Tag: book blog

Trade Talk: New Indie Book Bestseller Lists

January 14, 2026

Publisher’s Weekly has announced that “The Independent Publishers Caucus, a collective of 117 small and independent publishers, has announced the launch of a new weekly bestseller list in partnership with the American Booksellers Association, creating what organizers say is the first national ranking focused exclusively on independent press titles sold at independent bookstores…Dubbed the Independent Press Top 40” (find the rest of PW’s article here).

Regularly publicizing a ranking of independent press titles (“indie books”) sold at independent bookstores is a great idea. This promotes small businesses. It provides attention for authors whose voices might not otherwise be getting large-scale public notice – making it more possible for readers to discover new-to-them authors.

A couple of examples demonstrate the value of this “Independent Press Top 40” list.

  • I personally buy several books per year from several niche publishers in a specific industry whose books (topics) I value. I happen to be “in the know” about the particular market for which these book publishers provide titles, so I know to follow these publishers. With that said, I know people who would likely want to read the same types of books I’m reading, but who aren’t likely familiar with the publishers whose websites I visit regularly. Any mechanism that supports “get out the word” for such indie publishers is a win-win-win-win for publishers, authors, readers, and the sustainability of “shop local” business practices.
  • My hometown (Bellingham, Washington) – like many communities – has a beloved local bookstore. Village Books and Paper Dreams is a valued hub in the community. This new weekly national “Independent Press Top 40” ranking is another way to keep such small bookstores in the public eye – thereby supporting great businesses.

While we’re talking indie booksellers, I’m happy to plug my two favorite online booksellers:

  • Hamilton Books. Based in Connecticut, Hamilton Books is based in Connecticut, USA and has been around since 1969. They specialize in selling discounted books to U.S. customers. I love Hamilton Books. They sell books via their website and a print magazine. I discovered them more than twenty years ago when they somehow got my name and mailing address; they sent me one of their magazines listing a sampling of their book inventory. It was actually their magazine that I fell in love with – their listing of quirky and off-the-wall titles of available books. I started buying from them for the purpose of staying on their mailing list (this is a sentence that every marketer wants to read!). Reading their lists of “off-the-wall titles” – such as “off the beaten track” historical books and books on political and religious conspiracy theories from “every end the political and religious spectrums” – literally became Friday night entertainment for me.
  • Thrift Books (their marketing angles: “gift more, spend less” and “read more, spend less”). This Washington State-based bookseller calls themself “the largest online independent used book seller. A friend told me about them last spring; I have already purchased enough books to achieve their highest reader/purchaser tier of “Literati Elite.” Their “Reading Rewards” program is simple yet fun – the more you buy, the more book-buying benefits you get….. Their membership tier program seems to be tied into our digital age approach to tapping dopamine receptors – our brains get a “dopamine high” every time we “like” or “achieve” something via a click-of-the-mouse….. Of course, book lovers like joining “Literati Elite” status……

I encourage you to click on this weekly Independent Press Top 40 and add to however you track websites that you visit regularly (add it to your browser faves, whatever). You just might find your next great read!

Bibliophile and would-be-antiquarian Kim Burkhardt reviews books at The Books of the Ages and at The Hermitage Within. If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!).

Book Review: Searches – Selfhood in the Digital Age

January 13, 2026
Book: Searches - Selfhood in the Digital Age
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

Occasionally, a sociological book comes along that effectively captures the Zeitgeist of people and society within the scope of current events. These books articulate our experience such that we want to read these books. Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (2025) is one of those books.

When I recently saw this title on Publisher’s Weekly, the book’s title made the subject and its’ sociological relevance in today’s digital age immediately self-evident. It wasn’t until the last two to three decades that we could – in the course of human history – find bread crumbs of our own thoughts-experience-lives-searches-postings-etc. (lives!) and the collective experience of everyone who ever goes online (i.e., “everybody,” essentially) “on the internet.” Our individual and collective search histories are cumulatively aggregated online. A dream for sociologists and marketers.

Relevant example #1: When I started reading Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, the author self-disclosed that she looked back at her own Google search history over several years and at her Google account. Based on her cumulative search history, Google had accurately figured that she’s a married high-income-earner with a child. Google had also assumed that she works in tech because she does so many searches about the tech industry; in that case, Google was mistaken….. Similarly, many people complain about targeted search engine advertising based on one’s search history (when you search for shoes, your search engine starts showing you advertisements for shoes….) and/or that “Google probably knows where I live…..” Then, there are the less-common tech privacy geeks like me who literally clear my cache and search history between EVERY search. I never get online advertising as there’s no cumulative history for search engines to use to identify my interests or life-trends (although the contours of my life could likewise be privately inferred by scanning the content of my email history…..).

Relevant example #2: When I want to tweak one of my websites to make the content relevant for the people who I want searching for my website, I go to Google Trends and look up society’s collective search histories from 2004 to the present to find which topical words and/or phrases – relevant to my website(s) – people are currently searching. Ditto when I periodically pay for online advertising. Then, I populate my website(s) or advertising with relevant search terms that match what people are searching for so I can make my content relevant to the people with whom I am looking to connect.

I am glad that Vauhini Vara had the insight to write this book (extra bonus: I learned in the book that she and I have lived in several of the same cities). I appreciate having this book be part of our collective reading for sociological naval-gazing.

Bibliophile and would-be-antiquarian Kim Burkhardt reviews books at The Books of the Ages and at The Hermitage Within. If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!).

Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind

December 23, 2025
Book: The Shadow of the Wind
The Shadow of the Wind

I came upon Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind during COVID. I was out walking one day (alone, of course, there was a pandemic on….) and stopped at a Little Free Library in North Seattle. I went home with a whirlwind of a psychological thriller that captivated my imagination for weeks.

The Shadow of the Wind is set in Barcelona in 1945. This novel is wonderfully about books. And about people. And Barcelona. And, psychological suspense.

In this book, the writer manages to keep much in “the shadows” throughout the book – no way to “catch the whodunnit.” We are taken on the wind through the suspense of plot. Bottom line, Carlos Ruiz Zafon knows how to write.

This novel is dark. I attest to the author’s ability to write – the novel’s darkness took me into the depths of a dark despair. However, I couldn’t put the book down. When I had started reading a different book (several years earlier) that also led me into the depths of despair, I donated that other book to the library to get it out of my house rather than continue reading it. This book, however, doesn’t provide that option. I was so emotionally drawn into the book that I had to continue reading it. When I got to the end of the book, I was glad to have read it.

I’m looking forward to when I’ve forgotten enough details of the book that I can read it again. When I read it again, I’m going to be prepared for the depths to which the book takes the reader. The Shadow of the Wind is a must-read.

Bibliophile and would-be-antiquarian Kim Burkhardt reviews books at The Books of the Ages and at The Hermitage Within. If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!).

Book Review: Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East

July 2, 2025
Book
Authors: Irenee Halisherr, Foreward Bishop Kalistsos Ware

I very much enjoyed finding this book, Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East. I was equally thrilled to discover that it was published by Cistercian Publications (I worked for a Cistercian monk-priest for a time……).

This is among books written on very specific topics – it’s great to find such books when they are written on a topic of personal interest. I take an interest in the history of religious thought in the Medieval period and earlier. I am also currently exploring spiritual direction. Thus, I was excited to order this book and read it.

A number of passages in the foreward prove tangible to the reader interested in spiritual direction:

  • The ministry of the spiritual father is already foreshadowed in the New Testament; ‘Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.’ (1 Cor 4:15)”
  • “He helps his children in Christ precisely because he is willing to share himself with them, identifying his own life with theirs.”

Within the book itself, any number of passages artfully describe spiritual direction:

  • Desert fathers have, if not brought into being….at least, systemized this magnificent thing….’the divine art of healing another.'”
  • We should examine ….[the qualities]…. the Byzantines deemed most necessary to the exercise of spiritual direction.” This section of the book starts with discussion of any would-be spiritual director needing to possess the quality of charity with the aspect of charity that involves being loving (spoiler alert: read the book to discover the other deemed-necessary qualities!).
  • Later chapters of the book discuss how to enter into spiritual direction as a directee in such a way as to benefit from receiving spiritual direction – a useful topic of instruction.

In addition, any number of passages interestingly discuss Eastern Christianity:

  • This book is addressed to Western Christians interested in the East: the main intention is to make them breathe the spirit of which animated the great spiritual masters of the past….”
  • “Almost all the documents [referenced in the main of the book] belong to monastic literature. It could not be otherwise. Spiritual direction was not taught and practiced to perfection except among monks.”
  • “….abba Elias and abba Dorotheos….devoted themselves to a large monastery of virgins in Antripe, upper Egypt…..Their role, which they assumed spontaneously out of compassion consisted in maintaining or re-establishing peace among the some three hundred ascetrie (women ascetics) who had been accepted there…..” [Note: I now find myself wondering what literature is available for learning more about ascetrie!]

Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East is an important contribution to books on spiritual direction and literature about Eastern Christianity – particularly the practice of spiritual direction. I encourage anyone interested in one or both topics to pick up this book.

Bibliophile and would-be-antiquarian Kim Burkhardt reviews books at The Books of the Ages. If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!).