As always, we have a great selection of new and classic books for adults and young readers. Our toy department has interesting, unusual items as well as the latest offerings from Lego and Playmobil. Our card department features work by local artists that express the beauty of our area. We have popular music CD's and we can special order most anything that's available for you, at no extra cost.

Our League of NH Craftsmen gallery has handmade local crafts for all interests and all budgets, and our cafe offers coffees, teas, and snacks to warm and revive the weary!

Our friendly and knowledgeable staff look forward to seeing you on Main Street and at the Village Book Store. 

Spanish Classes at the   

Village Book Store

Beginner Level Spanish Class will meet for six Thursdays starting on April 4th. The class will start at 3:45 and runs for one hour.

Intermediate Spanish Class meets for six Thursdays starting April 4. Class begins at 4:45 and last for one hour.

The cost for Beginner or Intermediate Spanish for six weeks is $55.00.

Our Spanish instructor is Argentine native Isabel Costa. Isabel is currently teaching  Spanish classes to people of different ages and Spanish proficiency levels in New Hampshire and Vermont.  She received a master's degree in bilingual and multicultural education from the University of Massachusetts as well as a Spanish teaching certificate.  Before moving to New Hampshire, Isabel  worked as a Spanish Teacher at Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Massachusetts, for 8 years, where she taught different class levels, including all the Spanish AP classes.

For more information or to register for either class call the Village Book Store at 6023.444.5263.  

How to Cook Everything: the Basics

Mark Bittman, John Wiley & Sons, 2012

I'm a big fan of Mark Bittman's. His straightforward, nonfussy approach to cooking, and his respect for ingredients and their production strike just the right chord.

A few of his earlier cookbooks were instructive, but not very inspirational for visually oriented casual cooks like me.

"How to Cook Everything: the Basics," though, really is a great contribution. One of the only things I like about the online edition of the New York Times are the videos they include of things like Bittman showing how to prepare a particular dish. And in this new cookbook, there are more than 1,000 photos that show HOW to do a particular step, and WHAT the result should look like at each stage along the way. How do you tell when the clams are cooked enough but not overcooked when making clam chowder? Just how brown should the meat be when you're browning it to make a stew? When are the onions caramelized enough to make a dark rich onion soup? For each step there's a set of clear and simple directions, and a picture of what you're going for.

He starts the book with an amply illustrated review of basic techniques (such as boiling, sauteing, baking, or roasting,) then proceeds to show how to trim foods, chop, peel, slice, and puree, for example.

The recipes (there are 185 of them, which tells you how comprehensive the photographic coverage is!) are all relatively simple and not time consuming, but they range widely, from Spanish lentils with spinach and chorizo to Thanksgiving basics, to no-knead bread.

Bittman's emphasis is on getting you in the kitchen to prepare what you eat as often as possible. To this end, he gives us his "five golden rules of the kitchen" which will, I think, convey his terrific personality:

1. anything you cook at home will be good.

2. read the recipe through before starting

3. it's o.k. to serve dishes warm or at room temperature

4. trust your senses

5. be safe -- but not insane -- about cleanliness

I think this book deserves a place on most cooks' crowded bookshelves for its clarity, its illustration, and of course for some great recipes. I also think the book becomes a contender for that gifted cookbook to the young person starting off in the kitchen for him or herself, a guide to the pleasure and economies of cooking for oneself and those we love.

Review by Village Book Store owner Jeff Wheeler. 

Rolling Stone Magizine  

Babel  

By Will Hermes 

September 20, 2012

To hear Mumford & Sons, I Will Wait for You click HERE.

"It's hard to imagine a more preposterous road to platinum success than the one Mumford & Sons traveled. Sigh No More, the 2010 debut by Marcus Mumford and his London crew, is a set of rousing tunes clad in choirboy harmonies, clawhammer banjo and Salvation Army brass that exploded amid a sea of AutoTuned cyber-pop. Soon, the band was backing Dylan on the Grammys, recording Kinks classics with Ray Davies and uncannily recalling the days when string bands like the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers were radio gold. 

Babel steps up Mumford & Sons' game without changing it too much. It feels shinier, punchier, more arena-scale than the debut, with the band hollering, hooting, plucking and strumming like Olympian street buskers. The songs lean toward the hooky folkfest stomps of tunes such as "Little Lion Man" and "The Cave," whose beer-slosh melody and fist-pump dynamics branded Sigh No More. See Babel's hymnlike first single, "I Will Wait," and "Lover of the Light" - both are proof that the Mumfords do dramatic builds, dropouts and soft-loud shifts as impressively as U2 or Skrillex. The fact that these guys are able to do big rock catharsis with humble tools is part of the thrill. 

But it's the band's lyrics, and Mumford's delivery, that define the album's sound. Babel is full of all manner of religious shoptalk, with Biblical metaphors swirling like detritus in a Christopher Nolan film. Jesus is invoked above Edge-style guitar on "Below My Feet." On "Whispers in the Dark," Mumford declares an intention "to serve the Lord" over a Riverdance bounce. Compared to unfreaky-folk-revival peers like the Avett Brothers or the Low Anthem, Mumford & Sons really double down on the ol' time religion..."

The Backyard Homestead

Edited by Carleen Madigan

Put your backyard to work! Enjoy fresher, organic, better-tasting food all the time. The solution is as close as your own backyard. Grow the vegetables and fruits your family loves; keep bees; raise chickens, goats, or even a cow. The Backyard Homestead shows you how it's done. And when the harvest is in, you'll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew, or pickle the fruits of your labor.

From a quarter of an acre, you can harvest 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts.(less)  

  The Burgess Boys

  by Elizabeth Strout

  Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan- the Burgess sibling who stayed behind- urgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of thir childhood, where the long buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.  

A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)-an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man-a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.

When the bride's brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the university and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain-all plagued by "accursed" visions.

An utterly fresh work from Oates, The Accursed marks new territory for the masterful writer. Narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect.

  Francona 

  by Terry Francona and  

  Dan Shaughenessy 

 From 2004 to 2011, Terry Francona managed the Boston Red Sox, perhaps the most scrutinized team in all of sports. During that time, every home game was a sellout. Every play, call, word, gesture-on the field and off-was analyzed by thousands. And every decision was either genius, or disastrous. In those eight years, the Red Sox were transformed from a cursed franchise to one of the most successful and profitable in baseball history-only to fall back to last place as soon as Francona was gone. Now, in Francona: The Red Sox Years, the decorated manager opens up for the first time about his tenure in Boston, unspooling the narrative of how this world-class organization reached such incredible highs and dipped to equally incredible lows. But through it all, there was always baseball, that beautiful game of which Francona never lost sight.

As no book has ever quite done before, Francona escorts readers into the rarefied world of a twenty-first-century clubhouse, revealing the mercurial dynamic of the national pastime from the inside out. From his unique vantage point, Francona chronicles an epic era, from 2004, his first year as the Sox skipper, when they won their first championship in 86 years, through another win in 2007, to the controversial September collapse just four years later. He recounts the tightrope walk of managing unpredictable personalities such as Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez and working with Theo Epstein, the general managing phenom, and his statistics-driven executives. It was a job that meant balancing their voluminous data with the emotions of a 25-man roster. It was a job that also meant trying to meet the expectations of three owners with often wildly differing opinions. Along the way, readers are treated to never-before-told stories about their favorite players, moments, losses, and wins.

Ultimately, when for the Red Sox it became less about winning and more about making money, Francona contends they lost their way. But it was an unforgettable, endlessly entertaining, and instructive time in baseball history, one that is documented and celebrated in Francona, a book that examines like no other the art of managing in today's game.

Seconds Away

by Harlan Coben 

The McElderry Book of Mother Goose 

You know Little Miss Muffett and her tuffet, now meet Gregory Griggs with his twenty-seven wigs! And the cat and the fiddle are not the only music makers- there's also Terence Mcdiddler the three-stringed fiddler! Explore the well-known and offbeat in this charming collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes that will entertain readers of all ages.

Petra Mathers has chosen the most delightful verses and seamlessly mixes old friends with new faces. Her vivid, whimsical illustrations capture the timeless joy and cleverness that are the genius of Mother Goose.