Doctor’s Recommendations

While we wait for this terrible biblical pandemic to pass, or until we do, we are trying to keep up some semblance of mission by doing what other indie bookstores are doing: selling books and gift certificates online. Here are our medical recommendations!

Take shot of these life-affirming antidotes to this pandemic! Please email, leave voicemail or order online, and you can pick up curbside or we will mail to you. We love you, stay aware and take care.

Recommendations include:

Susanne

Doctor of Cookbooks and Puzzles

The expert chef and puzzler from Park Slope is here for any tips you might need on what to spend your time with as you get cozy in your apartment.

For more recommendations…

A cookbook for family and friends that offers some intriguing recipes to cook at home that will feel like you eat in restaurants, including recipes for Taco Night, Big Pot cooking,and fancy Pizzas.

Enjoy time at home with your kids and teach them some cooking skills. This kids-friendly cook book features easy recipes that kids can cook by themselves with some aid by parents, with fun facts and classics such as Meatballs and M&M cookies.

No Frill, easy comfort food recipes is what we need right now. Look for crazy easy pizza toppings and much more.

Many of us have plenty of time now that we are stuck at home and maybe this is finally the time to declutter or repair and maintain things at our house or garden.

Recommendations include:

Brittany

Doctor of Kids’ Books

Including toys, picture books, POW! Kids Books, and more!

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A Hundred Billion Stars

The whole world is filled with big, enormous, gigantic, incredible numbers. Look all around and you can see them in the sky, grass, the city, everywhere! They are even in the pages of this book waiting for you and your imagination to discover them.

Ready for Spring!

A gray day turns into a kaleidoscope of fun in this marvelously offbeat and stimulating journey through the world of color. Parents will enjoy the numerous ways color is depicted and kids will spend hours looking through the book trying to find the character’s journey through the busy pages.

High Five

Discover the lost art of “High Fiving” in this exciting and interactive High Five Contest! From hand-limbering stretches to lessons on five-ing with finesse, readers are guided and trained through a series of interactive challenges that will prepare them for the final round.

Just like stubborn toddlers everywhere, Annalise Devin McFleece won’t have anything to do nap time. Her dad tries to encourage a nap by pushing her around the park when all of a sudden everyone they pass has fallen asleep. She’s finally ready to take a nap, but now all the naps have been taken. Does anyone have one to spar and will Annalise Devin McFleece ever take a nap!

Get your singing voices ready with Flo and Daddy Duck! Flo is not one for following directions, so Daddy Duck tries singing her a song about following him on their outing, but it’s not long until Flo starts making up her own words and gets terribly lost. She now must sing along to Daddy Ducks song to find her path back.

The Filpot children all love to go fishing on Sundays. Except for Elsie, who prefers to do things her own way… Why should she act like everyone else when she can follow the path along the creek or catch a fish with a buttercup? What if Elsie was right?

A spring-themed board book that includes Easter eggs, bunnies, chicks, and more while teaching toddlers about basic shapes.

Recommendations include:

Chris

Doctor of Fiction and Non-Fiction

Can diagnose all the best recent fiction and non-fiction, and what Dumbo and Park Slope are reading today!

For more recommendations…

I waited a long time to read this book because it’s about rock climbing. I shouldn’t have. It’s James Salter’s best book and a small marvel that encapsulates the beauty and rigor of doing such a simple yet infinitely complex task – the existential, artistic, bohemian foolishness that made climbing what it was in the 1960s.

In rainy, late Communist Hungary, rural villagers scheme, fight, fool each other, are fooled, and are deeply, relatably human. It feels both mythical and post-apocalyptic, written in a jaw-dropping style, with bravura, multi-page sentences. Humor, philosophy, and astute emotional observations are built into every passage.

A coming of age tale about becoming a poet and moving to New York City in the 1970s. Disarmingly candid, with a strongly naturalistic storytelling voice that both heightens and subverts the genre of autobiographical fiction. Eileen Myles is one of the greatest living poets, with verse that touches emotions deeply and directly. Her fiction does that too.

A great introduction to Roberto Bolaño’s arresting storytelling, including the hilarious, raunchy ghost story, the underworld romance of “Cell Mates,” and the dreamy “Meeting with Enrique Lihn,” a characteristic stock-taking of the state of Latin American literature. His stories can feel like exercises or sketches as they begin, but that’s just a clever disguise for powerful, unique and carefully crafted each one is.

The best book about New York City – it’s the master key to finding out why everything is laid out the way it is, and looks the way it does. Robert Moses is one of the most interesting people to have ever lived, and as an unelected official constructed more than perhaps anyone who ever lived too.

Recommendations include:

Middle Grade

Megan

Doctor of Middle Grade and YA

Anything that tweens, teens, (or of course grown-ups with an open mind) might demand!

For more recommendations…

Mary Lambert has always felt safe and at home on her island. Many of the residents, including Mary, are deaf and nearly everyone can communicate in sign language. However, tensions rise over the land as new English settlers come and a cunning young scientist is obsessed in discovering the origins of the island’s prevailing deafness. Mary soon finds herself as his specimen and must fight to save herself from his grasp.

Jeanne Ann is smart, stubborn, living in an orange van, and determined to find a permanent address before the start of seventh grade. Cal is tall, sensitive, living in a humongous house across the street, and determined to save her. As the two form a tentative friendship they’re buoyed by a cast of complex, oddball characters, who let them down, lift them up, and leave you cheering.

On a spring morning, neighbors Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko wake up to an angry red sky. A reactor at the nuclear power plant where their fathers work, Chernobyl, has exploded. Before they know it, the two girls, who’ve always been enemies, find themselves on a train bound for Leningrad. In their new lives, they begin to learn what it means to trust another person. But how far would you go to save your best friend’s life? Would you risk your own?

YA

Born with a gift for music, Nannerl Mozart wishes to go down in history for her brilliant and masterful playing; however, as a woman in the 18th century, composing is forbidden to her. It’s not long before her younger brother Wolfgang also shows signs of remarkable musical talent. His brilliance begins to eclipse her own, until one day a mysterious stranger from a magical land appears with an irresistible offer. He has the power to make her wish come true, but his help may cost her everything.

Ware can’t wait to spend summer “off in his own world”—dreaming of knights in the Middle Ages and generally being left alone. But then his parents sign him up for dreaded Rec camp, where he must endure Meaningful Social Interaction and whatever activities so-called “normal” kids do.

From the creator of the hit TV series The Bold Type comes an empowering and heartfelt novel about a future female president’s senior year of high school.

Recommendations include:

Nick and Nick Jr.

Doctors of Poetry

Based in Ridgewood, NY, they voraciously consume kibble and verse and are ready to recommend anything you might desire of that nature.

For more recommendations…

Any book of Ruefle’s is a must read whenever it comes out. Her language is engaging and informative, and each poem sits somewhere between the question and its answer.

If we can consider any book of poetry an epic for the times, this might be it. Sprawling and puzzling, comic and testimonial, Reines’ work is more than words or images, it is a totality of the feeling of life right now.

The New Yorker poetry editor’s most recent tour de force.

Powerhouse’s favorite poetess! One of her very best collections.