Olivia’s book selection of the month

On occasion, Olivia selects books she’s particularly fond of, and shares a little something about them with our loyal customers.

Olivia’s book picks for March:

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, reg. $25.99—our price $18.19

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian.  But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency.  His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.  Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits—from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.  Marked by Foer’s profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell.

Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan, $14.99

Written by a Jesuit priest, each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.  A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday.  A Rwandan girl relates her family’s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts.  A young brother and sister cope with their uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery.  Aboard a bus filled with refugees—a microcosm of today’s Africa—a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria.  Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.  Akpan’s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.