The Popeks also bought and sold antiques and owned a small shop in town, not far from their house. Within a few years, Michael’s father had filled a barn in the backyard with over 20,000 books.

But we didn’t want to waste ‘em,” Peter Popek says. According to the elder Popek, no one wanted these books, including him. His father, Peter Popek, a former UPS deliveryman, started a book business in the mid-eighties, but only after coming upon a too-good-to-be-true deal at a local auction. He grew up in an old farmhouse in Oneonta, a small town in upstate New York. It seems destined to happen, given that Popek comes from a family of collectors.

Those visits happened long before Popek, now 35, started gathering his own assortment of collectibles: things left between the pages of books, or as he calls them, Forgotten Bookmarks. As far as his grandfather knew, these were still live and active. “There was a standing order not to touch any of the WWI grenades,” Popek says. It surprised me by being a poetic and cleverly written book that was much more engaging than I had expected.Michael Popek remembers visiting his grandfather’s four-story home in New Jersey, where anything that could be collected, was-stamps, toy train cars, cap guns, autographs, baseball cards. While undeniably YA in focus, The Scorpio Races is engaging to an older audinece as well and cleverly weaves together mythology about water horses, other celtic legends, and includes just a few Shakespearean allusions as well.

I also read The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy Charnas McKee, which was written long before the current sparkly-vampire craze and is a subdued narrative dealing with the etymology of vampires - or at least of one vampire.Īnd in terms of more recent releases, I had hummed and hawed about whether to read The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater - better known for her unusual take on young adult werewolf/romance in her Shiver trilogy. I just finished her Patternist series which was incredibly original and engaging. I can highly recommend pretty much anything by Octavia Butler, the first African-American female author to have won major awards in the sci-fi field. But for some reason, probably because I've started foraying into sci-fi and fantasy of late, I've discovered some really great and lesser known (at least in my limited experience) writers. Usually, I'm turning my mind to summer reading in late May/early June and this year is no different.

Forgotten bookmarks by michael popek