Best of Boston

Plenty of book stores host signings, but for a truly enlightening author event, two venues always vie for our top spot: the Brookline Booksmith and the Harvard Book Store. Both are homey, friendly, and proudly independent. But Harvard wins this year for its muscular lineup: This past spring the store brought to town political heavyweights Paul Krugman and Madeleine Albright, fiction legends Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Carey, and local writers Audrey Schulman and Pablo Medina.