:

- Skinny jeans are for skinny people.
- Men will never change. Not even into clean underwear.
- If God didn't want us to eat meat, why did He make the cow so slow? (Ever eaten a cheetah-burger? Nope. And you never will.)

Buy this book and you will hopefully laugh out loud, call your mom a little more often and never vote for a member of the Bush family ever again.

At the very least, though, you'll have yourself a nice big twenty-six-dollar coaster to place your drink on while you watch TV. And isn't that reason alone to buy it?

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2009!

This Week's Bestsellers

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

When U.S. Marine Logan Thibault finds a photograph of a smiling young woman half-buried in the dirt during his third tour of duty in Iraq, his first instinct is to toss it aside. Instead, he brings it back to the base for someone to claim, but when no one does, he finds himself always carrying the photo in his pocket. Soon Thibault experiences a sudden streak of luck, winning poker games and even surviving deadly combat that kills two of his closest buddies. Only his best friend, Victor, seems to have an explanation for his good fortune: the photograph--his lucky charm.

Back home in Colorado, Thibault can't seem to get the photo--and the woman in it--out of is mind. Believing that she somehow holds the key to his destiny, he sets out on a journey across the country to find her, never expecting the strong but vulnerable woman he encounters in Hampton, North Carolina--Elizabeth, a divorced mother with a young son--to be the girl he's been waiting his whole life to meet.

Caught off guard by the attraction he feels, Thibault keeps the story of the photo, and his luck, a secret. As he and Elizabeth embark upon a passionate and all-consuming love affair, the secret he is keeping will soon threaten to tear them apart--destroying not only their love, but also their lives.

Filled with tender romance and terrific suspense, THE LUCKY ONE, is Nicholas Sparks at his best--an unforgettable story about the surprising paths our lives often take and the poewr of fate to guide us to true and everlasting love.



Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Why do some people succeed far more than others?

There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we went to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them -- at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. The story of success is more complex -- and a lot more interesting -- than it initially appears.

Outliers explains what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the extraordinary success of Asians at math, the hidden advantages of star athletes, why all top New York lawyers have the same resume, and the reason you've never heard of the world's smartest man -- all in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. It matters what year you were born if you want to be a Silicon Valley billionaire, Gladwell argues, and it matters where you were born if you want to be a successful pilot. The lives of outliers -- those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience -- follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all our friends and family. Have a safe weekend and for goodness sake, go play in the snow! I'll be back on Monday with more blog action.

Run, Run, Rudolph!

Be on the lookout for this guy tonight:


Make sure you get to bed early and leave some cookies for him, or he might fly right by.
Merry Christmas from the MSU Bookstore.