Paul Beatty, Booker Prize winner and author of The Sellout, is speaking and signing books tonight at the Dinah Washington Cultural Art Center. The event runs 7pm-8pm. This is one local author appearance I wish I’d known about earlier. Beatty is here as the final guest speaker in The University of Alabama’s Creative Writing Program Visiting Writer Series.
While it’s tough to get away on weekday nights, this is one author appearance that is worth the drive.
Sweet Home Books is a lovely little bookstore located in downtown Wetumpka, AL. As soon as you enter you can tell it’s run by a real book person. The first room is mainly kids’ books, plus fun book-related gift-y items. The second room has the adult and YA books.
Everything is new and well organized. Sweet Home Books has a fun Instagram account to follow. There’s plenty of art and shops around the river and downtown as well, so it’s worth a walk around.
Sweet Home Books
107 E. Bridge Street
Wetumpka, AL 36092
Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm
Sunday & Monday – closed
Here are a few photos from my visit:
If you liked this post about one of Alabama’s indie bookshops, be sure to check out this page where I’m chronicling bookstores in Birmingham, AL.
I hope your holiday season has been book-filled and restful and that 2024 shines brighter than 2023. I mean, no matter how things are, sometimes just hoping that things “are better next time around” is good enough. 2023 had its rough patches, but there’s a new year just around the corner.
I’ve never been much of an Auld Lang Syne kind of person (though New Year’s Eve is absolutely my favorite holiday), and I don’t get very nostalgic, but it is fun to look over a stack of books you have read.
My 2023 stack is 25 titles tall, which LibraryThing tells me is taller than a garden gnome but shorter than a tennis net. I am also reading more contemporary books, with all of my 2023 reads having been published since 1990. I am running about 50% fiction and 50% non-fiction. That sounds healthy, doesn’t it?
My favorite fiction reads of 2023 were: Erasure by Percival Everett, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, and Trust by Hernan Diaz.
My favorite non-fiction reads of 2023 were: This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich.
There are so many books I am looking forward to reading in 2024! Already in the queue are: The Fraud by Zadie Smith, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading by Andrew Pettegree, The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson.
I think I am going to have to pick up the Stevenson first. Writers, trains, and a locked room murder seems like a wonderful way to spend the New Year’s weekend waiting for 2024 to arrive.
So, a BIG happy New Year’s to you all! Thank you for stopping by the blog, and I look forward to hearing what you are reading in the new year.
Hugh Howey’s Beacon 23 debuted on the streaming service MGM+ earlier last week. I really enjoyed the short book the TV series is based on, but it sounds like the reception of the new series has been mixed. You can watch the trailer on YouTube.
The cast looks great and stars Stephan James and Lena Heady. Sounds like they’ve already filmed two seasons. To be honest, I had never heard of MGM+, but I guess this is why you do a high-production series like this – to bring attention to your app/service.
Anyway, Beacon 23 follows the story of an outer space-based lighthouse keeper who takes on a ‘shipwrecked’ traveler. The book is a fast read and has all of Hugh Howey’s signature sci-fi goodness. The reviews have been mixed but trending up. From the few I’ve run across, it sounds like if science fiction is your jam, then you’re going to really enjoy this. I’m one of those that absolutely enjoyed the Silo series on Apple TV (but the books really were better), so I feel like I’ll enjoy Beacon 23 as well.
I know that none of this is breaking news, but a buddy just returned my copy of Beacon 23, and it reminded me to look for the show.
