Book Recommendations for 2015

The tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions is an important one. They serve as a road map for the year ahead, letting you plan where you want to be and what you should accomplish within the next 12 months to get there. Even if you don’t achieve them all, resolutions force you to think about how you want to grow and what’s worth pursuing. If you’ve made resolutions this year, chances are that reading more books is one of them. Our lives are increasingly experienced in front of screens -- we can thank smart phones, tablets and Netflix -- and books are the surest way to unplug and gain a fresh perspective. Thousands of books are published each year and it can be difficult, and frankly overwhelming, to figure out where to start. Thankfully, that’s where the folks at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café have us covered. Whenever we’re in Washington, D.C., Kramerbooks is one of our favorite places to grab a book, a beer and a quick bite to eat in one go. On our last stop, we asked the staff for a few recommendations of what books we should be reading in the new year. Jack Carlson, “Rowing Blazers” “Hovering somewhere between the ridiculous and the sublime, ‘Rowing Blazers’ is a must-have for anyone interested in these elaborate garments. Now an American classic, rowing blazers were born in the boat clubs of Britain. Carlson's exceptionally photographed book not only details the intricacies of each blazer, but the story of the club that wears it.” George Pelecanos, “The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories” “The ‘martini shot’ is, in Hollywood parlance, the next-to-last ‘shot’ of the day because the final shot is out the glass. In the title novella, television sound stages and scriptwriters replace the hard streets of Washington and cops of Pelecanos’ former work.” Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven” “‘Station Eleven’ molds together the stories of a famous actor who dies on stage the night that a flu pandemic breaks out, and that of a young woman who has grown up in the post-apocalyptic world and now performs with a traveling symphony. Emily St. John Mandel has written a contemplative book about art, family, love and survival through a tightly woven plot.”

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