My wife (@near-mrs) and I recently revisited one of our local(ish) bookstores and decided to take a gamble on something that they were trying for the first time - blind purchases. It's a fairly new marketing gamble that the store is taking, though I've seen it done successfully in other shops and with other products, so I'm sure it'll work out fine for them.
The idea is simple: books are chosen by the staff and a short blurb is written up about each describing vaguely what it was about or how that staff member enjoyed it, and then they're wrapped in simple butcher's paper and set on a shelf for purchase.
Besides the genre, you're basically going in totally blind on the recommendation of someone that you (very likely) don't even know. In many ways, the experience was reminiscent of the old Staff Picks wall of movies you'd see in Blockbusters around the country, which as a sentimental fool born in the 80s... speaks to my inner nostalgia. So, of course, we couldn't turn down snagging some mystery books... and I thought I'd share those with you folks here, today!
There were quite a few options to pick from - I think in total there were 10 - though many of them were for me in genres that I don't generally read a lot of. Young LGBTQ targetted books, one that sounded like it was probably poetry or something, and several that sounded either non-fiction or extremely uninteresting.
So, what I ended up with was one of the only Thriller genre books available, and my wife snagged a generalized 'fiction' book that billed itself as a light summer read and thus caught her eye.
When I got home, I peaked at the letter (because who could resist?) and then set the books down with it to take a photo:
The fancy little letter came complete with a wax seal and, upon breaking into it - a hand-made bookmark of thin wood. The letter itself was just explaining that this was something new they were trying and basically thanked us for taking the dive into this experiment with them.
Look at how nice these all look together!
I couldn't resist the chance to take a closer shot of the seal too - had to make it black and white though so the details could be properly seen.
And, the letter itself reads:
So, with all that said... once we unwrapped our mystery books, we got the following titles:
My wife's book is 'The Authenticity Project' and mine is 'I'm thinking of ending things'. I haven't honestly looked at my wife's book much, but I did read the first few pages of mine... and was pleasantly surprised to find out it was told in a first-person narrative from the POV of a young female character. I think it'll end up being a pretty good read, and as it's fairly small, I should be able to finish it relatively quickly.
Unfortunately for my available reading time, but fortunately for my family, within a week of getting these books we bought a house and moved cities. So this post, and these books, have been waiting for about two months without being completed. Things are finally settling down around our place though - I even got a chance to listen to an audiobook that blew my socks off (but that's for a future post) - so I'm sure we'll be able to crack these pages open and actually read them in the weeks ahead.
Once I do finish mine, I'll be sure to pop back into Hive Book Club for a proper review. I thought you folks would enjoy the Mystery Book journey we took, so even though this isn't a review and doesn't have many details about the books themselves... I hope you've enjoyed.
Keep turning those pages folks.
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