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Rainy Day Books
Rainy Day Books is located in
The Fairway Shops
2706 W 53rd Street
Fairway, Kansas 66205-1705
Phone: 913-384-3126

Store Hours:
Mon/Tue/Wed/Fri      10-6
Thursday                   10-7
Saturday                    10-5
Sunday we rest and read! 

In This Newsletter
We will be celebrating the 4th of July resting and reading!
Tuesday Night: Tom Wilson
Coming up on July 15: Girls' Night Out with Jennifer Weiner
Subscribe to Shelf Awareness
IndieNext Book of The Week: A Dog's Purpose
Staff picks of the week!
At a glance, our complete author events schedule, watch for changes and updates!

 JUNE

Tom Wilson appears to celebrate the 40th Annniversary of the comic strip Ziggy on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 6:30 PM at Kansas City Public Library, Plaza Branch. 

JULY

Georgette Jones, author of The Three of Us, appears on Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza.

Sapphire, author of The Kid, appears on Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza. 

Jennifer Weiner, author of Then Came You, appears on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza.

Jim Butcher, author of Ghost Storyappears on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza.

Maggie Stiefvater, author of Forever, appears on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza.

Melanie Benjamin, author of The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, appears on Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 7:00 PM at Rainy Day Books. 

AUGUST

Julie Garwood, author of The Ideal Man, appears on Tuesday, August 9, 2011.

 

And watch for details soon on Calvin Trillin, Martha Stewart, and more!

 
Support your local independent bookseller: Shop for competitively priced E-Books for your e-reader from Rainy Day Books. Shop local, read mobile.
Rainy Day Books offers you e-books through our partnership with Google eBooks. All our e-books are competitively priced.

Jefferson Key
The Jefferson Key
Sixth Man
The Sixth Man
Kingdom
The Kingdom

GoogleeBooksColumnGraphic
Volume 538June 27, 2011

Greetings!


As we head into the holiday weekend, remember to stop in and let us find something to take your mind off the heat! We'll be celebrating the holiday, resting and reading.  

Celebrating the 4th of July? Rainy Day Books will be too, resting and reading!

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Rainy Day Books and our staff will be celebrating the 4th of July Weekend by resting and reading.  We will close our Bookstore from Saturday, July 2 through Monday, July 4.  We will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, July 5.  Remember that our Website www.RainyDayBooks.com is always Open for you to shop your locally-owned independent bookseller.

 

We wish you a safe a happy holiday weekend, and thank you for your continued support of our store, our Events, and our Legacy of Literacy.

 

Check out our Google eBooks, too!  Get more information, or start your search now!

 

Tuesday night: Tom Wilson 


Tom WIlson 

Tuesday night: Tom Wilson   

 

Tom Wilson appears to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the comic strip Ziggy. 

 

This event is Tuesday, June 28 at 6:30 PM at Kansas City Public Library, Plaza Branch. 

 

Complete details at www.RainyDayBooks.com/TomWilson 

 

Coming up on July 15th: Girls' Night Out with Jennifer Weiner!  


Jennifer Weiner Promo  

Would you like even more book news, plus weekly review of books? Subscribe to Shelf Awareness! 


Shelf Awareness  

IndieNext Book of the Week

Each week we spotlight one book from the month's IndieNext List (a collection of recommendations by indie booksellers across the country). Ask for a copy of the IndieNext newsletter at our front counter or click to browse them online


A Dog's PurposeA Dog's Purpose
W. Bruce CameronIndieNext

Paperback, Forge Books

 

"This is a charming story of a dog's search for meaning over the course of several lifetimes, from that of a feral dog, to a beloved family pet, a search-and-rescue dog, and a victim of abuse. I laughed and cried, all the while appreciating the fragility of life as seen through the first-person narration of this remarkable dog." -- Fran Wilson, Colorado State University Bookstore, Fort Collins, CO

Click here for more about this book.

NEW AND NOTABLE BOOKS,
ON OUR SHELVES NOW!

Great ideas for summer reading! 



Fiction

 

 

The BorrowerThe Borrower     Bookseller Seal
Rebecca Makkai

Hardcover, Viking Books


Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. But is it just Ian who is running away? Read more.

 

Claire DeWitt and the City of the DeadClaire DeWitt and The City of the Dead

Sara Gran   

Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

 

Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on D�tection - the only book published by the late, great, and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette. The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she's avoided since her mentor, Silette's student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide- plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as a means to disappear? Read more. 


 

RidgeThe Ridge

Michael Koryta   

Hardcover, Little, Brown

 

In an isolated stretch of eastern Kentucky, on a hilltop known as Blade Ridge, stands a lighthouse that illuminates nothing but the surrounding woods. For years the lighthouse has been considered no more than an eccentric local landmark-until its builder is found dead at the top of the light, and his belongings reveal a troubling local history. For deputy sheriff Kevin Kimble, the lighthouse-keeper's death is disturbing and personal. Years ago, Kimble was shot while on duty. Somehow the death suggests a connection between the lighthouse and the most terrifying moment of his life. Audrey Clark is in the midst of moving her large-cat sanctuary onto land adjacent to the lighthouse. Sixty-seven tigers, lions, leopards, and one legendary black panther are about to have a new home there. Her husband, the sanctuary's founder, died scouting the new property, and Audrey is determined to see his vision through. As strange occurrences multiply at the Ridge, the animals grow ever more restless, and Kimble and Audrey try to understand what evil forces are moving through this ancient landscape, just past the divide between dark and light. Read more. 



The ArrivalsThe Arrivals
Meg Mitchell Moore

Hardcover, Reagan Arthur Books   

 

It's early summer when Ginny and William's peaceful life in Vermont comes to an abrupt halt. First, their daughter Lillian arrives, with her two children in tow, to escape her crumbling marriage. Next, their son Stephen and his pregnant wife Jane show up for a weekend visit, which extends indefinitely when Jane ends up on bed rest. When their youngest daughter Rachel appears, fleeing her difficult life in New York, Ginny and William find themselves consumed again by the chaos of parenthood - only this time around, their children are facing adult problems. By summer's end, the family gains new ideas of loyalty and responsibility, exposing the challenges of surviving the modern family - and the old adage, once a parent, always a parent, has never rung so true.Read more.


Centuries of JuneCenturies of June
Keith Donohue

Hardcover, Crown   

 

Set in the bathroom of an old house just before dawn on a night in June, Centuries of June is a black comedy about a man who is attempting to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects-eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend in a wild medley of styles and voices. Centuries of June is a romp through history, a madcap murder mystery, an existential ghost story, and a stunning tour de force at once ingenious, sexy, inspiring, and ultimately deeply movingRead more.


Nonfiction

 

The Influencing MachineThe Influencing Machine 

Brooke Gladstone

Hardcover, W.W. Norton

 

Nearly one million weekly listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the distortions and complexities of the modern media. This brilliant radio personality now bursts onto the page as an illustrated character in vivid comics drawn by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld. The cartoon of Brooke conducts the reader through two millennia of history-from the newspapers in Caesar's Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the manipulations of contemporary journalism. Gladstone's manifesto debunks the notion that "The Media" is an external force, outside of our control, since we've begun directly constructing, filtering, and responding to what we watch and read. With fascinating digressions, sobering anecdotes, and brave analytical wit, The Influencing Machine equips us to be smart, savvy, informed consumers and shapers of the media. It shows that we have met the media and it is us. So now what? Read more. 

 

 

The Story of Charlotte's Web The Story of Charlotte's Web  

Michael Sims

Hardcover, Basic Books  

 

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats-White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully shy his entire life, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It's all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White. With Charlotte's Web, which has gone on to sell more than 45 million copies, the man William Shawn called "the most companionable of writers" lodged his own character, the avuncular author, into the hearts of generations of readers. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole" by mining the raw ore of his childhood friendship with animals in Mount Vernon, New York. translating his own passions and contradictions, delights and fears, into an all-time classic. Read more.  

 

 

The Big Roads The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways  

Earl Swift

Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt  

 

A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape-the U.S. interstate system changed the face of our country. The Big Roads charts the creation of these essential American highways. From the turn-of-the-century car racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led "Good Roads" movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work-years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed-to the protests that erupted across the nation when highways reached the cities and found people unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress, Swift follows a winding, fascinating route through twentieth-century American life. Read more.  

 

 

Teach Us To Sit Still Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Search for Health and Healing  

Tim Parks

Hardcover, Rodale  

 

Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Read more. 

 

 

The President and The Assassin The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century  

Scott Miller

Hardcover, Random House  

 

In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin's bullet shattered the nation's confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different paths that brought together two of the most compelling figures of the era: President William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him. The two men seemed to live in eerily parallel Americas. McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a president whose conflicted feelings about imperialism reflected the country's own. Under its popular Republican commander-in-chief, the United States was undergoing an uneasy transition from a simple agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse spreading its influence overseas by force of arms. Czolgosz was on the losing end of the economic changes taking place-a first-generation Polish immigrant and factory worker sickened by a government that seemed focused solely on making the rich richer. With a deft narrative hand, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these two men, each pursuing what he considered the right and honorable path, collided in violence at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Read more. 

 

 

Children's Books: 

 

Imaginary GirlsImaginary Girls

Nova Ren Suma   

Hardcover, Dutton  

 

Chloe's older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can't be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby's friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood. Read more. 

 

 

Along A long RoadAlong A Long Road

Frank Viva   

Hardcover, Little Brown for Young Readers  

 

Follow that road! Speed off on an eventful bicycle ride along the bold yellow road that cuts through town, by the sea, and through the country. Ride up and around, along and through, out and down. Frank's striking graphic style is executed in just five joyous colors, and his spare, rhythmic language is infectious. Hit a bump? Get back on track! Reach the end? Start again! Read more. 

 

  





Thank You for supporting Your Community Bookseller, Rainy Day Books

We celebrated 35 years of bookselling on November 4, 2010.  It is a celebration of our Legacy of Literacy: 35 years of helping match readers to great books, bringing famous and soon-to-be-famous names to Kansas City, and enjoying the excitement of sharing so many experiences.

Take the time to tell someone new about Rainy Day Books.  Each book that you purchase at Rainy Day Books makes Rainy Day Books a place authors ask to visit, a vibrant part of Kansas City's arts community, and a bookstore where people love books enough to talk about them all day long.  Please encourage your fellow readers to sign up for this E-Newsletter.  We have an exciting schedule of upcoming Author Events, and this is the first place to hear about them!  We also take Orders for Author Autographed Books, so your friends far and wide can share in the experience.

 

Rainy Day Books is located in The Fairway Shops, at the intersection of Shawnee Mission Parkway and Belinder Road.  Our address is 2706 W 53rd Street, Fairway, Kansas (KS) 66205.

 

Get directions to Rainy Day Books and our Event venues by clicking here. 

 

Store Hours: Mon/Tue/Wed/Fri 10 AM to 6 PM, Thu 10 AM to 7 PM, Sat 10 AM to 5 PM, and Sundays we rest and read.

 

When you shop at Rainy Day Books you're a part of our Legacy of Literacy for Kansas City.  We provide full service, knowledgeable recommendations and priceless Author Event experiences, all at a fair price.  To our customers, 

thank you for your support.

 

We look forward to seeing you soon!

 

Vivien Jennings & Roger Doeren  


Vivien, Roger, and all of your friends at Rainy Day Books