Oblong Books & Music

This Week’s YA Bestsellers

What were the bestselling YA books at our stores this past week? Take a peek at what our YA fans are reading.

The Philosopher Queen: Rebecca Solnit

It's a cool October evening, and writer Rebecca Solnit is onstage at Columbia University's Miller Theatre telling a story. She was 19, she says, strolling San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, when she realized she was being followed by "a well-dressed white man murmuring a long string of vile sexual proposals to me." This is a familiar scenario to tonight's mostly female audience; we wait for the punch line: "When I turned around and told him to fuck off, he told me I had no right to speak to him like that." We laugh. But: "It's sort of not funny, because then he threatened to kill me." 

Happy International Women’s Day!

What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day than books ABOUT women, BY women? Here are nine recommendations across the board of books to read today - and tomorrow - and the rest of the month.

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Shrill by Lindy West

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

A Year Between Friends: 3191 Miles Apart by Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes

I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsberg Makes Her Mark by Debbie Levy, illustrations by Elizabeth Baddelley

Women In Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed The World by Rachel Ignotofsky

Love audiobooks? Try Libro.fm!

If you love audiobook subscriptions like Audible but want to support independent bookstores like us, we’ve got the perfect solution for you: Libro.fm. We’ve been partnered with them for months on selling individual audioboooks, but they finally launched a subscription service! YAY!

How does it work?

Simple: a customer gets their first audiobook for $0.99 and then pays $14.99 per month thereafter for one audiobook per month.

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Over 70,000 titles

First month for $0.99

$14.99 monthly fee (one audiobook/month)

30% off additional audiobooks

Free Libro.fm iOS and Android App

Membership credits never expire

DRM-Free (listen on multiple devices)

Superior audio quality (2X industry standard)

Join us for the book launch of The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge!

Wednesday, March 8 Oblong Rhinebeck @ 6 pm

From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.

We're excited to be the local launch venue for Paul La Farge's much anticipated new novel. He is also the author of The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann or the Distinction, and Luminous Airplanes and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. He lives in a subterranean ‘annex’ here in the Hudson Valley, where he is almost certainly up to no good.

5 women trailblazers in Dutchess

Suzanna Hermans likes to say that she grew up in a bookstore. Her father, Dick Hermans, founded Oblong Books & Music in Millerton in 1975, 10 years before she born.

“I’ve literally been doing this since I was tall enough to look over the counter,” Hermans says.

In 2007, after college, she came back to the business full time and she now manages the Rhinebeck store and co-owns the business with her father.

The Oblong stores have a strong sense of place, with a large display of Hudson Valley guidebooks as well as books, some rather obscure, on Hudson Valley history. And there’s a huge selection of cookbooks, highlighting Rhinebeck’s proximity to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park.

The store is also reflective of current politics. Hermans recently launched a Social Justice Book Group at Oblong to encourage the community to come together to read and learn in a safe space.

“In this political climate, we’re all stressed and on edge,” she says. “A bookstore is a good place for people to come together to talk about things.”