Old Book of the Week (July 12, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #79

The Names: A Memoir

by N. Scott Momaday

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an American story of non-white ancestry, but that's about where the similarities end. There is ancestry in The Names, but, unlike Roots, it is equally the story of an individual consciousness, of a writer coming to understand the world. The story has a forward movement to it, from his forebears to his own coming of age, but it is hardly linear, as Momaday circles back through memory, his own and his ancestors', to construct his own imagination. His "I" is often a "we," but it is no less concrete for that, full of a wonder that's grounded in the details of personality and place and that makes his well-observed existence seem like a miracle. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (July 12, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #67

On the Other Side of the Forest

by Nadine Robert and Gerard DuBois

Amid all the bright colors and exclamation points in our picture-book section, you might overlook this lovely, but more subdued, item. Illustrated mostly in muted grays and browns, and featuring a rabbit father who labors to exhaustion toward his dream—building a tower of stones to see over the dark forest that surrounds their small community—it's a story that asks for a little patience. But the story it so modestly tells rewards that patience with a sense of beauty and kindness and, on its final page, a grand sense of mystery and wonder. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 28, 2021)

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

You open a Michael Lewis book knowing it will be full of Michael Lewis characters—brainy, contrarian visionaries—and here they include a California public health official, a Zuckerberg-funded biochemist, and a self-styled "redneck epidemiologist," all of whom, in some sense, saw COVID coming and, more contentiously, saw what would be required to stop it. And while the public mishandling of the COVID crisis is part of Lewis's tale, his real story—told, as always, with cinematic skill and almost impossibly larger-than-life characters—takes place behind the scenes, as decades of effort and then months of urgent warnings fail to move elected officials and a reluctant bureaucracy to action. The Premonition is too anecdotal to stand as the last word on the COVID era, but it is a rousing and infuriating first read of history and those who, often anonymously, make it. —Tom

Audiobook of the Week (June 28, 2021)

New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time

by Craig Taylor

No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradition, Taylor, a Canadian who gave the same loving treatment to another adopted city in Londoners, has chosen the best from his years of conversations with ordinary New Yorkers, and the best of these—from a skyscraper window washer, a 911 dispatcher, an elevator repairman, and a lawyer almost killed by COVID—express, with everyday profundity, philosophies of living in a great and merciless metropolis. (For the audiobook, available through our partners at Libro.fm and read by a rotating cast of ten narrators, a special shoutout to Luis Moreno, who pulled off the tricky assignment of reading other people's oral histories with a particular New York flair.) —Tom

Young Adult Book of the Week (June 28, 2021)

Between You, Me, and the Honeybees

by Amelia Diane Coombs

This sweet, sunny YA novel is just in time for graduation and summer. Josie Hazeldine is supposed to be going to college in the fall—it's her mother's dream for her—but Josie has other plans. She's turned down her college acceptance with hopes of staying in her hometown to continue on with the Hazeldine family bee business. The only problem is she hasn't told anyone yet: not her mother, and not her best friend. It's a good thing the loving labor of beekeeping helps to quell Josie's ever-present anxiety, because the first person she finally confesses her dream to? He becomes yet another secret. —Anika

New Book of the Week (June 14, 2021)

On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson's estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its white ones in unprecedented detail. But she was raised in Texas, East Texas specifically, and her little handbook about Juneteenth, the local holiday that is finally becoming a national one, gives the history behind the celebration, as well as a very personal history of the presence of black people—alongside white and indigenous people—in that one-of-a-kind state. She loves the state in which she was raised, and for that very reason, she is compelled to tell its honest history. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (June 14, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #78

Thomas and Beulah

by Rita Dove

I had always wanted to choose a book of poetry for Phinney by Post, and I knew, when we did, it would be one in which the poems truly made a book, something Dove leaves no doubt about at the beginning of hers: "These poems tell two sides of a story, and are meant to be read in sequence," she declares in boldface. The sequence is "Thomas" and then "Beulah," two halves that imagine the lives, mostly in Ohio, of her grandfather and grandmother, but as I've read the sequences over and over, they've gained their value to me by knocking against each other, as different moments speak to me, and to each other, two lives gaining their shapes from moments held in memory, fleeting and forward-borne. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (June 14, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #66

Toasty

by Sarah Hwang

What is the proper level of preposterousness for a picture book, especially one about a piece of toast that thinks it's a dog? Whatever it is, Sarah Hwang hits the perfect balance of logic and absurdity in her debut. Can a piece of toast, like our hero Toasty, roll in a puddle like a dog? Of course not: it gets soggy! But can Toasty bark like a dog? Surprisingly, yes! You'll laugh and root for this intrepid piece of bread as he finds his ideal home. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 31, 2021)

Brood

by Jackie Polzin

"Life is the ongoing effort to live. Some people make it look easy. Chickens do not."

As a person who aspires to one day keep my own backyard chickens, I was delighted by this little novel about an unnamed woman who becomes mother to a flock of four hens in rural Minnesota. Polzin's writing is spare but so specific in its attention to detail that I forgot, more than once, I wasn't reading a memoir, or sitting outside, observing the meanderings of actual flesh-and-blood chickens. But Brood is about so much more than the precarious business of raising chickens. It's a meditation on life—expectations, transitions, grief—and reading it felt like a hug after a hard year.

P.S. I am team Gloria. —Anika

New Book of the Week (May 31, 2021)

Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

If you’ve seen my past Top 10 lists, you know I love mysteries and thrillers. Especially during the pandemic, when I’ve compulsively read one after the other, I’ve focused on all the novels by a single author: Tana French, Ruth Ware, Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. But I’d never read Mary Kubica until a colleague suggested I read her newest book, Local Woman Missing. After that breathtaking page-turner, I plan to binge-read all of her books. A young mother of a newborn disappears one night while going for a jog. A few weeks later, another woman in the same small town disappears, along with her young daughter, leaving behind a cryptic note. Eleven years later, the daughter reappears, severely damaged psychologically. Chapters alternate in time from then and now, and from different characters’ points of view, as the story slowly unfolds to show you the connections between characters—and how each is not exactly who they seem on the surface. Yes, that’s typical form for a good mystery, but in Kubica’s hands, it’s an extraordinary tale that will most likely be in my Top 10 list this year. —Doree

New Book of the Week (May 31, 2021)

Secrets of Happiness

by Joan Silber

Does Joan Silber's novel contain any of the secrets promised by its title? Actually, yes! Such titles are often ironic, and there is certainly plenty of unhappiness to go around in this story, but there are also models for ways to live well, which include forgiveness, patience, and taking love where you find it (which is often not where you are supposed to). Her story opens with the rupture of one family, when a prosperous New Yorker learns that his father has two more children by a Thai woman living in Queens. From there, Silber, like Bernardine Evaristo in Girl, Woman, Other, nimbly steps from life to connected life in each chapter, linking her characters together and showing that the families they make are often stronger than the ones they are given. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 10, 2021)

Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound

by David B. Williams

When it comes to books about Seattle and its surroundings, there's one must-read writer as far as I'm concerned, and that's David B. Williams. I've long been telling recent arrivals and lifetime residents alike about such titles as Too High and Too Steep and Seattle Walks, and now I can add another to my recommendation list. Homewaters is the author's most wide-ranging work yet, a comprehensive account of the human and natural history of Puget Sound. From the formation of the land- and seascape by ancient glaciation, through the long years of indigenous stewardship and into the colonial and contemporary eras, the waters of the Salish Sea have been the region's lifeblood, enabling commerce, culture, and connection, and Williams addresses all that's gone before while also looking toward the future. The vital tie between ecology and the progress of people is the string that holds Homewaters together and will, I think, be the most-remembered message of this essential book. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New Book of the Week (May 10, 2021)

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

A modest property on the outskirts of Pretoria, an unhappy white family whose dysfunctions seem likely to be remembered by no one outside their tiny circle: these might seem unpromising materials for a national epic, but Galgut weaves them into the last four decades of South African history—from Botha to Mandela to Mbeki to Zuma and beyond—in a way that makes you feel the press (the oppression) of national destiny. With a narrative consciousness that flows easily and often wittily from mind to mind through dozens of characters—nearly all of them stunted and miserable in their own ways—his story arrives at a similar conclusion to Coetzee's Disgrace: the only legitimate response for white South Africans to the legacy of apartheid is a kind of monkish self-abnegation. Enjoyable? I can't say that it is. Bracing? Certainly. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 10, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #77

The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth

by Roy Andries de Groot

The "Auberge" of the title is a small inn and restaurant, tucked away in a valley in the Alps and largely undiscovered, until de Groot's 1973 book, which has been celebrated by chefs like Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Samin Nosrat ever since. In this misty Shangri-La, two women, Mademoiselle Vivette and Mademoiselle Ray, present daily menus (always accompanied by multiple wines and cheeses) grounded in the terrain and seasons of their valley and the surrounding locales. The first half of the book tells the story of these women and their valley and these meals and the second half provides the recipes, all presented with de Groot's voluptuously appreciative charm, which makes your mouth water for such delicacies as Les Rognons de Veau Grillés à la Broche, Sauce Diable, even if, like me, you have no desire to actually eat Veal Kidneys Spit-Roasted with Deviled Sauce. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (May 10, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #65

The Lights and Types of Ships at Night

by Dave Eggers and Annie Dills

Those former and current bedtime-readers among you likely are aware how difficult it can be to turn a much-loved fact book (e.g., in our house's case, the DK volume on Airplanes) into an enjoyable bedtime story. One of the beauties of this recent picture book is that Eggers has turned a fact book on ships—trawlers, junks, galleons, etc.—into a witty readaloud. The other beauty is, well, how beautiful it is, as illustrator Annie Dills has managed to back up, in shimmering glory, Eggers's typically grandiose assertion that "there is nothing more beautiful than a ship and its lights on the sea at night." (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 26, 2021)

Festival Days

by Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult hero in the rather uncultish world of essay writing. I am a card-carrying member of that cult (it was a Phinney by Post selection a few years ago), so when I say that her new book, Festival Days, is as good as that one, please understand that makes it the best new book I've read this year. Why are these essays (and two pieces she calls "stories") so heart-flutteringly good? There is her tender, clear-eyed intimacy with mortality (most of the stories concern the dying and the dead); there is the equally tender, lively presence of animals (dogs, mostly) through nearly every story. But most of all it is the structure of these stories, subtly ricocheting and reverberating between mourning and laughter, between memory and the moment, that gives them the fullness that only the most observed and felt life ever achieves. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 26, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #76

Dusty Answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

Does it sound patronizing if I call this a "young person's book"? I don't mean it to—realizing what it is (a book that finds it impossible to imagine what it's like to live past the age of 25) released me to enjoy it even more fully than I already was. Lehmann herself was only 26 when this debut novel had a Fitzgerald-style scandalous success in the UK in the '20s, and she captures with a lush, breathless intelligence what it feels like to grow into the first years of adulthood and learn that the people you have desired from afar—in this case, a glamorous neighboring family of cousins—can be desired up close, and might (or might not) desire you back. If you feel like being swept away, wade in. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 26, 2021)

The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

When you start a novel with Patricia Highsmith's name on the cover, you have certain expectations: betrayal, desire (often same-sex desire), consequence. The most striking thing about this novel, about an American writer who goes to Tunisia to work on a small movie set there, is how most of these elements are withheld. For the most part, nothing happens, and then something does, but what of it? You hardly know what to think (Ingram, the writer, certainly doesn't), and Highsmith isn't going to help you (or him) out. Somehow, though, the stark abstraction of this story of a man far from home in a poor desert country made it oddly compelling, and it remains vivid in my mind as few novels I've read lately have. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 12, 2021)

We Play Ourselves

by Jen Silverman

If you’ve ever struggled to lead a creatively satisfying professional life, there’s a good chance Cass’s story will resonate. Cass’s chosen career path? Theater. After an entire decade of working on “weird downtown plays” as a no-name playwright in NYC, she wins an award along with $50,000 and lands herself an off-Broadway debut. She’s 33 and being lauded as a “fierce new voice” that’s both queer and feminist. Finally, she’s reached the tipping point in her career. Everything is taking off. The only problem is the higher you rise, the harder you fall. Cass falls hard, fleeing to LA after a scandal of her own making. There, she’s thrust into another landscape of ambition: film, and fame for fame’s sake. We Play Ourselves is a wry, intelligent, and sincere grappling with the ideas of failure and success. —Anika

New Book of the Week (April 12, 2021)

The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

Over a year ago I read one of those reviews that makes you want to drop everything you're doing and rush to the bookstore, even if what you're doing is running a bookstore. Tantalizingly, I couldn't then read the book that inspired such raptures, as it was available only a hemisphere away in New Zealand. It's now been published in the US, and having obtained it at last, I can confirm the initial reports: What a book! The Absolute Book is stuffed full of ideas and images, with enough plot for a series of novels. It starts as a taut thriller, as a young woman stumbles onto a foolproof way to avenge her murdered sister, but it quickly expands across multiple genre boundaries, using myth and fantasy to play a literary game for the highest stakes there are. It's very much a story built out of stories, inspired by similar tales of conspiracies, ancient secrets, and quests for lost objects, but it surpasses almost all of these in scope and style. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Kids Book of the Week (April 12, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #64

Fish for Supper

by M.B. Goffstein

The story (a Caldecott Honor winner from 1976 just now brought back into print) is as simple as its endearingly simple pen-and-ink illustrations. A grandmother wakes up early, has breakfast, cleans up quickly, and packs to spend the day fishing in her rowboat on a lake, after which she comes home, cooks the fish for dinner, cleans up, and goes to bed so she can wake up early to do the same the next day. Oh, how I love this little book and its celebration of a woman who does as she pleases! (Age 2 to grandmother) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 29, 2021)

Where Stands a Wingèd Sentry

by Margaret Kennedy

When it comes to the British Home Front during WWII, the Blitz gets all the attention. As a Blitz-Lit lover myself, I won’t deny its historical dazzle. But having just finished this diary, kept during the summer after Dunkirk—when Brits reasonably thought they could be invaded and even lose the war—I see why the “quiet” can be just as fascinating as the “storm.” A published historian, as well as a famous novelist at the time, Kennedy had a keen sense for detail, dialogue, and geopolitics. But she was also a mother to three children, and she discovered that the qualities that make her diary so compelling were not as practical as the staunch sentiments of her less “imaginative” fellow citizens. Her account has eerie echoes of the year we just endured: she penetrates the amorphous dread that arises when nothing too extraordinary is happening except History-with-a-capital-H. (And she manages to be really funny too.) —Liz

New Book of the Week (April 12, 2021)

Philip Roth: The Biography

by Blake Bailey

In the funniest of his often droll footnotes, Bailey notes that, after he finished his Zuckerman trilogy, Roth had to have his typewriter repaired because the "I" had worn off. Through 31 books, including some of the most acclaimed (and most notorious) novels of the last fifty years, Roth puckishly and often perversely filtered his self through a handful of alter egos, but Bailey, who had access to all the fiction but also to hundreds of pages of unpublished missives from Roth justifying his own equally notorious existence, never gets lost in that hall of mirrors: he makes you feel, and know, a life, lived by a real, flawed person. Did I like Roth any more or less afterwards? I'm not even sure: he was both generous and vindictive, capable of great friendship with women and consumed by youth-chasing lust. But the real drama, and the reason we eagerly read an 800-page biography (at least one as good as this one), is the time he spent at that typewriter, and the artistic stamina that pushed him to write his greatest books when most writers would have coasted to the finish. And it's back to those books I want to turn next. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 29, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #75

The Devil That Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghanaian man in his 60s. After reading this memoir, I couldn't help imagining that Attila is an idealized portrait of the man Forna's father might have lived to become. The Devil That Danced on the Water recounts Forna's earliest years, as she is shuttled between Sierra Leone and Scotland, the homelands of her father and mother, while her idealistic physician father rises in the government of his newly independent nation and is then destroyed as it falls into dictatorship. It's a tender, fascinating, and brilliantly observed story that seamlessly weaves together her child's perspective with the often terrible knowledge of later experience. —Tom

Kids’ Book of the Week (March 29, 2021)

Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth Wein

If not for World War II, and their roles in it, Queenie of Scotland and Maddie of Manchester would likely have never met, which would be a shame, because their fierce love and dynamic talents make them a sensational team. Each is doing her part for the British War Effort: Queenie “Verity” as an interrogator, and Maddie “Kittyhawk” as a pilot. But their mission to Nazi-occupied France goes awry, forcing Maddie to crash land the plane and Queenie to parachute out, only to be arrested by the Gestapo. “Verity” must reveal the details of their assignment or face execution. Code Name Verity is a vivid and brazen story about love and loyalty. It’s deeply researched, profoundly painful, and perfectly exemplifies how a made-up story might reveal a deeper truth. I only wish I’d read it sooner. (Age 14 and up) —Anika

Kids’ Book of the Week (March 29, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #63

Ten Ways to Hear Snow

by Cathy Camper, illustrated by Kenard Pak

Our weekend-long Seattle snowfest is already fading into memory, but you can evoke snow's wondrous sensory transformations with this lovely celebration of the sounds—Ploompf! Thwomp!—of winter, which also manages to expertly weave in a story of cultural tradition and family aging into its catchy premise (helped by the quiet paintings of Kenard Pak, who, I realize, was the illustrator of last month's Phinney by Post Kids pick too). (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 15, 2021)

The Narrowboat Summer

by Anne Youngson

Anne Youngson became an instant Madison Books favorite with the release of her 2018 debut novel Meet Me at the Museum, and we've been eagerly anticipating a follow-up ever since. She's at last obliged us with a tale of a trio of women, all of a certain age, drawn together by a shared journey along the English canal system. As we've already become used to with this essential author, her characters are fully dimensional and interact with each other in all the complex ways that real people do. A sweet story that never becomes too treacly, charming but not superficial, The Narrowboat Summer exudes all the warmth of the sunniest season. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Audiobook of the Week (March 15, 2021)

Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob

by Russell Shorto

Shorto is an acclaimed historian (you can usually find his modern classic, Amsterdam, on our Cities shelf), but he was reluctant to tell his own family history, specifically that of his namesake grandfather, Russ Shorto, who, with his brother-in-law, ran the local mob—and the town—in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the mid-20th century. But you'll be glad he finally did: Smalltime (especially as read by Shorto himself) is moving, funny, and enlightening, unearthing family secrets but also embedding them in a fascinating social history of Sicilian immigrants climbing the American social structure in about the only way available to them. (I heard many echoes from a previous Audiobook of the Week, The World According to Fannie Davis, a rosier portrait of family prosperity built on the other side of the law.) —Tom

(Order the audio download of Smalltime from our partners at Libro.fm)

Old Book of the Week (March 15, 2021)

Sunset Song

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I was that weirdo who adored every book I had to read in high school. Now, I’m that weirdo who seeks out the books teenagers in other countries have to read. And that’s how I discovered why Sunset Song was voted "the best Scottish book of all time.” Set in a northeastern hamlet called Kinraddie during the first two decades of the 20th century, it recounts the coming-of-age of bookish crofter’s daughter Chris Guthrie, and the passing-of-an-era of unmechanized farming. While Gibbon doesn’t write in dialect, he seeds his lilting prose with an abundance of Scots words so that you feel like you’re learning a new language by living among its speakers. (I checked my work with the glossary at the back.) Being significantly older than a teenager, I thought I knew how the story would unspool, but it twisted and untwisted my heart right up to the end. Sunset Song is rooted in a specific time and place but yields timeless, universal enjoyment. —Liz

Kids’ Book of the Week (March 15, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #62

'Ohana Means Family

by Ilima Loomis and Kenard Pak

Loomis takes the cadence and concept of "The House That Jack Built" and makes them her own with a wonderfully rhythmic and evocative story of traditions of Hawaiian food, land, and farming, writing of a sun "that warms the wind on which stories are told / that lifts the rain to the valley fold" and so on. And Kenard Pak's beautiful illustrations of figures in washes of landscape will immediate evoke the island for anyone who has visited Maui, while turning the perspective toward those who have lived there for centuries. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 1, 2021)

Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

Zorrie is a short novel about a full life. Not full in the usual way we think of for a character in fiction: travel, romances, adventure, public achievements. Zorrie Underwood's life, covering most of the 20th century, was so tied to the soil of her patch of rural Indiana that a few months spent working in Illinois as a young woman remained an exotic memory for years after. Mostly she worked, hard, and loved, patiently, with her curiosity and appreciation of the world around her burbling along at a low simmer. This little gem will remind readers of Marilynne Robinson and Kent Haruf and (for me especially) of Brad Watson's lovely Miss Jane, as it reminds us of the passions that can grow, and be sustained for decades, in a quiet mind and a laboring body. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 1, 2021)

An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

What sort of book is this? Schalansky, a German writer and designer (she designed this starkly beautiful book), loves lists, and in part it is just what the title promises, a list of things that are no longer here: an extinct tiger, a destroyed palace (two, actually), a lost film. But each missing item is accompanied by—well, this is where definitions get tricky—a story of some kind, or an essay. Some are fairly literal excavations, some fanciful (one favorite follows grumpy Greta Garbo around for a day), but what they add up to is less a factual reclamation of these lost things than an emotional reckoning with what it means to lose. The last chapter, in which an old rumor that everything lost on Earth ends up on the moon is confirmed, explained the book best to me: this book is the moon. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 1, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #74

A Different Drummer

by William Melvin Kelley

Like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Kelley's novel (his debut, published in 1962 when he was 24) straps itself into the straitjacket of American racial history but leaves just enough room to wriggle out and imagine something else. Set in an unnamed southern state wedged somehow between Alabama and Mississippi, A Different Drummer has the Great Migration taking place in single month, emptying the state of every one of its black residents. And perhaps most challengingly to the traditions of African American (and American) fiction, Kelley presents it entirely from the perspective from the state's white residents, giving readers a puzzle he declines to solve for them. —Tom

New Book of the Week (February 1, 2021)

Outlawed

by Anna North

I got to read an early copy of Outlawed last year and have been impatiently waiting until it went on sale and I could share it. This book deftly recasts the Western genre through a queer, feminist lens, with lots of fun and adventure along the way. In an alternate 1890s where any woman who can't get pregnant is suspected of being a witch, teenage Ada barely escapes her hometown with her life. She finds herself at a hideout in the company of the Hole in the Wall Gang, a ragtag group of misfits who each have something they're running from too. I loved living in this world for the much-too-short time it took me to read Outlawed. —Haley

New Paperback of the Week (February 1, 2021)

Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

From the outside, 35-year-old Jenny McLaine appears to be a successful adult. She owns her house, has a cool writing job in London, a few good friends, and up until recently she lived with her famous photographer boyfriend. Her inner monologue quickly shatters this illusion of put togetherness, revealing Jenny to be neurotic, self-obsessed, and needy; she can’t put down her phone and cares exceedingly about being “liked” on social media to the detriment of her real world relationships. Grown Ups is a satirical portrait of the elder millennial that is messy, tender, and hilarious. Go ahead: put your phone down, pick it up! —Anika

Old Book of the Week (February 1, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #73

Laughing in the Hills: A Story of Life and the Race Track

by Bill Barich

When Bill Barich decided, "with the same hapless illogic that governed all my actions then," to spend the spring of 1978 at a second-rate racetrack in Northern California, he might have been looking for a big score—the book does track the progress of his small wagering bankroll—but what he found was people, a collection of characters drawn to the track not by the promises of riches or glamour (there is little of either to be found here) than for subtler and more mysterious reasons: perhaps a desire for an orderly life, organized around the nine daily races, or for a disorderly one, outside the strictures of nine-to-five respectability. Barich's wry and affectionate eye for his fellow denizens makes this read like—and please note the high praise this implies—the nonfiction book Charles Portis never wrote. —Tom

Audiobook of the Week (February 1, 2021)

The Blackhouse

by Peter May

There has been a murder on the stark Hebridean Isle of Lewis, in the same small town where Edinburgh police detective Fin Macleod was raised, but Fin, sent to investigate, spends much more time peeling back the tragic history of his own youth than following the usual clues. Once the events of The Blackhouse have all unfurled, you'll understand why Fin was so reluctant to return to the island he left for good at the age of 18. The revelations are disturbing and dramatic (even melodramatic), but the real fascination for me was the setting, especially a brutal traditional bird-hunting outing on a nesting rock in the Atlantic, and in the audio version, the atmosphere is only heightened by Peter Forbes's wonderful narration, modulating between island and mainland Scottish accents. —Tom (The audiobook, via our partners at Libro.fm, is the only edition I can currently recommend, since the paperback appears to be between US editions right now.)

New Book of the Week (January 18, 2021)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

George Saunders is one of the best short-story writers around—he blew out the doors of the genre back in the '90s and has not rested since—and if you've seen him speak or read his interviews you'll know that he's also one of the wisest givers of advice on the craft and creative process of fiction writing, so it's no surprise that this book is a treat. Based on a class he taught at Syracuse for two decades, it includes seven stories by 19th-century Russian masters (including three by Chekhov, among them the exquisite "Gooseberries," the source of his title), each followed by Saunders's modest, funny, and thoroughly insightful analysis of both the technical and—dare I say it—moral details that make them tick. It's obviously a book for writers, including some exercises at the back that I, who hate writing exercises, might actually try, but it's equally a book for readers, especially those for whom stepping back and examining how art is made just adds to the wonder of its creation. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 18, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #72

The Ice Palace

by Tarjei Vesaas

I read this book twice last year, at the beginning of the year and the end, and my awe and delight at its beauty only increased. The story is simple—a new girl comes to a small Norwegian town, and makes a connection to a girl there—and the language is stripped down to its minimum. But oh my, the intensity that those simple words—some of them unspoken—carry! In other hands, this might have felt like a horror story, but Vesaas (a household name in Norway, but nearly unknown here) invests it with stark enchantment. When I describe it as a cross between Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, please forgive my glibness and know that I am giving it the highest praise I have. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 18, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #60

On Account of the Gum

by Adam Rex

And you think the old lady who swallowed a fly had problems! What starts with a little gum stuck in your hair soon grows until there are scissors, a vacuum, and a rabbit (and much more) up there. Adam Rex handles both the expert rhymes—"Your grandpa, who said that your aunt was mistaken, is mostly to blame for the noodles and bacon"—and the delightfully disastrous illustrations, in which the funniest elements are the wide, fed-up eyes of the poor kid whose sloppy gum chewing set this whole snowball rolling. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

Phinney by Post Kids Book #60

No Reading Allowed: The Worst Read-Aloud Book Ever

by Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, and Bryce Gladfelter

We know what a homonym is, those words that amusingly sound alike, but what do you call it when it's a whole sentence? Haldar, Carpenter, and Gladfelter, authors of the witty P Is for Pterodactyl, have raised their wordplay game in their second book to an entirely new level (with illustrations to match), from "Sir Francis Bacon" / "Sir, France is bakin!" to "The new deli clark runs a pretty sorry store" / "The New Delhi clerk runs a pretty sari store." A delightful celebration of the flexibility and inclusiveness of the English language. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 23, 2020)

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Having read The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James's still-classic 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, earlier this year, I was curious what a modern version could add to the story. Even more than James, Hazareesingh focuses on the miraculously compelling figure of Toussaint Louverture, and from the mists of legend is able to create the picture of a man. Inevitably, the first 45 years of his life, spent largely in undocumented slavery, can only be speculated about, but once he ascends to power, there is a wealth of records to work from—much of it from Toussaint's own voluminous letter-writing—and by carefully tracking Toussaint's maneuvers through the tightest of domestic and international squeezes and by documenting his self-educated and sometimes idiosyncratic wisdom, he makes you understand both the brilliant improbability of his success and the tragedy of his personal failure, just as his country was headed toward independence. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 23, 2020)

Blades of Freedom (Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales #10)

by Nathan Hale

One response to the complexity of explaining the Haitian Revolution is to narrow the scope, as Hazareesingh (see above) does by focusing on Toussaint. Despite his tinier canvas and his younger audience, Hale, in the tenth installment of his wildly popular series of graphic histories of thrilling episodes in American history, does the opposite, making his story about the Louisiana Purchase as well as Haiti and detouring along the way to explain, among many other subjects, the production of sugar, the syncretism of Haitian vudou, the rise of Napoleon, and the succession of the Spanish empire. It's a lot to thread together, and even the wisecracking characters in the story complain, but it's thrilling to see the story placed in such helpful and fascinating context. As much as I've read on the subject this year, I learned a lot! —Tom

Young Adult Book of the Week (November 23, 2020)

Again Again

by E. Lockhart

Again Again both was and wasn’t the young adult love story I expected. Adelaide’s summer can and does go a myriad of different ways, in a number of possible worlds, perhaps thanks to her introduction to multiverse theory. However, it seems that in each world, even the worlds where she might, possibly, fall in love with someone new, she must first contend with a painful breakup. And yet, the heart of this story isn’t the romance(s); it’s Adelaide’s relationship with her opioid-addicted little brother. Lockhart’s thought-experiment of a novel celebrates the perhaps overly analytical mind that carries out hypothetical conversations to their furthest conclusions, that ponders the consequences of second and third chances, that dares to wonder what if? The result is charmingly weird, bittersweet, and philosophical. (12 and up) —Anika

New Book of the Week (November 16, 2020)

Plain Bad Heroines

by Emily M. Danforth

Plain Bad Heroines is a delicious feast of a book served by a compelling narrator-host, who’s omniscient, witty, and opinionated without being tiresome. This horror-comedy boasts multiple storylines spanning more than a century, each of them a savory slow-burn. In 1902, we’re introduced to doomed, romantic, Mary MacLane-obsessed boarding school girls Flo and Clara, whose macabre deaths inspired 16-year-old Merritt Emmon’s bestselling, 21st century book, The Happenings at Brookhants. In present day, we meet the cast for the book’s forthcoming horror-film adaptation: film-star celesbian (celebrity + lesbian) Harper Harper and B-list actress Audrey, daughter of a famous 1980’s scream queen. Part queer gothic romance, part Hollywood satire, Plain Bad Heroines is wholly unique, wonderfully entertaining, and extremely meta. —Anika

New Book of the Week (November 2, 2020)

The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

Jess Walter's fiction has covered comedy, history, crime, character study, and more, but I don't think he's ever put so much into one book before. His most recent novel centers on two brothers, Rye and Gig Dolan, scrabbling for a living as they ride the rails of the Northwest in 1909. Both are caught by a current of social unrest, swept downstream along with a cast of labor organizers, plutocrats, suffragists, vaudeville stars, mobsters, and many humble others. The judicious blend of reality and imagination brings E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime to mind, but as a portrait of the Inland Empire of the Palouse, there's nothing else like it. The Cold Millions is an extravagant, panoramic story told with rumbustious verve, and it's sure as heck going to be on my year's best list. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (November 16, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #71

The Starship and the Canoe

by Kenneth Brower

The starship is a father's dream, the canoe—really a kayak—his son's. The father is Freeman Dyson, physicist and wild thinker who concocted plans to colonize comets and send spaceships to Saturn, and the son—estranged for a while in his early 20s from his father—is George Dyson, living sometimes in a treehouse north of Vancouver and building kayaks based on the technological traditions of the indigenous Arctic. Brower shuttles between them before bringing the two together, writing with all the grace, curiosity, and humor of John McPhee, a comparison that brings another set of father/son dynamics, since Brower's own famous father, David, was the subject of McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. A wonderful book that gathers even more meaning from its context, both before and after it was published in 1978. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (November 2, 2020)

The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

I’ll admit the set-up is not promising even in the best of times: two upper-middle-aged/class friends, one with cancer, the other caring for her. BUT STICK WITH ME! In the highly capable hands of one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, there’s no bathos or cliche to be found in this sharply entertaining novel, which might end up my favorite of this unimaginable year. Garner is as famous for her journalism as her fiction, and the specificity of her details and dialogue is so ordinarily odd that they just feel true. The narrator (a writer named Helen) sounds like she’s talking to you—her friend, you hope—because she’s so smart, funny and recognizably human: she knows she’s imperfect but would prefer to be less so. And since actual events don’t unfold neatly, Garner cleverly structures her story to uphold that reality while delivering a satisfying narrative. This slim, unassuming book reminded me that an everyday miracle of creativity can reassure us of the everyday miracle of kindness. —Liz

Kids Book of the Week (November 16, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #59

Flip-a-Feather

by Sara Ball

The idea is simple: mix-and-match flip pages that create various bird combos of head, body, and tail. But, as with Ball's previous book, Mix-a-Mutt, the execution is superb: sturdy board-book pages, bright illustrations full of personality and a little humor, and just enough fun facts about each species to make it an interesting and edifying reading, as well as flipping, experience. Besides, who wouldn't want to see what a Toucan-Ostrich-Hummingbird looks like? (Age 1 to 5) —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 2, 2020)

The Owl Service

by Alan Garner

The strangest and most baffling book I've read this year—and one of the best—is shelved in our Middle Reader section. Alan Garner is a legend in the UK but much less well-known here, and The Owl Service was one of his breakthrough books, winning the Carnegie Medal in 1967. Set during a family's vacation at a rural house in Wales, it bristles with class friction and complex family dynamics but also, most memorably, with the insistent, and increasingly fantastical, eruption of very local myths into the present. And the strangeness is only increased by the storytelling, which is carried off in a deceptively chatty and familiar style that makes you feel like every third sentence has been removed. You are, like most of the characters, continually catching up with what's going on, and it's worth it. (Age 10 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 19, 2020)

Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

Akhtar pulls you in with his very first sentences—intellectual and political, but flowing with the energy and intimacy of friendly conversation—and you are off on a ride through post-9/11 America, as lived by one man—like Akhtar the son of Pakistani immigrants and like Akhtar a Pulitzer-winning playwright, although the book is fiction. His father is an America-embracing, Trump-friendly cardiologist/failed businessman; his new best friend (for a time) is a hedge-fund billionaire pouring his money into positive PR for Islam. It's a marvelously complex, challenging, and companionable portrait of America, by one of its children. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 19, 2020)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Living in the “castle” are the surviving Blackwood family members: 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” and her cat, Jonas, 28-year-old Constance, and their old Uncle Julian, who spends his days sitting in the sunny garden in his wheelchair or obsessing over the details of his memoir. Six years ago, someone murdered the rest of the family via arsenic poisoning, and the nearby village is rife with speculation about which remaining Blackwood could’ve done such a thing. Darkly humorous and deliciously atmospheric, Shirley Jackson’s 1962 gothic mystery cleverly tells the myth of a foreboding castle-like house—and its suspect residents—from the inside. A classic choice for October! —Anika

Old Book of the Week (October 19, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #70

Sleepless Nights

by Elizabeth Hardwick

Hardwick called this book a novel, and it may look to some like a memoir (the life of the "Elizabeth" in it matches of the outline of Hardwick's), but to my mind, it's a book of criticism: not of works of art but of people. Hardwick was one of the great critics, and here she makes a series of witheringly sharp portraits of friends and relations, summing them up with a few deft words, a few well-chosen actions, and only rarely, tantalizingly, turning that same judging eye on herself. If you're the sort of reader who underlines in your books, you sometimes will feel like you should underline every sentence of this brilliant gem. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 19, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #58

Skulls!

by Blair Thornburgh and Scott Campbell

Skulls, glorious skulls! You might think of this as a scary Halloween book (it is October, after all), but really it's a wonderfully unscary celebration of that big, well-shaped bone in your head, a "car seat for your brain," as your young tour guide, and skull enthusiast, tells you. You'll never look at a skeleton in the same way. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 5, 2020)

Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

I was drawn to this novel for two reasons: because it was a surprise hit in the UK last year, from a small publisher I admire, and because it was described as "a nice book about nice people." That might sound bland or even patronizing, but in the hands of Hession, an Irish musician publishing his first novel, it feels almost radical to write, not about betrayal and tragedy (the usual stuff of fiction), but about everyday kindness and forgiveness and small steps that seem immensely large to those who make them. It helps that Hession has a wonderfully modest sense of humor and, even more, a sense of the drama inherent in the lives of these two quiet, and quietly courageous, men. By the end of their story, you'll be rooting for them too. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 5, 2020)

The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives

by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager

I delighted in this book of twenty-three author interviews conducted by world-famous librarian Nancy Pearl and her co-author Jeff Schwager, the perfect duo for this literary project. I found listening in on these conversations to be a deliciously voyeuristic experience, particularly because I was lucky enough to transcribe all but a few of the interviews for the book; I’m happy to report that reading the physical copy of the book is just as vivid and entertaining as listening to the MP3 files. The Writer’s Library is chock full of book recommendations, laugh-out-loud moments, and nuggets of wisdom 
as its eclectic cast of authors reflect on their reading histories and habits and enthuse about the books they love most. Grab a copy and prepare for your to-be-read stack to grow! —Anika

Kids Book of the Week (October 5, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #58

Little Fox

by Edward van de Vendel and Marije Tolman

You might be drawn into this book by the brilliant bright orange of that rambunctious little fox, set against the pale, windswept Dutch seaside. But then the book opens out into an expansive story that you might not expect in a picture book, with dreaming and danger and the little pleasures of a little fox's life, and a thoughtful new understanding of the words his father always tells him: "Too nosy is dead nosy." (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 21, 2020)

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

It hasn't been easy to explain why I like this novel so much (Laura and Nancy and the Booker Prize judges do too), but I think it comes down to what it's like to be inside the head of Wallace, the gay African American Big Ten biochemistry grad student whose real life you share for a few alternately slack and intense summer days. He's a hard one to get to know, for his friends and for a reader, armored with defenses and then suddenly so bristly and vulnerable when those defenses are pierced that you might need to turn away. The vulnerability might remind you of Kiese Laymon's Heavy, but you might also think of Sally Rooney's novels, with their similar deliberately banal titles and similarly drifting, passionate twentysomethings. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 21, 2020)

Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Fredrik Backman knows exactly how to break my heart. And he does it just moments after making me snort with laughter. The author of A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here ups the comedy in his new novel, but his trademark unfolding of each character’s back story several times left me so stunned I had to stop reading and remind myself to breathe. Anxious People is about a bank robber, a bridge, an apartment open house, a father-son relationship, loneliness, and how so many of us are unable to tell people we love them out loud but do so in quiet ways that go unnoticed. It is classic Backman, where he illuminates the flaws and foibles that make us fully human. —Doree

Kids Book of the Week (September 21, 2020)

Three Keys

by Kelly Yang

Mia Tang is back in Three Keys, the sequel to Front Desk! Since its debut last year, Front Desk has been one of my go-to middle-grade recommendations, and Three Keys returns to the Calivista Motel—just five miles from Disneyland, but a world apart. There, Mia and her parents have created a welcoming atmosphere for immigrants, with classes for adults and kids. But they still struggle to make ends meet. To make things worse, a nasty state proposition threatens to kick undocumented kids out of school and encourages a string of hate crimes against immigrants. The resolute Mia finds a way to fight for her friends and make things right, while dealing with a bitter new teacher, motel investors, and parents who have put aside their former dreams to clean motel rooms. Kelly Yang again manages to pack so many important and thought-provoking topics in a short book (her books are inspired by her real-life experience growing up as the daughter of motel managers). (Ages 8-12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (August 24, 2020)

Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Who knew that the finest chronicler of the modern conservative movement would be a writer from the left? Or that his four massive volumes of history, taking us from Goldwater's landslide defeat to Reagan's landslide victory, would be so incredibly entertaining? Perlstein's method is full immersion: a moment-by-moment recounting of political news and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, which in this case means the rollercoaster of hope and malaise of the Carter presidency and the rise of direct-mail politics and the Christian right that brought us the elderly ascent of the Gipper. Reaganland may be the finale of Perlstein's epic, but as we know, the story was just beginning, and you'll find the echoes of our current times deafening. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 24, 2020)

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

Too often in our discussions about diversity, we leave disability out of the conversation. In this memoir-in-essays, Rebekah Taussig brings her fresh and incisive voice to the table, sharing her story of what it’s been like growing up and living in her “ordinary resilient disabled” body. With humor and honesty, Sitting Pretty examines ableism in our society, which includes lack of representation, inclusivity, and accessibility, and also reveals the ways well-meaning nondisabled folks disregard and undermine the experiences, desires, and abilities of disabled people. While this book is a lesson in disability studies and intersectionality, it is also a love story with a message of empowerment and body positivity at its center. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a body (and also a heart). —Anika

New Paperback of the Week (August 24, 2020)

Know My Name

by Chanel Miller

During the trial of Brock Turner, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, “the unconscious intoxicated woman” Turner attacked on Stanford’s campus. Now, in this stunning and unapologetic memoir, Miller owns her experience as a sexual assault victim and honors her pain. Know My Name is an emotional and unflinching look into the trauma of sexual assault and the upsetting treatment survivors face in the court system. It is also beautifully written, humanizing, and empowering. Through her own telling, Miller reveals herself to be a whole person, one who is not easily defined by this terrible thing that happened to her. Her story is a powerful reckoning.



“You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”

—Anika

New Book of the Week (August 10, 2020)

Mexican Gothic

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

How about some chills to cool you off this summer? Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia fulfills the eerie haunted house genre perfectly. After society girl Noemí receives a strange letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina, she treks to a remote mining town in the Mexican hills to investigate her cousin's sanity. A decrepit Victorian mansion in the foggy woods, strange rumors about the odd family within, and the ever-present whiff of danger make for a very fun page-turner that will keep readers guessing. —Haley

Old Book of the Week (August 10, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #68

The City & the City

by China Miéville

Miéville is best known as a baroque and endlessly inventive fantasist, but in this novel he harnesses his imagination to the rules and the spare language of a police procedural, which he turns inside-out with a single, intriguing twist. I won't spoil his premise, since he only gradually reveals it, but let's just say the border between the two cities in his story is unlike any you've seen before—that is, until you start to think how our own cities are divided. A wonderful and strange book that thoroughly fulfills the promise of its idea. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (August 10, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids #56

Just in Case You Want to Fly

by Julie Fogliano and Christian Robinson

Christian Robinson's name keeps popping up on the covers of our favorite picture books (Gaston, Last Stop on Market Street, and Another, to name a few), and here his sprightly, generous illustrations find an ideal match in the wonderfully evocative—and equally generous—words of Julie Fogliano: "Just in case you want to fly," they begin, "here's some wind and here's the sky." (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 27, 2020)

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

by Adrian Tomine

I hope it doesn't trivialize last week's New Book of the Week, Erica C. Barnett's memoir of alcoholic blackouts and self-destruction, to say that the humiliating confessions in this book are nearly as relentless and excruciating. Because the humiliations, in the case of this graphic memoir, are tiny: failed bookstore events, comicon party snubs, parenting meltdowns, extracted from a life of evident professional and personal success. But there's something about that ceaseless rhythm of minor abasement, presented, as always, in Tomine's pristine, deadpan lines, that is both hilarious—I laughed out loud more than I have for any book since The Dog of the South—and, finally, moving, as Tomine himself questions, and then resumes, his maniacal devotion to his career and craft. —Tom

Newish Book of the Week (July 28, 2020)

Gender Queer

by Maia Kobabe

This delightfully illustrated graphic memoir is an emotional and straightforward account of self-discovery and acceptance. Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, explores coming to terms with eir genderqueer identity and asexuality in a way that is personal, thoughtful, and educational. Kobabe's self-aware recollections range from uncomfortable and painful to awkward and joyful and liberating. The artwork is beautiful, and the discussions—particularly the conversations (and their respective panels) on coming out, dating, and pronouns—are heartfelt and great. This book is a welcome addition to LGBTQIA+ literature! —Anika

Old Book of the Week (July 27, 2020)

Ongoingness: The End of the Story

by Sarah Manguso

This short, unconventional memoir is an account of Sarah Manguso’s meticulously kept diary: eight hundred thousand words written over twenty-five years. I am fascinated by people who keep daily records of their lives, though I’m intrigued by the process more than the product. Ongoingness doesn’t include a single excerpt from Manguso’s diary, but rather describes the author’s compulsion to write, “to retain the whole memory” of her life. It is a meditation on memory: remembering, and forgetting, as well as a confession of what it is to be human. Despite the fact that I don’t journal obsessively or even daily, I found this book to be deeply resonant; if I’d have highlighted each passage that captivated me, most of its pages would now be yellow. —Anika

New Book of the Week (July 20, 2020)

Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery

by Erica C. Barnett

You may know Erica C. Barnett from her dogged local reporting in the Stranger or PubliCola or on her current blog, The C Is for Crank, or her appearances on KUOW, but what you may not have known was that she spent a decade of her reporting career as a blackout drunk, cycling through recovery and relapses and nearly destroying herself in the process before finally finding a sobriety that stuck. What sets Quitter apart as an addiction memoir is that she reports on her own life with the same ruthless attention to detail (and wry humor) she brings to City Hall, and that she declines to fit her story into the usual arc of rock-bottom epiphany. She knows failure is as likely as success, and that there's always a bottom below the one you thought was bedrock, and her skepticism toward solutions makes the ones that ultimately worked for her feel even more precious and hard-earned. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (July 20, 2020)

The Years

by Annie Ernaux

All of Ernaux's work blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but The Years blurs it further, into history. The book covers a lifetime—hers, from 1941 to the present—but it is the history of a "we" much more than an "I." (Or, from another perspective, it shows how much any "I" depends on the "we" it's part of.) She progresses impressionistically from war through postwar austerity through personal liberation and social revolution into our tech-mediated times, marking moments with the shared ephemera of clothing, pop culture, and sexual mores no less than French milestones like Algeria and May 1968. For an American reader, the effect is to see those years through the novelty of another national experience; for any reader, the effect is a poignant immersion in the fleetingness of human identities and attachments. —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 20, 2020)

A Girl’s Story

by Annie Ernaux

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and its aftermath: an ambiguous encounter with a slightly older man, forced and then forgotten by him but altering her life forever. As in The Years, she holds her own past self at arm's length—who is this "I" who once was me, she asks again—but for all the distance she places between herself, now in her seventies, and this girl, the connection between them, along with the ruthless honesty of her self-investigation, give this little book an intensity beyond anything contained in The Years. —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 13, 2020)

Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

I love historical fiction that focuses on strong female characters, especially when it’s written by Beatriz Williams, who is a master at slowly unfurling connections between characters years apart. Her latest book, Her Last Flight, is a kind of homage to Amelia Earhart and the daring men and women of the 1920s and ’30s who took to the skies to prove that airplanes were the future of travel. In 1928, 20-year-old Irene Foster meets famed aviator Sam Mallory, who teaches her to fly before the two attempt a historic flight from California to Australia. Irene’s fame soon eclipses Sam’s as everyone is fascinated by a woman pilot, until they both disappear without a trace 10 years later. In 1947, a daring female journalist with her own secrets tracks down a woman she believes to be Irene, as she tries to discover what really happened to Sam and Irene on that last flight. —Doree

Old Book of the Week (July 13, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #67

The Black Jacobins

C.L.R. James

Rare is the book of history that remains in print over eighty years later, but James's ground-breaking account of the Haitian Revolution—written in 1938, revised in 1962, and meant to inspire and celebrate the revolutions of the oppressed in both moments—has become a part of history itself. And the book remains a marvelously readable telling of a crucial, stunning, and still poorly understood event. James (a Marxist) often pays more attention to factions and classes than the personalities that popular historians usually build their stories around, but even he can't resist the phenomenon of Toussaint L'Ouverture, a slave until he was 45 and then, for a decade, one of the most capable and consequential people on the planet, whose tragic career shows, as James writes, that "Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make." —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (July 13, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #55

From Ed’s to Ned’s

by Gideon Sterer, illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins

Remember visiting your friends' houses? This blissfully kooky book carries with it an immediate and probably unintended nostalgia for those carefree days of going from house to house. But the real pleasure comes from the sing-song rhymes that will make for excellent lap reading and the increasingly convoluted ways—tightrope, parachute, cannon blast—this horde of friend-loving kids find to get from place to place. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 29, 2020)

The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

Within the first few pages of The Vanishing Half, I knew I was reading something special. In this slow-burn novel, twins Desiree and Stella grow up in Mallard, a small black community in segregated Louisiana that prides itself on the lightness of its people’s skin. At sixteen, the twins flee from Mallard after their mother pulls them out of school to work cleaning white people’s houses, sacrificing the familiarity of home, the safety of their community, and the predictable trajectory of their lives. In New Orleans, the twins begin their new lives together, but eventually Stella takes off on her own, choosing to live the rest of her life “passing” as white; Desiree marries a dark-skinned man, has a child who looks like him, and ends up living back in Mallard. The consequences of the twins’ life choices unfold throughout the book, from the 1950s to the 1990s, and include the lives (and perspectives) of their daughters, Kennedy and Jude. The Vanishing Half is a fascinating story about family relationships, identity, and belonging, and I savored every page. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (June 29, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #66

Grief

by Andrew Holleran

Thomas Wolfe once divided novelists into "putter-inners" (like himself) and "taker-outers," who pared their art down to its bones. This is one of the taker-outerest novels I've ever read. There's so much you don't know about in this elegant, reticent story, despite its setting in the concrete details of Northwest Washington, DC, in the late Clinton era. The great unspoken is the recent plague, the devastation of AIDS, of which the narrator and his friends are survivors. Those years are not entirely suppressed, but they are spoken of with the shared exhaustion of those who have lived through a tragedy together and are still trying to live. Grief, for that lost generation, and for other losses, surrounds the story with a white, silent space that gives this spare story its gravity. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (June 29, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #44

The Jolly Postman, or Other People’s Letters

by Janet & Allan Ahlberg

The Jolly Postman, by the British married duo, the Ahlbergs, was a throwback when it was published in the '80s and seems even more so now, but its inventiveness remains, with letters between Mother Goose characters—an apology note from Goldilocks to the three bears, an attorney's threat to the Big Bad Wolf—each placed in their own envelope. A librarian's nightmare, but lots of fun, especially for young isolated readers who might want to send and receive their own letters to absent loved ones right now. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 15, 2020)

At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

by Fenton Johnson

"Solitude" is a seductive word in our chaotic times, but Johnson doesn't just mean a quiet week in the woods to rejuvenate us for the rat race. His solitude is a lifelong vocation, a choice made by the artists he profiles—and by himself—to live as "solitaries," uncoupled for the most part (and often celibate) and devoted to creative work that unites them not with a single person but with all of humanity. Some of his ideals are familiar (Thoreau, Dickinson, and Cezanne, from whom he borrows his cover image), but he also includes Rabindranath Tagore, Nina Simone, Bill Cunningham, and even rehabilitates Rod McKuen! The most moving passages concern his self-described "bent sexuality" and his family's formative friendship with their neighboring monks in Kentucky, including Thomas Merton. You'll be glad to draw some deep breaths of rarer air with his help. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (June 15, 2020)

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

by Jill Leovy

I know it's early yet, but this is the best book I've read in 2015, and it might remain so. For over a decade Leovy has reported on murder in L.A., especially on the killing of black men (and boys) by black men (and boys) in the south side of the city, and in Ghettoside she does justice to a vast and varied range of characters: victims (often chosen nearly at random), killers (often motivated by revenge), witnesses (often terrified and reluctant), and especially the few dogged homicide detectives who refuse to shrug and let murders go unsolved. And from this daily tragedy she builds a compelling conclusion: that black-on-black homicide flourishes because it is not punished; while the law harasses African Americans over pretexts and petty crimes, it declines to protect them from the worst crime of all. It's a complex, subtly skillful, and necessary book. —Tom [from an February 2015 newsletter]

Old Book of the Week (August 12, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #56

The Marrow of Tradition

by Charles W. Chesnutt

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wilmington, NC, in 1898 that overthrew the biracial elected city government. And that's part of the reason to turn back to it over a century later (when it feels like times have hardly changed). But the other is Chesnutt's wizardry as a social novelist: his ability to trace the box limiting empathy and imagination that each character carries around, and then to construct scenes that force them to the edges of those boxes (where, almost always, they end up turning back toward convention). It's a funny, tragic, brutal, and deeply human story. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (June 1, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #65

The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

It's hard to imagine that a book this powerful sat unread in its author's drawer for thirty years. Written in the '40s and finally brought out a few years before Shepherd's death, it has since become, rightfully, one of the classics of nature writing. Shepherd lived her whole life among the Cairngorms, Scotland's most mountainous area, and her beautifully exact reflections are a result, not of conquering a mountain, but of living in and around it. Every page in this compact marvel has sentences so thought-provokingly observant you'll want to write them down, and, like the best nature writing, her writing is so selflessly attentive that it becomes a philosophy. —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 1, 2020)

Sin Eater

by Megan Campisi

Sin Eater takes a little-known historical role and expands it in this imaginative novel set in an alternate Elizabethan England. For stealing a loaf of bread, teenage orphan May is forced to become a sin eater—shackled with a metal collar proclaiming her status to all she meets and with a black "S" tattooed on her tongue. Shunned by society, sin eaters must only speak to the dying, who tell them their sins. Each sin corresponds with a food item—raisins for adultery, mustard seeds for lies, etc. By eating the "sins," the sin eater takes them on as their own, releasing the dead person's soul. At first distraught from the isolation and contempt her new lot in life brings, May gradually realizes that it isn't without its benefits. One of those benefits is access to the court of Queen Bethany (a thinly veiled Queen Elizabeth I), where courtesans are being murdered and accusations of witchcraft are flying. Fans of Uprooted, Spinning Silver, and Godshot will find similar themes in this fast-paced, high-stakes adventure. —Haley

Kids Book of the Week (June 1, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #43

The Little Island

by Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard

We usually choose new picture books for Phinney by Post Kids, but when this one—which I had never seen before, even though it was written by Margaret Wise Brown and won a Caldecott in 1947—came into the store recently, there was something about its story of isolation and connection that seemed perfect for the time we're in, and Weisgard's illustrations, full of the brightness of sea and sky, seemed an ideal tonic for our own shuttered lives. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 18, 2020)

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

by Vivian Gornick

Striking a balance in my reading these days is a challenge, like so much else. I want reading with feeling, but not too much; reading with truth, but not too much; reading with poignancy, but certainly not too much. Unfinished Business hit this slippery target beautifully. I was ready for this book, ready in the way Gornick defines it: "responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader—no less than between people—is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness.” It is with that stark perceptiveness that Gornick revisits her life’s reading and re-reading of a handful of favorite authors. Her connection to the characters, plots, and themes shifts with each reading, so all the while she is crafting beautiful reflections on her own life’s unfolding. It’s a book I wish I could read for the first time again and again to capture its magic, though I suppose I will have to be content to simply re-read it. —Kim

New Book of the Week (May 18, 2020)

The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

It seems impossible that this short novel of family life on a remote Norwegian island hasn't been handed down for generations. It feels as much like a document for the ages as it does a piece of contemporary fiction, depicting lives filled with toil and reward that might as easily be led in the middle ages as in the 20th century. The Unseen's characters aren't primitives, though, nor are they simple. Jacobsen's uncondescending narration richly individualizes them and grants them the full scope of human expression, from fear and strain and grief to whimsy, desire, and joy. I don't think I've ever read anything that better touched the essential truth of what it is to be alive. —James

Audiobook of the Week (May 18, 2020)

Actress

by Anne Enright

My usual policy (with a few notable exceptions) is that an audiobook is almost always better when read by the author, who brings, if nothing else, the emotional resonance of speaking words she has written. In no case so far has that paid off as grandly as with this book and this author, a born actress herself, not for her polish but for what feels like its opposite, a swervy, drolly impulsive style of speech that keeps surprising you mid-sentence—mid-word!—with shifts in rhythm and emphasis. its a good match for her tale—a grownup daughter recalling the once-famous Irish actress who was her mother—which follows no pat arc of a life but is deliciously full of sentence-by-sentence observations and odd bits of fully lived life, mostly in 1970s Dublin. A treat. —Tom (Order the audio download from our partners at Libro.fm)

Old Book of the Week (April 20, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #64

Memoirs of Hadrian

by Marguerite Yourcenar

I really think of this as two books. There's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powerful-but-admirable main characters in literature. And then there's Yourcenar's twenty-page afterword, "Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian," which is one of my very favorite pieces of writing from any time or anywhere, a romance of passion and patience between author and subject that distills Yourcenar's thirty-year struggle, through war and exile, to write the book you hold before you. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 4, 2020)

The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

Are you the sort of person who would choose to read The Road in the middle of a blackout? Then The End of October might be for you! Wright has been justifiably acclaimed for his fearlessly reported accounts of both al-Qaeda (The Looming Tower) and Scientology (Going Clear), so perhaps it's not too surprising that his first fictional thriller—written when COVID-19 was a mere twinkle in a bat's eye—would turn out to be so unsettlingly prescient. Yes, a viral pandemic is quickly ravaging the planet, and some of the elements—ventilator shortages, accusations of foreign lab culprits—will feel weirdly familiar, but Wright, in true thriller fashion, turns the dial up to eleven in every respect: the blood-gushing brutality of the virus, the immanence of global war, the rapid collapse into anarchy. It's not easy going, and his brilliant epidemiologist hero—spoiler!—can't fix everything; some might find it cathartic to read, others too close to home. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 4, 2020)

Midwest Futures

by Phil Christman

I'm one of the few members of our staff who is not from the Midwest, but the region's allegedly bland mysteries are a draw to me as well. The mystery starts with the region itself (does South Dakota count? Pittsburgh? Missouri?), but Christman, a Michigan working-class native turned Michigan academic, wisely doesn't try to unravel a single answer, choosing instead to ravel a whole host of threads—political, literary, geographic, natural—together in a thought-provoking tangle. The most convincing case he makes is that our "Heartland," often claimed as the site of American authenticity, is built on ideas and abstractions, not the least of which were the grids America's frontier planners used to make sense of the land they were taking over, a grid wittily mimicked by the structure of his book. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 8, 2019)

Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster

by Jonathan Auxier

When I heard an interview with Jonathan Auxier talking about how many years of historical research he did when writing Sweep, I couldn't wait to dive into his authentic world of Victorian chimney sweeps. As perfectly as he has constructed this world it is, after all, the story of a girl and her monster, so there is plenty of fantasy mingled with the realistic details. Nan Sparrow is a child chimney sweep, or "climber," who by the age of twelve has become accustomed to being invisible in Victorian London society. The mysterious sweep who raised her simply vanished one day, leaving her with a small piece of coal that always stays warm. As magical events develop, Nan learns to open herself to vulnerability and rely on others. This beautiful, heart-wrenching book deals with friendship, sacrifice, and love. I particularly enjoyed reading a story with a tough and street-smart preteen girl protagonist in a world traditionally dominated by boys. (Ages 8 to 12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (April 20, 2020)

Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco

by Alia Volz

When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-depth education on both the history of the era and the politics surrounding marijuana. Home Baked tells the story of the underground, and extremely illegal at the time, first known pot brownie business, Sticky Fingers. The author’s mother, Meridy, known to many simply as “The Brownie Lady,” and her friends expanded the operation through the swinging ‘70s and into the AIDS epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when marijuana went from a recreational drug to one that could mean life or death to many of their friends suffering from the disease. This book is about so much more than a homespun "magic brownie" business and the people whose lives it touched. It’s the story of a 20th century family, a movement, and an era. Whether you’re a square like me or an experienced pothead, I "highly" recommend Home Baked! —Haley

Old Book of the Week (April 20, 2020)

A Long Way from Verona

by Jane Gardam

Jessica Vye is a 13-year-old girl living in the North of England during World War II. Yet she maintains that the “violent” experience that shaped her was being told, at the age of 9, by visiting author Arnold Hanger that she is “a writer beyond all possible doubt!” At 13, Jessica has internalized the sentiment that she is a born writer and also believes herself to be a mind-reader and a compulsive truth-teller. She’s smart, funny, odd, and widely misunderstood by her fellow students and teachers, who worry that she’s getting above herself. In this short, sweet coming-of-age novel, the eccentric young Jessica Vye paints a vivid picture of her school days, family life, and social sphere amidst the bleak realities of wartime: food rations, gas masks, and the threat of air raids. At the end of my reading, I’m inclined to agree with Arnold Hanger. What a wonderful writer!. —Anika

New Book of the Week (April 13, 2020)

Hurricane Season

by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Melchor’s English-language debut is a portrait of a Mexican village as unnerving and entrancing as any painting by Bruegel or Bosch. The scene opens on the village's outskirts, its resident Witch found murdered and floating in a ditch. Chapter by chapter, Melchor shifts focus from one inhabitant to another, edging closer to the why, how, and who of the crime. She trains her lens on the most anguished and the pages overflow with their torrential voices: the abused and the abusers, as well as complicit bystanders. Yet all are to be pitied—all prisoners of their hellish social-scape. Melchor alludes to drug gangs, political corruption, racial tensions, heavy-handed religion, and economic exploitation, but the true devils are machismo and misogyny that have metastasized until they engender rampant femicide and devour their hosts. A maelstrom of language that demands to be heard, Hurricane Season is currently on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, which awards both author and translator. And it’s already won a spot on my personal Top 10 of 2020. —Liz

New Book of the Week (April 13, 2020)

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

Schizophrenia is among the most ruthless of diseases, suddenly erupting in a life, often in adolescence, and turning it inside out in ways few treatments have been able to solve. That's what happened to six of the twelve children in the Galvin family in Colorado in the '60s and '70s, creating a house of turmoil for the stricken and their family members, but also a rich genetic record for researchers desperate to solve the disease's puzzle. With an empathetic and scientific mastery that will remind many readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Kolker weaves the devastating but still humane story of the Galvins together with the often equally frustrating history of schizophrenia's many failed treatments, and brings the two storylines together to offer some hope for the future. A superbly compelling book. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 13, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Selection #52

Long-Haired Cat-Boy Cub

by Etgar Keret, illustrated by Aviel Basil

If you think that Etgar Keret, the Israeli master of oddball tales for grownups, might also be pretty good at writing stories for kids, you would be correct. Here he turns the premise of a distracted dad and a kid lost at the zoo into a fantastical—but emotionally true and satisfyingly well-rounded—adventure involving an airship, a rhinoceros, and chocolate milk. (Ages 3 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 6, 2020)

Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

In a drought-stricken California town, a teenage girl grows up in thrall to her troubled single mother and a pastor with a cultish power over his flock, struggling to assert autonomy over her mind, soul, and body. Debut novelist Bieker employs muscular language and Technicolor imagery with the deftness of a seasoned pro in creating what might be an entirely new genre, Central Valley Gothic. And from the department of small victories comes this news: while many books are being postponed this spring, the publisher of Godshot decided to grace readers with it ahead of schedule. More than a few of you will be grateful for the extra time you get to spend in the grip of its feverish intensity. —James

New Paperback of the Week (April 6, 2020)

Afternoon of a Faun

by James Lasdun

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly as Lasdun about how people think, and his narrator—an acquaintance of both the he and the she—recounts what he is told as well as how he processes that information. While we live with the optimism and anxiety caused by a tectonic cultural shift, when masses of received wisdom are breaking up and new standards haven’t quite solidified, it’s crucial to examine not just ideas but the motives and emotions that undergird them. Lasdun’s novella has the plotting and pacing of a thriller, each revelation causing you to reexamine the situation and your own assumptions—even after you finish it! But it’s his sly wit and quietly elegant prose—shot through with images of surprising aptness (he also writes poetry)—that elevate this ripped-from-the-headlines story into a thoroughly satisfying reading experience. —Liz

Teen Book of the Week (April 6, 2020)

Great

by Sara Benincasa

Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Hampton home. Naomi’s status-obsessed mother encourages her to mingle with the popular, elite crowd, including senator’s daughter and aspiring model Delilah Fairweather and her boyfriend Teddy, who never skips an opportunity to wax nostalgic about his career as a child actor. But Naomi is more interested in studying for her SATs and reading Save Me the Waltz than being social until she meets her next door neighbor, Jacinta: fashion blogger, thrower of lavish parties, and card-carrying member of the Delilah Fairweather fan club. Benincasa captures the mood, pacing, and drama of the original and cleverly updates the story with modern technology, social media, and gender swapping. The result is charming and fun, especially in picking out parallels between the two texts. I wish my high school English teacher had assigned this! —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 30, 2020)

The Man in the Red Coat

by Julian Barnes

Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi, the subject of the Sargent painting adapted for the cover—it's really a portrait of an age, the French Belle Epoque, a world of dandies and duels, of beauty and rage, tied together by images from the Félix Potin trading cards, collectibles found in department-store chocolates celebrating the 500 most famous figures of the time. Barnes is a graceful and thoughtful inquisitor, but the best part of the book is Pozzi himself, once-famous, now-forgotten, a charismatic, brilliant, innovative, and flawed figure who is a delight to have unearthed from history. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 30, 2020)

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

Yes, I know that Station Eleven is one of the most brilliant and entertaining books about a pandemic ever written, but I swear, it's a coincidence that I'm recommending another book by Emily St. John Mandel this week. Her latest novel has at last been published, and it's one that I've been waiting a while to be able to tell you about. It has the sort of plot that's the right amount of tricky, not overly complicated but with enough surprises that I don't want to spoil any. Suffice to say that the author has said that her working title for the book was Ghosts and Money, and that the characters within it are haunted by both, metaphorically and just possibly literally. —James

New Paperback of the Week (March 30, 2020)

Normal People

by Sally Rooney

Normal People, while a coming-of-age novel about first love, is not a romance. The story is written with insight into two protagonists, Marianne and Connell, which lends a sort of he-said, she-said quality to the narrative. Each chapter moves us a little deeper into what each of them is thinking and feeling. Each chapter is also a time jump, advancing us as little as five minutes or as much as seven months into the future. In this novel, character is plot, and I found it both fascinating and frustrating to observe Marianne and Connell and the way they often talked but failed to communicate. Rooney’s simple yet distinct writing style, filled with comma splices and no quotation marks, took some getting used to but eventually began to sound like a friend telling a story: life-like, intimate, vulnerable. I’m impressed and grateful not to be offended that Sally Rooney has been called the voice of my generation. —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 23, 2020)

House Lessons: Renovating a Life

by Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister's memoir-in-essays is a treasure for anyone who, like me, can't resist the intrigue of an open-house sign. House Lessons beckons you inside a trash-filled hoarder house in Port Townsend, where a family is determined to transform it into a beautiful, memory-filled home. The project proves to be an undertaking that is easier dreamt than done, and Bauermeister is transparent about the frustrations inherent in the process. This book is in part an education in architecture, informative as well as interesting, and its structure is strong enough to hold this story, with its cast of eccentric real-life characters and stranger-than-fiction moments. Told with loving language and such respect, this was a most enjoyable read. —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 23, 2020)

The House in the Cerulean Sea

by T.J. Klune

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a heart-swelling wave of sweetness and hope. Mild-mannered government caseworker Linus Baker is sent on a secret assignment to an island orphanage he's never even heard of. The astonishing inhabitants he gets to know there will change his life and make him reassess everything he thought he knew. This book will leave you believing in the good in everyone—even those society has given up on—and contemplating how huge changes have to start somewhere. —Haley

New Paperback of the Week (March 23, 2020)

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

If you're looking for a book that has something useful to say about the current situation that isn't too, you know, on point, look no further. In previous books (The Big Short, Flash Boys, etc.) Lewis took on the issue of deregulation of the financial markets, but in this, his most recent work, he casts a wider net and does a cost-benefit analysis of government as a whole. Embedding himself in the lives of workers in what he expects will be the most superficially dull and least important sectors of the federal system (Agriculture, Energy, etc.), he finds unsung heroes at every turn, displaying expertise and professionalism essential to the smooth functioning of democracy. When asked by an interviewer last year what it would take to remind Americans about the true importance of those qualities, he said, "For people to suddenly start to value what good government does, I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California, or a hurricane in Florida, is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it, something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich. I think that might do it." —James

New Book of the Week (March 16, 2020)

Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is one of the best sociopolitical writers we have (she's the coiner of the term "mansplaining") but I like to imagine a better world in which she doesn't feel obligated to take on tyrants, terrorists, and people who occupy more than one seat on the train. Because when she's not making devastatingly cogent arguments in support of truth, justice, and the American way, she's one of the best writers we have, period. Whether the subject is history, travel, architecture, or nature, her limpid prose elevates and illuminates it. In the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, her subject for the first time is herself, the young woman who came of age as a human being and a writer in once-bohemian but increasingly gentrified San Francisco. Since we don't live in the better world of my imagination, this is a political book as well as a personal one, examining the ways in which our culture tries to erase women individually and collectively. It's an essential addition to a body of work for the ages. —James

New Book of the Week (March 16, 2020)

Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

A 42-year-old writer looks at his young sons, considers the recent death of his 84-year-old father, and tries to make sense of it all in the only natural way: by undertaking a round-the-world quest to see the 42 existing paintings by one of the greatest masters of the Northern Renaissance, Bruegel the Elder. The book that results from this whimsical impulse is a gorgeous object and an even lovelier read, both an account of a physical journey and a tracing of a curious mind at play. —James

Old Book of the Week (March 16, 2020)

Bad Debts

by Peter Temple

Peter Temple launched his career as a novelist (at age 50) with a very enticing sentence, introducing one "Edward Dollery, age forty-seven, defrocked accountant, big spender, and dishonest person." That was enough to draw me in, but it helped too that Nancy Pearl is a big fan of Bad Debts, Temple's debut. So am I now: his hard-boiled banter justifies the comparisons to Elmore Leonard, and his hero, Jack Irish, a somewhat good-hearted attorney who, among other things, doesn't mind cashing in on a giant horse-racing scam, is a compellingly flawed and reluctant sleuth. I see why, in his short career—only eight novels long—Temple became Australia's most acclaimed crime writer. —Tom

New Book of the Week

My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

As the title promises, this story is a dark one. It is a modern-day Lolita, in which 32-year-old Vanessa is still reckoning with the affair she had at the brave and vulnerable age of 15 with her 42-year-old English teacher. As an adult, Vanessa is adamant that she was not abused, that she is unlike the other girls now coming forward with allegations against Mr. Strane. She argues that she was a willing participant and does her best to convince herself (and us) that her and Strane’s relationship was a love story—“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?” My Dark Vanessa is full of empathy and nuance as Russell grapples with the issue of agency in victimization, explores the long-term effects of trauma, and reveals the grittier side of the #MeToo movement. It is one hell of a debut. —Anika

New Paperback of the Week

The Island of the Sea Women

by Lisa See

I love to learn things from the books I read, and this book taught me so much—not only about the South Korean island Jeju, its matrifocal society of haenyeo (women divers), and its culture and traditions, but also about friendship, the horrors of war, loyalty, and grief. The Island of Sea Women is vividly imagined and deeply researched, which is apparent as we follow “sisters of the heart” Young-sook and Mi-ja from their girlhood in the 1930s to present day 2008 through the dramatic events—both personal and historical—that shape their lives and test their relationship. The story is at turns beautiful, brutal, absorbing, and raw. Females are strong as hell. —Anika

Kids Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Kids Book #51

Everyone’s Awake

by Colin Meloy and Shawn Harris

As anyone who reads kids books out loud knows, not every rhyming picture book has rhymes that really sing. But Colin Meloy, the singer and songwriter of the Decembrists, knows how to compose a singable line, and his new book balances the chaos of a night when no one is sleeping—the dog throwing darts, the dad buying chintz, the cat giving tattoos—with the perfect order of rhythm and rhyme. This book is a hoot. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week

Abigail

by Magda Szabo

Booksellers geek out devising pithy comparisons that telegraph the feel of one book with the modified title of another. So I gave myself a pat on the back when I realized I had just finished the Hungarian To Kill A Mockingbird! Szabo was a popular and acclaimed author, and Abigail was voted the sixth most beloved novel by her compatriots (as well as adapted as a TV show and a musical). The story is told from the point-of-view of a girl (at a point in time after the events) with a wise father fighting on the right side of history, and a mysterious benefactor whose identity is revealed at the end. Adolescent readers will commiserate with Gina as she navigates her cloistered boarding school, and when they share her discoveries about the outside world, their minds just might be blown. Adults will be amused and appalled by the specifics of a Calvinist girls school in 1940s Debrecen (Szabo was a teacher in one), and the plotting and pacing guarantee a twisty, breakneck ride even if they can guess the destination. —Liz

New Book of the Week (March 2, 2020)

Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking

by Annie Atkins

It doesn't seem a stretch to wonder if Wes Anderson makes films (especially The Grand Budapest Hotel) as an excuse to create exquisite fictitious letterhead, and when he wanted someone equally meticulous about such things, he found Annie Atkins, who worked with him on graphic prop design (did you know that was a job?) for Isle of Dogs too, as well as on Bridge of Spies, The Tudors, and Penny Dreadful. Atkins's yummy first book shares reproductions of her own work as well as the period ephemera—movie tickets, signage, hotel stationery—that inspire her. For certain kind of design- (and movie-) besotted person (such as me), this book of behind-the-scenes magic is candy, specifically the sort of candy you might be presented in a pink Mendl's box. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (March 2, 2020)

The Old Truck

by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey

The first book by the Pumphrey brothers has the classic feeling of the old truck (and the way of life) it celebrates, with beautiful pastel prints and a story of technological obsolescence that brings a believably happy ending to the roadside romance of neglected old vehicles. An additional presence is the equally neglected tradition of American American farming that was inspired by their own family history. (Ages 0 to 4) —Tom

New Book of the Week

A Month in Siena

by Hisham Matar

Matar wrote this book in between books. The one he had just finished, The Return (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017), was a memoir of his attempt to discover the fate of his father, who was disappeared by the Libyan regime when Matar was a child, and so his month in this Italian city was intended as a respite. And it reads that way: not as a vacation, but as a chance for Matar to wander, in body and mind, a project for which the ancient walled city turns out, paradoxically, to be ideal. Drawn at first by his almost inexplicable longtime attraction to the paintings of the Sienese School, Matar turns out to be equally drawn to chance encounters with locals (often fellow outsiders like himself) and to the play of his thinking through days of near silence. It's a small book about a small city that opens the space for large thoughts. —Tom

Audiobook of the Week

Master and Commander

by Patrick O’Brian

For so long I've looked forward to trying Patrick O'Brian's famous tales of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and I'm glad I finally did so via Patrick Tull's utterly delightful audio rendition. The novel itself (the first of twenty (!) in the series featuring captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin) is full of superb character studies as well as a density of period language and absurdly detailed seamanship that's even more delicious to consume than I expected, all of which are matched by Tull's wonderfully dramatic impersonations, true to person, to naval lingo, and to the variety of accents onboard. Reef the topsails, Mr. Marshall! Set the topgallants! Mr. Pullings, fire as they bear! —Tom (available from our audio download partners at Libro.fm)

Kids Book of the Week

The Imaginaries: Little Scraps of Larger Stories

by Emily Winfield Martin

Many books are bad (I can admit that), some books are good, and a few books are great. Even fewer are great at being more than one kind of book at the same time. Oregon's Emily Winfield Martin has long been one of my favorite children's book artists, but she's reached new heights with this, her most recent publication. The Imaginaries collects an array (a sequence?) of her evocative, inimitable illustrations, each accompanied by a caption that will delight and perhaps confound kids of all ages, from toddlers to tweens. As a readaloud, this is a neverending story that allows a child's imagination unfettered rein. But adults too, at least those of a creative bent, will be inspired just as much. Is it a picture book? Art book? Guide for seekers of truth and beauty? The Imaginaries says yes to all those questions, and to many more. —James [from the Madison Books newsletter]

Old Book of the Week (February 10, 2020)

The Women in Black

by Madeleine St. John

I’ve noticed more and more people coming into the bookstore asking for a type of fiction the Guardian has recently dubbed "Uplit." Not escapist fluff to help forget reality, but books to reassure them that reality doesn’t have to be this way. And the hilarious, heartening novel I just finished should be a classic of the genre. With her slightly out-of-the-way locutions, St. John sets a retro-Aussie scene and hits all her marks. She slyly nips at the innocent provincialism of midcentury Sydney, but also helps map the inner topographies of characters who don’t always know how to get where they want. The women who work in Ladies’ Frocks at F.G. Goode’s Department Store may not get a fairy-tale happily-ever-after, but they remind us that—even in the real world—hope is not always misplaced.

Full disclosure: I am usually wary of “happy” books, firmly believing that a pessimist is actually a realist who is occasionally pleasantly surprised. But it turns out that some of my favorites of the last year and half have been exactly that. And The Women in Black is so simply perfect that I doubt I’ll read anything better all year ... but then you never know. —Liz [from our April 2018 newsletter]

Old Book of the Week (February 10, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #62

Her First American

by Lore Segal

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quite a novelist too. Her First American features two indelible characters, a young refugee from Austria, Ilka Weissnix, trying to find America, and the American she finds, Carter Bayoux, a charismatic, troubled African American intellectual. Surrounding them is an equally memorable cast of supporting roles and cameos, and while at its heart this is an encounter between identities—young European meets older African American—its brilliance comes from the sheer, strange, lively individuality of everyone she imagines. It's funny, poignant, brilliantly told and heard, and so subtly insightful that it still feels ahead of its time. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (February 10, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #50

The Button Book

by Sally Nicholls and Bethan Woollvin

With its primary colors and interactive premise, The Button Book is not the first picture book to be inspired by (or, alternatively, rip off) Hervé Tullet's modern classic Press Here. But regardless, I can just imagine the chaotic fun this book's premise—"press" the yellow button and everybody bounces, press the purple button and it's a tickle attack!—will stir up among toddler audiences. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (February 3, 2020)

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

by Anna Wiener

It's a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener's memoir, sharp-tongued as it sometimes is—of the photos on a first date's Instagram feed, she writes, "They were, I had to admit, very high resolution"—is more melancholy than that. She finds that she likes most of the people she meets, even the CEOs, and in her eyes, the intermingled idealism and greed (the latter often disguised as the former) of her cohort—or rather the cohort around her that is hoovering up money while she's just grateful to have a decent health plan—come across as deeply human characteristics, though no less sad and disturbing for it. —Tom

Old Book of the Week

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

One of my favorite books on creativity is this book-length dialogue between a novelist and a film editor, who got to know each other when Murch, best known for his work on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and for his own classic book, In the Blink of an Eye, edited the adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient. The cross-disciplinary discussion, their wide-ranging curiosity, their shared love of film, and the genuine affection between them all make for a deliciously enlightening conversation of interest for any film lover, or anyone interested in the construction of a good story. —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 27, 2020)

Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulgaria, it's also a story of desire, and it's also elegant and intense. But, as a set of connected stories, it's more diffused, and, with a three-story centerpiece called "Loving R.," it's more open to the possibility of joy. Greenwell writes about desire and physical intimacy with a jaw-dropping candor and intelligence, but the most striking thing in this book are the sentences: cascading series of comma splices that (in a manner that might remind readers of Cusk or Sebald, though Greenwell's style is his own) create both an intimate engagement and a melancholy distance for the narrator and ourselves. This feels like life, breathed and lived, and stylishly recalled. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 27, 2020)

The Boring Book

by Shinsuke Yoshitake

Yoshitake's Still Stuck, the story of a boy who can't get his shirt off, is one of our very favorite picture books, and in his latest, a child is confronted by an even more common, and more challenging, difficulty: being bored. Turns out being bored can lead you to wonder: what does "boring" really mean? What things are fun and what are boring? Can fun things become boring? Can boring things become fun, once you aren't doing them any more? The Boring Book includes a little everyday philosophy, a handful of coping mechanisms, and whole lot of oddball humor. Not boring at all! (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (February 3, 2020)

Verge

by Lidia Yuknavitch

This short story collection does what Yuknavitch does best—asks you to trade your life for a book that is just strange and beautiful enough for you to make the deal. I floated through these stories the same way I've floated through her other work, almost unaware of time passing. Her endangered characters make terrible and necessary choices to preserve their difficult lives, and to move through a world that was not made for them. —Erica (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New Book of the Week (January 13, 2020)

Agency

by William Gibson

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the future and in our recent past, or rather an alternative past—a "stub," in the book's term—to which people from the future can travel, through various intermediaries. Gibson is one of my favorite writers, whose vision of the future makes you feel so intensely the conditions and possibilities of our own present, but I had forgotten just how enjoyably challenging it is to situate yourself in the worlds he creates and only slowly explains. Agency's alternative past is full of horrors, at least at a distance, but is surprisingly utopian in the possibilities of good will on display. My mind was crackling with thought and pleasure throughout. —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 13, 2020)

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

by David Zucchino

The hit new TV series Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore's comic of the same name, opened its first season with dramatic scenes of widespread white-on-black violence in 1920s Tulsa, Oklahoma, that were so shocking many viewers couldn't believe they were drawn from history. The massacre was all too real, as was an earlier series of events in North Carolina that is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino's most recent book. In the 1890s, Wilmington was the state's largest city, home to a thriving black population whose members owned many of the community's businesses and held a number of political offices. All this effort at post-Civil War Reconstruction was torn down in 1898 after what was sometimes referred to (when discussed at all) as a "race riot." In fact, it was an intentionally orchestrated coup, one of the only occasions in American history when a duly elected government was overthrown by violence. The story of how its perpetrators seized control of the state legislature and destroyed the city is essential, jaw-dropping reading. Like David Grann in his Killers of the Flower Moon, Zucchino performs an invaluable service in uncovering history that's too long been suppressed. Unputdownable. —James

Kids Book of the Week (January 13, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #49

Saturday

by Oge Mora

We loved the art and story of Mora's first picture book, Thank You, Omu, but might like her new one even more. It's a simple tale of a shared routine between mother and daughter in a busy life, of modest hopes, disappointments, and togetherness, given full dimension by her beautiful painted-collage illustrations. A keeper. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 6, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #60

Golden Days

by Carolyn See

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is in See's sentences: as swervy, surprising, and suddenly breathtaking as the hairpin turns of the Topanga Canyon road on which her narrator, post-divorce, finds a home in the midst of the particular LA excess of the era. As I emailed the friend who had tipped me off to this forgotten gem, after reading the jaw-dropping first dozen pages, "Joan Didion is reading this and thinking, 'I'm getting left in the dust.’" Rediscover this crazy and wonderful book, as we approach our own apocalypse(s). —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 6, 2020)

Phinney by Post Book #61

Oil Notes

by Rick Bass

This is a young man's book, written at a particular time (the late '80s) about a subject that, in our own time, is almost impossible not to see in a different way. Before Bass moved to remote Montana for a career as an environmental writer and activist, he worked as an oil geologist in Mississippi. A contradiction between environment and oil? Not entirely, when you look at the mysteries of the earth in the way Bass does here, curious about what you can learn about millions of years of geologic history and youthfully confident in wagering thousands of dollars of other people's money to find out more. Bass may now see the earth in a different way, but the life-loving exuberance of these early notes will make you appreciate the appeal of roughneck prospecting. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 6, 2020)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #48

A Million Dots

by Sven Völker

There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between linear and exponential growth, doubling from one dot to a million (actually, 1,048,576 to be exact) in just 21 page spreads. Your young reader might not fully understand the math, but they'll sure love all the dots. (Age 2 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week (December 9, 2019)

The Crying Book

by Heather Christle

I am, for better or worse, not usually a cryer. Heather Christle is, and at first I thought her book would be a defense of that maligned, female-aligned activity. And in some ways it is, but it quickly becomes far more complex than that. Written as a series of tiny anecdotes, quotes, aphorisms, and notes from science, art, and myth, her narrative turns her subject through a kaleidoscope in which tears are both a burden and a release and a source of pride and stigma, and in which this most intensely personal phenomenon is held close and at the arm's length of observation. (Did you know tears from crying have more proteins than those made to cleanse the eyes?) I was dog-earing pages and examining (metaphorically) my own eyes. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 25, 2019)

Seattle at 150: Stories of the City Through 150 Objects from the Seattle Municipal Archives

by Jennifer Ott and HistoryLink

When your city is changing every time you turn around, history can be something you want to hold onto, and the indefatigable local historians at HistoryLink know that is often best done deep in the archives. In this approachable coffee-table keepsake, they've unearthed an object for each of our city's 150 years, and their choices balance between boosterish nostalgia (oh, that Ivar!) and critical documentation (the waves of bureaucratic exclusion of Chinese and Japanese residents). The best documentation comes from actual documents—handwritten, hand-typed, hand-annotated—that evoke the haunting presence of individual humanity in the tides of the past. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 19, 2019)

In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth

by Jack Goldsmith

You may remember Jack Goldsmith from the Bush-Cheney years (he stood up to Cheney to stop the Stellarwind surveillance program and now is a Harvard law professor), but his life has been shadowed by a more notorious piece of American history: when he was twelve, his beloved stepfather, Chuckie O'Brien, became one of the leading suspects in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, for whom he had been a right-hand man so intimately close he had inspired the Tom Hagen character in The Godfather. With Chuckie's reticent assistance, Goldsmith investigates the crime, but his book, written with tenderness but also a lawyer's stolid fact-sorting, is a far broader, and more interesting, portrait of the rise and fall of union power and a hapless, doomed life spent at the intersection of a charismatic labor leader and the implacable Mob. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 19, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #47

A Big Bed for Little Snow

by Grace Lin

A Big Mooncake for Little Star was my favorite picture book last year, and Lin has followed it with a companion book that is a perfect match for its feeling that you have stepped into a timeless fable, in this case a story that makes an ideal winter bedtime story. Grace Lin is amazing! (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

Audiobook of the Week (November 25, 2019)

Your House Will Pay

by Steph Cha

You could be forgiven for wondering, for the first half of this novel, why we have it shelved in the Crime & Mystery section, as you get to know two families, the Parks and the Matthewses, in contemporary Los Angeles. There is indeed a crime, and then another one, but the mystery is less who done them than how these two families will reckon with their intensely private and unbearably public aftermath. It's a story taken from the headlines—the original crime shares many elements with the 1992 murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper—but Cha humanizes those headlines with her wide-ranging but unsentimental empathy. —Tom (audio download available from our partners at Libro.fm)

Old Book of the Week (November 25, 2019)

The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

by Lewis Hyde

The Gift first appeared in 1983 to immediate acclaim and lasting popularity. Despite the praise, I avoided it for years because I thought it was a long-winded version of those insipid inspirational posters of sunsets and kittens that used to hang on office walls. Not the first time I’ve been wrong. It is in fact is a rigorously intellectual, approachably written combination of history, psychology, ethnology, economics, poetry, personal anecdote, and self-help manual. The Gift is about a lot of things, but the primary question it asks is how creativity can be expressed in a society like ours, where the value of art is assigned in such unpredictable ways. Take Van Gogh, who sold only a single painting for a pittance while he was alive, but whose collected output might now fetch over a billion dollars at auction. Hyde suggests an alternative framework based not on commodity but free exchange without obligation, a framework that supports self-expression regardless of the world's response. He’s not advocating some loose, neo-hippie ideology where we burn all money, just distinguishing between different kinds of value. His book amply rewards any reader in search of a mindful life. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (November 19, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #59

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

by Kate Summerscale

Detectives and detective fiction arose together in the 19th century, and Summerscale, with relish, uses the style of the murder mystery to unravel an infamous true-life crime that helped birth the genre: the inexplicable murder of a young English boy that made him the JonBenet of his day (and inspired Wilkie Collins's ground-breaking detective novel, The Moonstone). While tracing the many turns in the case, which humiliated Scotland Yard's man on the scene, Jonathan Whicher, Summerscale expertly weaves the early histories of policing and detective stories, and, most fascinatingly, follows the long afterlife of some of the crime's central characters to convincingly suggest a further turn beyond the conviction that closed the case. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 4, 2019)

Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

The buzz surrounding this award-winning French author’s first English translation—the saga of a family of pig farmers—always includes a warning along the lines of “You’ll never eat bacon again!” Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of literary challenge I feel compelled to accept. Del Amo’s rich, heady style almost overwhelms the imaginative senses, immediately plunging readers into the gorgeous and grisly of Gascon peasant life. We meet farmer’s daughter Éléonore pre-WWI, when human-porcine relations are interdependent if not entirely pleasant, but by the time she is a great-grandmother, (possibly) inevitable forces have twisted that relationship until the farm is untenable for pigs and people alike. It’s a visceral book, but also heart-breaking and thought-provoking—recommended for those who read environmental nonfiction as well as those who, like me, prefer to investigate most topics through a narrative lens. Timely and engaging, Animalia might be the most important book I’ve read all year. P.S. I’m still eating bacon, but much more, um, consciously. —Liz

New Book of the Week (November 4, 2019)

This Is Pleasure

by Mary Gaitskill

To say that Mary Gaitskill is the ideal author to translate the #MeToo movement into fiction doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of her work, or the complexity of the movement. But nevertheless, when her novella This Is Pleasure appeared on the New Yorker website this summer (now it's a book too), there was a palpable level of excitement: she has been detailing the brutal and tender relations of sex, power, and desire since her first collection, Bad Behavior. The new story is just what you might hope for: a dialogue, both cutting and sympathetic, about a somewhat disgraced, somewhat bad-behaving man that imagines the desiring, power-playing women and men of her earlier stories transported into our changing times. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 4, 2019)

Roar Like a Dandelion

written by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier

While we wait for her weird and wonderful collaboration with Maurice Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig, to return from the out-of-print limbo to which it's been inexplicably banished, we have this never-before-published gem that brings A Hole Is to Dig's oddball leaps of imagination to the classic alphabet-book form: "Fall like rain" and "Make music"? Of course. But "Go like a road" and "Look under the bed for poetry" might make a toddler (or a grownup) think a little more deeply. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 28, 2019)

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, looks almost like free verse. It turns out to be anything but: the writing itself is almost breezily straightforward and the characters so lively and distinctive that by the end you feel as if they are friends sitting around your living room. The challenge comes instead from the sheer accumulation of lives and identities: if "identity" is one of the central themes of our time, these twelve people, all by some definition Black and British and nearly all women, explode identity by their sheer variety and individuality, never unaware of their identities and never anything but individual within them. Imagine Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, with its collection of masterfully compressed and connected life stories, but stretched not across history but contemporary Britain. I expect Girl, Women, Other will evoke the same level of interest and discussion. —Tom

Audiobook of the Week (October 28, 2019)

The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

If you've read Lerner's cultishly celebrated first two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, you'll find both familiar and unfamiliar things in his third one. Familiar is the character Adam Gordon, who shares a name with the impishly semiautobiographical hero of Atocha Station and many characteristics with 10:04's unnamed writer narrator too. But The Topeka School is a different beast, expanding into a more traditional form by including Adam's parents, two New York psychologists transplanted into red-state Kansas, as narrators too. And while there are fascinating aspects of Adam's story as a high school debating champ wrestling with teenage prairie masculinity, it's with his parents, full of the knowledge and lingo of psychiatric analysis but still unable to escape the flawed dramas of human relations, that this speech-drunk (and speech-skeptical) story really takes flight. —Tom
(Download the audiobook from our partners at Libro.fm)

Kids Book of the Week (October 28, 2019)

Party: A Mystery

by Jamaica Kincaid and Ricardo Cortes

This must surely be a first: a Phinney by Post selection has been adapted into a children's picture book. In this case, it was one of the New Yorker Talk of the Town vignettes in Jamaica Kincaid's Talk Stories, an account of a publicity event for the Nancy Drew books told, in a droll deadpan, in fully Nancy Drew style, which illustrator Cortes thought—correctly, it turns out—could be turned into a charming, if oblique, illustrated tale of three girls discovering a mystery at a fancy reception, in which the true story is the frustration of the youngest girl at being, once again, left out of the know. (Ages 2 to 5, as well as older Nancy Drew or Jamaica Kincaid fans) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 21, 2019)

Stay and Fight

by Madeline ffitch

Stay and Fight follows a rotating cast of narrators making do on a plot of land in Appalachia. Although set in the present, the homesteading project they tackle, which includes a lot of acorns and snakes but no running water, would be perfectly recognizable by Laura Ingalls Wilder. What she would make of the non-traditional family they create, or of ffitch's 21st-century feminist sensibility, is another matter. The characters (one of whom is a Seattle expatriate) are fascinating if not exactly likable, and their choice to make their land and lives their own way, instead of abandoning the project, ultimately makes this a story of redemption in a sometimes bleak environment. —Erica (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (October 21, 2019)

How to Break Up with Your Phone

by Catherine Price

The diagnosis is obvious, and one I make for myself nearly every day: that marvelous, seductive object, the smartphone, is an addictive parasite (as is my laptop as well), drawing my attention multiple times an hour with the junky promise of dopamine hits and depriving me of the gift of sustained and focused thought. But recognizing an addiction (I don't use the term lightly here) is only the first step in breaking it, and holding tight to this little book—a bestseller in our store, for obvious reasons, in the year and a half since it came out—I hope will be what I need, with its sensible, stern-when-necessary good humor and thirty-day plan for building a new relationship with this necessary tool. Check back with me in a month and see. —Tom

Little Book of the Week (October 21, 2019)

The Inner Room

by Robert Aickman

I took the opportunity of this little volume in the Faber Stories series to introduce myself to a new writer, Robert Aickman, the British horror specialist in whose stories, to quote my favorite podcast, Backlisted, "Very ordinary, unimaginative people suddenly find themselves caught in a horrible nightmare." And so it is in The Inner Room, in which a child's acquisition, and then abandonment, of a strangely run-down dollhouse leads to uncomfortable dreams and then, much later in life, an even more uncomfortable visit to an actual house. The horror (and the pleasure) comes in part from the story, but more so from Aickman's sentences, nearly every one of which seems to overflow with a Lovecraftian surplus of dread. Quite delicious, this first, rotten bite... —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 14, 2019)

The Hard Tomorrow

by Eleanor Davis

Is "pre-apocalyptic" a word? There are books all over our shelves that imagine futures after various disasters, but Davis's graphic novel taps into a feeling that's more intensely present: how to move forward when you feel the horror of the apocalypse just beginning. Hannah is a home health-care worker in an unnamed city, living in a trailer with her boyfriend while he smokes weed with a prepper friend and, relatedly, barely makes progress on the house they dream of building for themselves, and for the baby they are trying to have. Amid protest, violence, sloth, and death lives a hope that's so beautiful you're terrified to see it enter the world. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 14, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #48

The Rider

by Tim Krabbé

You'll rarely find a novel so straightforward: a single cyclist, a single race; 137 kilometers in 148 pages. Like the racers themselves, it's stripped down for speed, every gram weighed against necessity. Krabbé himself was, like his main character (who shares his name), a competitive amateur racer, and his lean and thoroughly compelling account inhabits the strategies, the impulses, the frustrations, and the pain-is-pleasure joys of a driven, focused athlete. And perhaps best of all, in constructing his fictional race he convinces you of the result, but also that, given the collection of racing personalities he presents, and the turns of chance, it could have turned out many other ways. You never know what will happen when you clip your feet onto the pedals and set off. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 14, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #46

The Scarecrow

by Beth Ferry and the Fan Brothers

The work of a scarecrow is lonely: your job is to keep things away from your fields. But when a baby crow, lost and lonely itself, lands nearby, this scarecrow ignores his job description and leans down to take care of the little bird. Beth Ferry's graceful rhymes and the Fan Brothers's always-exquisite illustrations make this a sweet and lovely story of connection. But what does the farmer think? (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 7, 2019)

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

How did a corporation conquer one of the world's great civilizations? Dalrymple's storytelling gifts and his mastery of the archives of many nations and languages are on display once again as he shows how a private London business, the East India Company, exploited short-term technological advantages and a divided India to take control of one of the world's wealthiest and most productive regions in a few short decades. It's a stunning tale of one empire's disintegration and another's rise, and a surprisingly contemporary reminder of the dangers of unchecked corporate rapacity. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 7, 2019)

Black Hole

by Charles Burns

When I'm asked for a favorite Seattle book, I usually choose one of two titles: Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (and its sequel, How I Grew), set in her teen years in the 1920s, and this strange and beautiful graphic novel, the story of a disfiguring "bug" spread among teens in '70s Seattle. Burns's inky-black style has become a trademark in illustrations you may have seen in many places, but this is his masterpiece, a disturbing but tender tribute to the isolation and tenuous camaraderie of teen life (especially in the hands-off '70s). You'll wonder how any of us get through those years alive. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 7, 2019)

The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming

by J. Anderson Coats

I should perhaps be focusing on Coats's newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it's just come out and well, I haven't read it yet. But I really want to, based on how much my daughter and I enjoyed Coats's earlier novel The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming. I can't say enough about this book, which is based on the real history of the Mercer Girls, who in the 1860s sailed from the East Coast around the horn to a bustling logging town on Puget Sound. The fictional Jane Deming is an eleven-year-old girl living with her young stepmother and little brother, all of whom are grappling with the Civil War death of the family patriarch. Eager to seek opportunity elsewhere, they head west with stars in their eyes. Initially disillusioned by the muddy streets and rough manners of frontier Seattle, Jane’s self-reliance comes to the fore and she eventually falls in love with her new home. Many Reflections more than withstands comparison with the classic Little House on the Prairie, and the local setting—at one point Jane commutes to school by canoe across Lake Washington—makes it even more special. (Ages 8 to 14) —James

Old Book of the Week (September 23, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #57

Talk Stories

by Jamaica Kincaid

When I sat down to write the little introductory card I include in our Phinney by Post selections for what I had planned would be this month's choice—Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (see below)—I realized the book of hers I really wanted to send out was this one, a collection of her first published work, when she got started writing Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker in the '70s and '80s. The subjects of the pieces are often the fluffiest of fluff—publicity luncheons for the most part—but you can watch her voice—and her playful restlessness with the form—develop. Best of all are the two introductory essays, one by Kincaid and one by her friend and New Yorker colleague Ian Frazier, that make their adventures as young writers in the city sound like the most appealing youth I can imagine. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (September 23, 2019)

A Small Place

by Jamaica Kincaid

Someone on Twitter asked for suggestions of "angry" books just when I was in the middle of reading this one, one of the angriest books I've ever read. It comes in such a deceptive package, with its modest title and its muted design, but hoo boy. Written to just the sort of visitor to her tiny home island of Antigua who might pick up such a book for a bit of local color for the plane trip, it is unsparing about tourism but also about the corruption of the island's business and government, all told with the clarity and style of a New Yorker writer and the I'll-tell-it-to-your-face mockery she was raised to wield. It's bracing and enlightening. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (September 23, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #45

A Stone Sat Still

by Brendan Wenzel

Wenzel returns to the same premise as in his Caldecott Honor winner, They All Saw a Cat—everyone brings their own perspective to the same thing—but for me there's something even more evocative about making a stone—so solitary, cold, and unmoving, at least on first glance—the center of his attention. You'd never think a mere stone could carry the emotion and insight he brings to it, but by the end, there it is, dark and bright, smooth and rough, a pebble and a hill, in all the variety we bring it, with a wonderfully incantatory text to accompany it. Lovely. (Age 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 16, 2019)

Fishes of the Salish Sea

by Theodore W. Pietsch and James Wilder Orr

illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri

To say this is the perfect gift for the fish fan in your life is both an understatement and an assumption that you have $150 to throw around. Over two decades in preparation, this three-volume wonder from the University of Washington stands where no book has stood before, as an authoritative—and exquisitely beautiful—guide to the 260 fishes of our Northwest waters. I am sure it will be a necessity in the library of any professional in the field; for an amateur fish-lover it would be a breathtaking and treasured possession. Come by and check it out. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 16, 2019)

The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

Even if you've been to New Orleans, it's unlikely you've been to New Orleans East, a sprawling tract reclaimed from marshland in the '60s but suffering from neglect even before Katrina swept many residents and businesses away. Broom was raised there, in the Yellow House of the title, the youngest child of her mother's twelve, and her memoir—lovely, insightful, and sprawling in its own way—captures her sense of dislocation as part of a vibrant and close-knit family that nevertheless scatters to all corners of the country, whose only toehold in their vibrant city becomes, after the storm, a vacant lot in a part of the city not even half-heartedly rebuilt. —Tom

Teens’ Book of the Week (September 16, 2019)

Juliet Takes a Breath

by Gabby Rivera

In this wonderfully funny and charming YA debut, we accompany a young queer Puerto Rican woman—Juliet—as she travels to Portland to intern for the hippy-dippy white woman who wrote her favorite book. Raging Flower is a book about feminism, women’s bodies, and queerness, and it’s clearly taught Juliet most of what she knows about both feminism and the LGBT community. She has much more to learn from her time with author Harlowe Brisbane in 1990s-era Portland, and it’s a joy to learn along with her, seeing what she chooses to take to heart and what she prefers to leave. Juliet Takes a Breath is a fresh look at the significance of intersectionality. It’s vulnerable, fun, a little weird, and totally illuminating. (14 and up) —Anika
P.S. If you’ve ever wanted to read an entire chapter dedicated to periods, you’re going to LOVE chapter eleven!

Old Book of the Week (September 9, 2019)

The Corner That Held Them

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Who knew that NunLit was a genre with a passionately devoted following? Not me, until I read this unique story about a medieval convent, considered one of its classics. Townsend writes brilliantly about the momentous and mundane with the period detail typical of historical fiction, but without the novelistic reins of character hierarchy or narrative arc to steer your mind in a particular direction. When I started to contemplate (quite nunnishly) her authorial choice, I had an epiphany! She recreates for the reader the same sense of distance with which the nuns experienced life! The sisters are concerned with worldly things but they take the eternally long view: events ebb and flow and everybody and everything are significant and inconsequential at the same time. My favorite of the nuns, Dame Isabel, summed up what I think is the crux of the book: “The world was deeply interesting and a convent was the ideal place in which to meditate on the world. She was twenty-three. If she should live to forty, to sixty, her love of thinking would not be satiated.” NunLit has a new convert! (Sorry, couldn’t stop myself.) —Liz

New Book of the Week (September 9, 2019)

Ducks, Newburyport

by Lucy Ellmann

No getting around it, this sounds like a tough sell: 1000 pages of unbroken thought, not a stream of consciousness but a torrential river scouring a mental landscape. But that's how you produce something as deep and broad and beautiful and American as the Grand Canyon. Because this torrent spills from the mind of one ordinary woman (an Ohioan, a wife, a mom, a baker of pies), because she's hilarious, because her doubts and deprecations, her fondnesses and fears, are so mundane and relatable, because she exists as one of the truest-to-life fictional characters you could ever hope to meet, this book probably won't get the credit it deserves, credit for originality, insight, and literary excellence. Which is a shame, because Ducks, Newburyport is a domestic national epic to set beside Moby-Dick, a corrosive comic cultural indictment to compare with William Gaddis's National Book Award-winning J R. Read it and weep from laughter and righteous anger. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Kids Book of the Week (September 9, 2019)

Pie in the Sky

by Remy Lai

Pie in the Sky is a wonderful hybrid of a regular middle-grade novel and a graphic novel, with illustrations vividly fleshing out all the silly, heartbreaking, and imaginative moments in this story. Eleven-year-old Jingwen has just moved to Australia with his mom and obnoxious little brother Yanghao, and he feels like he'll never fit in in his new home. Lonely and still processing the guilt of his last unkind words to his father before his father's death, Jingwen thinks things will start looking up if he can just make the thirteen cakes that were going to be on the menu at the bakery he and his dad dreamed of opening someday. The brothers begin stealthily baking a cake each night while their mom is at work and eating the entire thing to hide the evidence (which turns out to be less fun that you might imagine). As the secret grows and things spiral out of control, it's up to Jingwen to figure out a way to make things right. Pie in the Sky packs much more of an emotional wallop than I expected from a middle-grade novel, and the book will leave its readers with plenty to chew on when they've turned the last page. (Ages 8 to 12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (August 26, 2019)

The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

This is a novel about gambling, heavy metal music, late-night debauchery, and washing dishes in a restaurant. Guess which is the most interesting, by far? The dishwashing! If you've read other behind-the-scenes food-service accounts, perhaps you won't be surprised, but a busy night in the dishpit and on the prep line can be thrilling, especially in the hands of a writer with such a vivid sense of the work and the characters involved, and of how work like that can be a lifeline for a young man otherwise screwing his life up at every turn. Larue's debut, a bestseller already in his native Quebec, has been called a cross between Kitchen Confidential and The Gambler, but I think of it as somewhere between two other favorites of mine, Queen of Spades and Love Me Back. Forgive me for saying so, but I ate it up. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 26, 2019)

The Scarecrow

by H.R. Morrieson

Why is laughing-out-loud at the written word so rare that it feels like an unexpected gift when it happens? Well, whatever the reason, this seriously funny coming-of-age story had me LOL-ing so often (there are witnesses) that I feel an obligation to share. Much of the humor comes from its dialogue: 1950’s slang and New Zealand idiom, malapropisms and idiosyncratic accents. And Morrieson—through his 14-year-old narrator, Ned—describes physical humor in a way that achieves slapstick genius. Ned’s voice hilariously renders a bookish, small-town boy’s experience, but it’s his older sister, Prudence Poindexter, who steals the show as an ingenue for the ages. And let’s not forget the titular serial killer. While cartoonish in his creepiness, the terror and devastation he causes is real. And Morrieson has the writerly skill and moral decorum so that you never laugh when you shouldn’t. (He even brought an actual tear to my eye.) His finesse makes this odd hybrid a Kiwi classic and one of the best novels I’ve read all year. —Liz

Paperback of the Week (August 26, 2019)

Early Work

by Andrew Martin

This is the kind of book I used to read more of: a debut novel by a young writer about, well, young writers. They drink too much, sleep with the wrong (or the right?) people, get poorly paid for iffy teaching gigs, read books off of each other's bookshelves, and—maybe—get a little writing done. It's quite enjoyable, especially for the up-to-date cultural banter (H Is for Hawk jokes!), which teeters on the edge between sharp commentary and satire. Does it add up to anything weightier? Your mileage may vary, but the weight, for me, came from a subtle turn in perspective that puts an unexpected twist on the title. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 12, 2019)

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janina Duszejko, a reclusive, strong-opinioned, sixtyish woman living in a village in southwest Poland, who loves animals and William Blake and is certain of the truths of astrology. Like the narrator of Milkman, she prefers nicknames to given ones (including her own); like Ottessa Moshfegh's narrators, she sometimes courts the repulsion of her neighbors. Like both, she has a voice like no other, and Tokarczuk's novel is a scathing portrait of a place and an illuminating one of the inner life of a fiercely idiosyncratic woman. One of the best books I've read this year. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (August 12, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #44

Kid Sheriff and the Terrible Toads

by Bob Shea and Lane Smith

One more time hearing Steph's masterful storytime rendition of this tale of a small Western town beset by bandits and saved by a young paleontologist (who arrives, slowly, on a tortoise) convinced me to finally make it a Phinney by Post Kids selection, and I advise anyone who takes it home to use your best cow-punchin' voice to spin this oddball yarn for your young listeners. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 29, 2019)

Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

Having missed out on Marlantes's fiercely admired Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, and in the mood for a big Northwest tale, I decidedDeep River, only his second novel in four decades of writing, would be my big book of the summer. I'm very glad I did. It is indeed a big Northwest tale, following a few decades in the lives of a dozen or so main characters and many memorable secondary players, nearly all of them Finnish immigrants to the logging camps and fishing villages near the mouth of the Columbia a century ago. Characters grow and die, succeed and fail, fall in and out of love, suffer tragedy and survive it, and get caught up in the larger dramas of their time—war, labor battles, good times and bad. But most of all, they work: for women and men, old and young, the highest praise among these stoic Finns, whether for an employee or a love match, is to be called a "good worker." I lived in their world for two weeks, and they'll live in mine—Aino and Aksel, Matti, Ilmari, and Kyllikki—for a lot longer. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (July 29, 2019)

Chronic City

by Jonathan Lethem

Reading last week about the late Michael Seidenberg, I got to thinking about this book by his great friend Jonathan Lethem, who started selling books for him as a young Brooklyn teenager. Perkus Tooth, the novel's most memorable character, might be based more closely on another Lethem pal, the critic Paul Nelson, but the book is saturated with the spirit of Seidenberg's salon: taking place in bohemian pockets hidden away in the billionaires' city, clouded with pot smoke, and full of brilliant cultural chatter curdled by impotence into melancholy and paranoia. Lethem's big Brooklyn novels might have gotten all the attention, but this one is a connoisseur's pleasure, with the sneaky staying power of, to make a reference its characters would likely appreciate, Bowie's Low. —Tom

Kids Book of the Year (July 29, 2019)

Searching for Shona

by Margaret J. Anderson

While perusing a list of women mystery writers’ favorite mysteries by women, one plot synopsis caught my eye: two girls swap identities while evacuating Edinburgh in 1940. When I looked on Goodreads it turned out to be a 1978 kids’ book, but so many adult commenters mentioned how it had stuck with them that I had to give it a try. The quietly compelling story follows Marjorie—aka Shona—as she grows from 11 to 17 in a Scottish village during WWII. Historical details about rationing and air raids, the emotional ties that develop between the evacuees and their foster families, as well as a spooky mansion that holds the secret to the real Shona’s parentage, all provide plenty to capture the imagination. But I bet it’s the eerie ending that inspired the would-be author and struck all those other young readers. It’s not so much a twist as a shock—the jolt of an unexpected but undeniable answer to that age-old mystery: what really makes you who you are? For fans of The War That Saved My Life and Charlotte, Sometimes. (Ages 9 to 12) —Liz

New Book of the Week (July 22, 2019)

The Salt Path

by Raynor Winn

A bad investment causes fifty-year-old Raynor Winn and her husband Moth to lose their family farm and livelihood. Around the same time, Moth is diagnosed with a terminal degenerative illness that leaves him depressed and in constant pain. Homeless and hopeless, the couple decides to embark on the 630-mile South West Coast Path along the English coast with no preparations and hardly any gear besides a cheap tent and thin sleeping bags. The long walk tests everything they have, including their 32-year relationship, but ultimately changes their lives in ways they never could have expected when they took that first step. Along the way, strangers they meet demonstrate the best and worst qualities in humanity. This uplifting memoir is a great summer read for anyone dreaming of far-off travel adventures. —Haley

Old Book of the Week (July 22, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #56

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

by Charles Sprawson

This wonderful and strange book may have launched the sub-genre known awkwardly as the "swimoir," but there is much more swimming than memoir here. You hardly learn more about the author than you do from the thrillingly terse biography at the back of the book: "Charles Sprawson lives in London. He recently swam the Hellespont," but it is clear that Sprawson, a throwback English colonial eccentric, is obsessed with swimming, and his survey of its history is full of off-handedly learned and deliciously surprising tidbits (who knew that Jane Austen loved sea bathing, or that Victorians learned their breaststroke form from frogs kept in tubs?). He is drawn to the beauty of swimming (and swimmers), to its dangers (the title is an allusion to a bizarrely masochistic Tennessee Williams story), and to its immersive otherworldliness, and you will likely want to put it aside and take a summertime plunge yourself. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (July 22, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids #44

Sock Story

by C.K. Smouha and Eleonora Marton

Do friends have to stay exactly the same to stay friends? Smouha and Marton take the old lost-sock gag for a new spin (sorry) and wring (sorry!) a surprisingly subtle tale out of a sock who gets separated from his beloved pal and returns a little changed by his journey. The bright, wash-resistant colors (sorry!!) of Marton's illustrations are a lovely bonus. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 7, 2019)

Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II

by Svetlana Alexievich

In Nobel Prize winner Alexievich’s latest book to be translated into English we hear from the most unacknowledged of all war veterans—those who experienced it as children. The physical details of their memories are specific to the USSR between 1940-45, but it is the children’s (boys and girls, rural and urban, Jewish and gentile) position closer to the ground that allows them to perceive unmediated the fundamentals of all war—fear, loss and uncertainty. Even more poignant are their echoed tales about how war mangles common talismans of childhood—dolls, candy, the word “Mama.” The chapters fly by—each is just a few pages of conversation—because they are both horribly compelling and too intense to linger over. Our consolation is that these children grew up to tell their stories, and Alexievich composed them into this shattering testimonial to the idea that no child should ever suffer for the political follies of their elders. —Liz

Audiobook of the Week (July 7, 2019)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

I'm not sure if Ocean Vuong's first novel is more intense on the page or in your ear. I took it in the latter way, read in Vuong's own soft, quavering, and forceful voice, which he keeps at such a pitch of high, vulnerable emotion that even his reading of the copyright notice at the end could bring you to tears. But so could any note of his character's story, written as a letter to his immigrant mother in a language she could never read, recounting the losses and fleeting joys (see the title) of their lives with an almost unbearably tender exactness for physical details—the toxins of nail salons, the brush of a farmer's son's teen mustache as they embrace in the barn—and the metaphors they spawn. The traditional immigrant's story charts a growing assimilation in the new culture and estrangement from the old; Vuong's follows no such arc but hovers in the anguish of the middle, sung like a bluesy, bitter lullaby, one of those in which down comes baby, cradle and all. —Tom
(Order the audiobook from our partners at Libro.fm)

Kids Book of the Week (July 7, 2019)

We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

I first read Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay shortly after it was published, and now that it’s been released in paperback, I feel compelled to write about it. It’s a quiet, character-driven book about family, first love, loneliness, and grief. When Marin’s grandfather dies unexpectedly, she’s left with no one. She heads from California to New York for college, where she suffers in silence for months before her childhood friend Mabel comes to visit her over winter break. LaCour’s writing is beautiful and melancholy, her storytelling straightforward and intimate. We Are Okay is so much more than just a pretty cover—and it is indeed a gorgeous cover. (12 and up) —Anika

New Book of the Week (June 24, 2019)

The Darwin Affair

by Tim Mason

What begins as a story about attempted assassination—Queen Victoria is shot at during an 1860 coach ride through London—quickly becomes a knotty but witty mystery involving Charles Darwin’s recently publicized theory of evolution, high-level political conspiracies, and an elusive, diabolically brutal killer. Responsible for defusing these volatile elements is Scotland Yard Inspector Charles Field, the oft-impetuous inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (as Field is so often reminded). Supported both by his resourceful spouse and by Victoria’s science-minded husband, Prince Albert, Field must confront Karl Marx and other historical luminaries as he struggles to figure out who’s behind efforts to suppress the democratizing potential of Darwin’s postulations. This may be Mason’s first novel, but it bears the polish of greater experience. —Jeff

Old Book of the Week (June 24, 2019)

Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

Published in 1993—decades before YA dystopias became so popular and ubiquitous—Parable of the Sower tells the story of 18-year-old Lauren Olamina, who is surviving in the year 2024. Octavia Butler’s imagining of the mid-2020s feels remarkably contemporary. Via Lauren’s diary entries, we learn that she lives with her family inside a gated community in southern California, while outside society is disintegrating into anarchy as a result of economic, environmental, and social crisis. Despite Lauren’s relative security, she anticipates things will change for the worse, and she’s better prepared than most when disaster strikes. Except for one thing: Lauren has a condition called hyperempathy, a supernatural ability to feel the pain (and pleasure) of others, which complicates the plot in interesting ways. Butler’s narrator is thoughtful and pragmatic, her cast of characters diverse and vibrant, and her prose clear and cutting. While the near-future Butler details is horrifyingly bleak and upsettingly fathomable, this story is infused with so much empathy and optimism that I find myself feeling hopeful about what comes next, both in the Parable of the Talents and in real life. —Anika

Kids Book of the Week (June 24, 2019)

This Was Our Pact

by Ryan Andrews

Everyone always says that the lanterns they set off during the annual Autumn Equinox Festival eventually turn into stars. This year Ben and a group of friends, accompanied by unwanted tag-along Nathaniel, make a pact to follow the lanterns down the river further than anyone has before to find out if it's true. Only Ben and Nathaniel keep their word to "never look back" and together they embark on an enchanting adventure that is both funny and heartwarming. This Was Our Pact is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel for anyone who loves the quiet kind of magic you can typically find only in a Ghibli movie. (Ages 10 to 14) —Gabi

Old Book of the Week (June 17, 2019)

Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

I will, at some point, shut up about Robert Macfarlane, but while it's fresh in my mind I wanted to recommend an earlier book of his that I've just gotten to know. I like books about nature, but I really like books about books about nature, and that, in part, is what Landmarks is. The other part of the book has gotten the most attention: a glossary of terms for the natural and human landscape that he's gathered from across the British Isles. But it's the rest of the book that drew me in: eleven essays on nature writing that are, mostly, appreciations of his favorite writers—Nan Shepherd, Roger Deakin, Barry Lopez, and more—every one of which will make you want to track down their books and read them next. —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 10, 2019)

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane is often called the great nature writer of his generation, but his vision of nature is not one of a pristine, unpeopled wilderness: his wilds are, for better or worse, deeply human, connected to the culture and language we've built over centuries. Having looked, in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, at how we're drawn to the highest places, now in this gorgeous and provocative new book, he has done the opposite: descending into caves, mines, catacombs, and nuclear storage facilities to unearth our relation, in both myth and practical action, with the underworld. There's no better guide: he writes with a fully grounded beauty, and brings a natural optimism to some of our darkest places. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (June 10, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #54

Outside the Gates

by Molly Gloss

I almost gave up on Outside the Gates. Having liked Gloss's Wild Life quite a bit, I decided to read her first novel (also recently republished by Saga Press) but at first thought its allegorical style (a boy, for unknown reasons, is banished from his community to a forest outside the "Gates" known as the UnderReach) wasn't for me. At some point, though, I forgot about the allegory and fell into the story, thanks to the detail with which Gloss makes her forest come alive and, especially, the wary tenderness of the alliances the boy makes with humans and animals. By the end of this short novel I was in love with the book, and ready to read my next Gloss. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (June 10, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #42

Yellow Yellow

by Frank Asch and Mark Alan Stamaty

Sometimes I suspect the gradual reprinting of Mark Alan Stamaty's books from the '70s and '80s has been undertaken with me in mind. Certainly Phinney Books must be among the nation's top sellers of his fabulous 1973 picture book, Who Needs Donuts?, and I recently praised the reissue of his '80s comics for grownups, MacDoodle Street. And now we're lucky to have his first book, Yellow Yellow, a picture-book collaboration with his friend Frank Asch, back too. Any Stamaty fan will immediately recognize his dense, delirious style, in support of a simple tale of a boy who finds a yellow hat that isn't his. If I call it the Mean Streets to the Taxi Driver of Who Needs Donuts?, will that give the wrong impression that these are anything but sweet, good-hearted stories? (Ages 2 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 3, 2019)

Lanny

by Max Porter

A family of three (mom, dad, and small son) resides in an English hamlet, a site with historic roots that's now a commuter suburb of London. All the mod cons, but with room for a creative kid to roam in nature and get his hands dirty. Idyllic, except for the old prejudices that some of the inhabitants still harbor, and the ancient mythic spirit who monitors everything best kept hidden. Lanny is contemporary writing that's already timeless, a song, an incantation, a poem of people, place, and power. Porter's village is a world, his characters are all-too-human archetypes, and his novel is a glorious verbal artifact. —James (via the Madison Books newsletter)

New Book of the Week (June 3, 2019)

The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal.

by Evan Ratliff

Paul Le Roux is a Zimbabwean-born software coder who might have built the Uber of prescription painkillers—exploiting the complexity and anonymity of the internet to create a massive business in the gray area of the law—but, out of boredom, greed, or a sadistic thirst for power, eagerly stepped from the gray into the black, building an international network of drugs, weapons, and murder. Ratliff followed his case for years, trying to trace his network as federal agents were doing the same, and his story—which he narrates himself in the audiobook—has the depth of detail and character that only comes from deep reporting and understanding. At its heart, though is a hole the size of Paul Le Roux, who is so blandly evil he's nearly dull; what fascinates are the lesser characters drawn into his orbit, for good or ill, and the frightening ease with which he can construct his nearly borderless criminal empire. —Tom (Download the audiobook from our partners at Libro.fm.)

Kids Book of the Week (June 3, 2019)

Tiny T. Rex and the Impossible Hug

by Jonathan Stutzman and Jay Fleck

Those of you familiar with the quirks of Cretaceous-era evolution might be aware of the problem our hero, Tiny, faces: "It is very difficult to hug with tiny arms." So what do you do when your friend Pointy (a stegosaurus, naturally) needs some cheering up? Well, in this endearing tale (which doubles in enjoyment when you hear it read in our storyteller Steph's adorable Tiny voice), you just have to practice. (Preferably not on a cactus.) (Age 0 to 4) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 27, 2019)

The Mueller Report

by the Office of the Special Counsel

In Robert Mueller's short statement this morning, he more or less pleaded, "Uh, have you read my report?" I recently have, and I can state that it is both refreshing and depressing to actually read the report about which so much as been said (mostly by people who haven't read it). Like Fates and Furies, like Furious Hours, it contains two distinct halves. In the first, various Russians and Trump campaign operatives meet, and fail to meet, to discuss, or not discuss, Russian cooperation with Trump, all while the Russian military, known or unknown to the above, is actively working toward Trump's election. The upshot, prosecutorially, is legitimately muddled, and likely only the 30th or 40th worst thing done in his name. In the second half, the president himself takes center stage, and the clear crimes are committed: repeated, and public, obstruction of justice, which the special counsel clearly thinks (though he often explains this through a thicket of legalese) should be prosecuted, but only by Congress, leaving the ball in Congress's court, bouncing somewhere around the back fence, waiting to be picked up... —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 27, 2019)

A Chelsea Concerto

by Frances Faviell

For all my fellow Blitz Lit fans out there: have I found a book for you! This thrilling memoir of WWII London is written with such immediacy and attention to detail that I swear I could hear my heartbeat while reading about some of the more harrowing "incidents" (as those nonchalant Brits referred to death and destruction). Faviell, a well-connected professional portrait painter, was in the thick of it, Chelsea being relatively hard hit, and because she volunteered as an assistant nurse, emergency telephonist, and interpreter/caretaker for the Belgian refugees in her neighborhood. She is awed by the humor, bravery, and know-how of those who endured the nightmarish scenes, but she’s also aware of intermittent despair and loss of empathy in herself as well as others. Her account feels like such a classic of the genre I’m amazed it was only brought back into print in 2016 after its initial publication in 1959. And I’ve already ordered another reissued Faviell memoir, The Dancing Bear, set in the city where she moved with her young family in 1946—Berlin! —Liz

Kids Book of the Week (May 27, 2019)

The Worst Book Ever

by Elise Gravel

A dull romance between a nose-picking princess (sorry, "prinsess") named Barbarotte and a hot-dog-loving prince (sorry, "prinse") named Putrick that includes soft-drink product placement and an "it was just a dream!" ending? It might indeed be the Worst Book Ever, so thank goodness Elise Gravel, creator of, among other delights, the Disgusting Critters series, has included three characters (a spider, some sort of a black smudge, and something that looks like a cross between a poop emoji and gefilte fish) to express their own disdain for the story, which should make this a goofy pleasure for readers just learning they can have their own opinions about books too. (Ages 4 to 8) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 20, 2019)

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

One of the great mysteries of American literature—what was Harper Lee working on for the fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird?—was left mostly unanswered after her death in 2016, but Casey Cep has unearthed part of the answer. She recounts the story of Lee's life, her reluctant fame after the success of Mockingbird, and her struggles to repeat it, but first, audaciously, she tells the tale that Lee spent much of the '70s and '80s trying to write: the true-crime account of an Alabama reverend who (apparently) murdered five family members for insurance money before being killed himself by a vigilante at his final victim's funeral. I'm still debating with myself (and with anyone else who has read the book) about Cep's structure and approach, but both halves of her tale—especially Lee's—are fascinating and intrepidly reported. For any fan of Mockingbird, or of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 20, 2019)

America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

Republished by Penguin this week alongside three other mostly neglected classics of Asian American literature (John Okada's No-No Boy, Younghill Kang's East Goes West, and H.T. Tsiang's The Hanging on Union Square), Bulosan's 1946 book is a tender and bitter memoir of his life of labor and poverty in the Philippines and the western United States, with crucial scenes in Seattle, where Bulosan first arrived in the U.S. and where he later died in 1956 at the age of 42, though most of the action, after his youth in the Philippines, follows the harvests up and down the West Coast, where Bulosan became a labor activist, and where his brutal experiences drove him to become a writer and tell the story of an immigrant's America, "so kind and yet so cruel." —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (May 20, 2019)

United Tastes of America: An Atlas of Food Facts and Recipes from Every State!

by Gabrielle Langholtz

There are plenty of cookbooks for kids, and lots of oversized illustrated books of facts too, but I've never seen the two combined, and in such an appealing way. Langholtz has adapted her giant book for grownups, America: The Cookbook, into a bright and approachable guide that includes food facts from each state and recipes (designed for somewhat experienced kid cooks) that sometimes match expectations (Key lime pie for Florida) and sometimes surprise in informative ways (tabbouleh for Michigan's many Arab immigrants). (Age 8 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 13, 2019)

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

by Lori Gottlieb

In one of my future dream scenarios, I become a therapist at age 55. This idea becomes even more alluring while I read the memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb. In this book, she weaves together client stories and her own recent stint as a therapy patient. For me, the psychological information she includes is just as compelling as the client stories. If the Psych 101 class I took at college had been as interesting as her portrayal of this science, perhaps I would have attended medical school long ago. I’m willing to place a bet on the number of folks who decide to give therapy a try after reading this memoir. At the very least, I believe this gem of a book will give its readers a new appreciation for the art and science that lead to transformation within a therapy office. —Nancy

Old Book of the Week (May 13, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #53

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

Imagine a history of Europe, from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Age, that makes little or no mention of Martin Luther, or Newton, or Queen Elizabeth, or Columbus. Instead, the main figures in Fagan's index include volcanic explosions, glacial expansion and retreat, and an atmospheric phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Writing twenty years ago, Fagan was one of the first to popularly synthesize the relatively new science of climate history, and with convincing detail (but in little more than 200 pages) he shows the decisive and often devastating impact that long-term climate shifts, as well as the abrupt year-by-year swings they spur, have on societies, especially those at the edge of subsistence. As he notes, it's the achievement that protected us from those vicissitudes—the harnessing of fossil fuels to advance industry and trade—that is now making those changes more extreme. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (May 13, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #41

Another

by Christian Robinson

Robinson's first solo picture book, after his collaborations with Matt de la Pena (the Newbery-winning Last Stop on Market Street) and Kelly DiPucchio (our beloved Gaston), is a quietly mind-blowing little story. A cat notices a hole in the wall, and follows a twin cat inside. A girl follows, and finds a twin girl, along with a delightfully strange mirror world, full of happy kids and round balls and round holes that echo the bright round beads at the end of each of the girl's braids. It's a story for you and your young readers to figure out—and invent for yourselves—as you read it again and again. (Age 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 6, 2019)

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

by Mira Jacob

"Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else." Starting with a premise similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates's in Between the World and Me—trying to explain to her son the America he is growing up brown in—Mira Jacob has made a very different, but equally thought-provoking, book. Jacob is a novelist, but here she uses a collage comic-book style that turns out to be ideal for her approach of layering conversation after conversation—with her son, with her Indian-immigrant parents, with her Jewish husband, with friends, lovers, kooky employers, jerks in bars—that capture the difficulty, the weirdness, the humor, the sadness of talking about identity, especially with those you love. A brilliant, funny, challenging, and appropriately mixed-up read. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 6, 2019)

Sing to It

by Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is one of the modern masters of the short story—really, as many of her admirers would say, of the sentence. Her stories are spare, and mostly short, as are her books, which are a once-a-decade treat. Some of the stories here are just half a page, but a couple are surprisingly garrulous, including "Cloudland," the novella-length ramble that closes the book, and the gem for me, "A Full-Service Shelter," which bears Hempel's other great passion (besides sentences), for dogs and those who care for them. The audiobook, available from our partners at Libro.fm, brings another treat: Hempel's wry reading voice, a perfect match for her terse declarations. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (May 6, 2019)

The First Rule of Punk

by Celia C. Pérez

Malu finds herself caught between a Mexican mother who wants her to be the perfect señorita and a music-loving father who helped foster her love of all things punk. After their divorce, Malu and her mother move to Chicago from Florida, where Malu has to start a new school and find her place, ultimately discovering that it’s okay not to fit into a specific box. Follow spunky and rebellious Malu as she navigates middle school, forms a band with her fellow misfits, and creates zines to express herself! This book will remind anyone to embrace your eccentricities and love yourself for all of the things that make you unique. You are guaranteed to fall in love with Malu! (Ages 9 to 12) —Gabi (shared from this week's Madison Books newsletter)

New Book of the Week (April 29, 2019)

The 100 Most Jewish Foods

edited by Alana Newhouse

In our mixed household, the Jewishness of certain foods (and other items) is a subject of frequent debate. Noodle kugel? Obviously. Marshmallows? Apparently not. (I'm not the expert.) In this fun and useful compendium, Alana Newhouse and her contributors (which include such titans as Ruth Reichl, Joan Nathan, and Yotam Ottolenghi as well appreciative Gentiles like Ian Frazier and Edward Lee) hit just the right note with celebrations of classic Jewish cuisine like chopped liver and hamantaschen as well as cultural quirks like "sugar cereals for Shabbos morning" (no cooking on the Sabbath meant Froot Loops for some Orthodox kids). With equal parts laughs, nostalgia, and actual recipes, you won't know whether to keep it in your kitchen or on your coffee table. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 29, 2019)

Doctor Glas

by Hjalmar Soderberg

You could subtitle this book “Diary of a Madman,” except Dr. Glas is too logical and high-functioning for that. Maybe “Diary of a Sociopath,” but I’ve never come across one so genuinely charming and sympathetic. How about we just say he “has issues” because really, who doesn’t whose diary makes for such compelling reading? Glas is a thoroughly modern character (from an era when the term “modern” was just starting to be applied to a certain kind of literature) with a moral conundrum. And because he’s a step ahead of most men of his time and place (late 19th C. Stockholm), Freudian dream analysis, evolution, atheism, and women’s rights find their way into the few months worth of musings he jots down while debating with himself whether or not to take action. Elegiac, funny, epigrammatic—Dr. Glas is Hamlet or Roskolnikov in a bowler hat. This classic novella of proto-Modernism is not to be missed. —Liz

Kids Book of the Week (April 29, 2019)

Extraordinary Birds

by Sandy Stark-McGinnis

How does a child recover from abuse? If you’re 11-year-old December, you become convinced you’re really a bird, with wings ready to sprout from that ugly scar on your back. Those wings will take you away from the succession of bad foster homes and cruel school mates and let you soar where you really belong. While you’re waiting for those wings to unfurl, you’ll keep your expectations of happiness low, your earthly possessions light, and continue to practice your “flying” from tall trees. In this beautiful middle-grade debut by Sandy Stark-McGinnis, December slowly begins to understand that by trusting others and making peace with her past, she may just find a home. (Ages 8 to 12) —Doree

New Book of the Week (April 23, 2019)

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing

by Robert A. Caro

This is absolute candy for me. Caro, the buttoned-up, indefatigable biographer of Robert Moses and—in five volumes—Lyndon Johnson, has, in his 80s, become a cultural hero weighted with some of the same admiration we place on hardworking throwbacks like Vin Scully, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Robert Mueller. In this anecdotal working memoir he embraces his identity, sharing his patient and creative methods—"turn every page!"—for unearthing the untold stories behind his subjects' lives and the lives of those they effected. Fascinating and entertaining for anyone who has read (or, like me, has always aspired to read) any of Caro's giant volumes, but also a wonderful self-portrait for anyone else who is interested in a life tirelessly devoted to a worthy vocation.  —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 23, 2019)

Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers

by Charlie Louvin

Any expectations that a memoir by a member of a legendary gospel country duo might be squeaky clean ends on its first pages, with Charlie's foul-mouthed account of kicking his older brother Ira's ass after he drunkenly slighted their mom. The book proceeds from there, a two-fisted tell-all that sometimes reads a little like an Opry version of Motley Crüe's The Dirt but is an eye-opening and compulsively compelling story, full of insights into the desperation of a hardscrabble upbringing, the relentless, road-weary struggle of building a country music career in the '50s and '60s, and the fiery creative collaboration behind the strange, mournful harmonies of the Louvin Brothers. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 23, 2019)

When Spring Comes to the DMZ

by Uk-Bae Lee

A picture book about the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea? Despite its unusual setting, When Spring Comes to the DMZ has the makings of a classic. Originally published in 2010 as part of the Peace Picture Book Project, this book by award-winning Korean author/illustrator Uk-Bae Lee has recently been translated into English. Each season, Grandfather climbs to the DMZ observatory and looks through binoculars at the homeland he can no longer visit. Salmon swim under the barbed wire fence, while birds migrate over it, free of the restrictions that bind their human counterparts. Beautiful watercolor and pencil art in a style based on traditional Korean techniques illustrates the lush wildlife that flourishes with the absence of human habitation, even amid rusted military equipment and the ever-present barbed wire fences. This poignant picture book ends on a hopeful note as Grandfather imagines reuniting with his family in North Korea one day. (Ages 2 to 5) —Haley

New Book of the Week (April 15, 2019)

Normal People

by Sally Rooney

Marianne is a loner in high school. Connell is a smart, popular jock. But Connell's mom cleans Marianne's house, and when they are drawn together, they tell no one. Rooney's second novel arrives here with a full wind of anticipation, with a half-dozen awards in the UK and Ireland and the twenty-something Rooney talked about as the voice of her generation. But the novel at the center of that storm might surprise you with its modesty: it's the story of that single relationship, of two (mostly) normal people working out, through their early twenties, whether they should be together. Some of you will consider it a masterpiece, some of you might shrug. I thought it was wonderful, with a subtle attention to character, love, and power that gathered over time. What will you think? —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 15, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #52

The Slaves of Solitude

by Patrick Hamilton

Oh boy. I remembered loving this book when I first read it a decade ago, but it was even more delicious than I recalled. The action, such as it is, takes place in the miserable confines of the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a drab suburban rooming house outside London during the Second World War where the horrible bully Mr. Thwaites dominates the conversation, the meek Miss Roach cringes at his every word, and the "cute" Vicki Kugelmann arrives to throw the household upside-down. I choose my word carefully when I say this is a comic masterpiece, a companion, in an odd way, to our in-house favorite, The Women in Black: another Christmastime tale, and although it wallows in the worst of petty human nature while The Women in Black (mostly) seeks the light, there is a similar sense that, just once in a while, the meek might really inherit the earth. Or at least a cozy little bit of it. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 15, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #40

I Can Only Draw Worms

by Will Mabbitt

In the admirable title-that-sums-up-the-story tradition of The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars, the story of this goofy, Day-Glo counting book is just that: if you can only draw worms, well, you are pretty much limited to making a book about worms. I can't imagine how to make this review longer, but I found it hilarious. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 8, 2019)

Afternoon of a Faun

by James Lasdun

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly as Lasdun about how people think, and his narrator—an acquaintance of both the he and the she—recounts what he is told as well as how he processes that information. While we live with the optimism and anxiety caused by a tectonic cultural shift, when masses of received wisdom are breaking up and new standards haven’t quite solidified, it’s crucial to examine not just ideas but the motives and emotions that undergird them. Lasdun’s novella has the plotting and pacing of a thriller, each revelation causing you to reexamine the situation and your own assumptions—even after you finish it! But it’s his sly wit and quietly elegant prose—shot through with images of surprising aptness (he also writes poetry)—that elevate this ripped-from-the-headlines story into a thoroughly satisfying reading experience. —Liz

Old Book of the Week (April 8, 2019)

John Crow’s Devil

by Marlon James

The ferocious energy of Marlon James's prose, the first sign of the literary genius that the Booker judges later recognized in A Brief History of Seven Killings, is immediately evident in this debut novel, which summons into being the Jamaican village of Gibbeah, a community put to the scourge by conflict between two rival preachers. With its rich language and biblical cadence, John Crow's Devil is a Miltonic epic of unrelenting spiritual darkness, but with James's ear for dialogue and knack for earthy humor it flashes with light on a human level. Rarely has a writer's career been announced with a trumpet blast this pure and powerful. —James

New Book of the Week (April 1, 2019)

Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

Toews has become one of Canada's leading novelists by writing with insight, sorrow, humor, and anger about the patriarchal Mennonite community in which she was raised. So how would she deal, in fiction, with a horrific (and true) incident in another Mennonite colony—the systematic drugging and rape of the colony's women by many of its men? Not as you might expect: the incident itself is offstage, replaced by the conversations of women as they, long kept isolated from the world around them, debate the ethics and efficacy of reform, revenge, and rebellion, finding the language of personal politics as they speak it, almost like a Continental Congress welling up in the attic of a barn as they wait for the men to return. It's rousing, subtle, and provocative. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 1, 2019)

MacDoodle St.

by Mark Alan Stamaty

First, for me, was Washingtoon, Mark Alan Stamaty's '80s comic strip, starring Congressman Bob Forehead, that was just nutty enough to help me make sense of the Reagan Era as a teenager. Then, to my unending gratitude, I discovered Who Needs Donuts?, the picture book fabulously packed with donuts, heart, and birds with horse heads that launched Stamaty's career in 1973. Now, resurrected, comes the work he did in between: MacDoodle St., a weekly celebration of Greenwich Village weirdness circa 1978-79, similarly jam-packed with his sweet-hearted satire and deliriously populated cityscapes in which—and I mean this as very high praise—the donut-loving Sam and Mr. Bikferd would feel right at home. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 1, 2019)

My Cat Looks Like My Dad

by Thao Lam

"Family is what you make it": Thao Lam's third picture book (and her first with words) takes an unexpected route to that final line, making a convincing and hilarious case for the dad/cat resemblance (they both love belly rubs and neither of them replaces the toilet paper roll) with her distinctive paper-collage illustrations before springing a sweet and thought-provoking surprise. Delightful. (Age 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 25, 2019)

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Last month I read the U.S. Climate Report, but only when I read this book did our predicament come devastatingly to life. Why? The facts are, mostly, the same; Wallace-Wells has only gathered existing reports into what, at times, reads like a Harper's Index of doom. Is it because it's written in a literary way, packaged in a handsome, literary volume, as befits a writer who used to work at the Paris Review? Is it because he vividly describes the climate changes that are already snowballing (or, rather, fireballing) and that are just a few decades from making our planet unrecognizable and, for many, unlivable? Is it because, despite calling himself an "optimist," he offers little hope, even though the knowledge of our situation and the technical (if not political) solutions are both at hand? Whatever the reason, there is no book I've read in years that is going to live under my skin every day the way this one does. Its dire portrait of the coming decades—"It is much, much worse than you think" is the opening sentence—may lead you to action, or to fatalism, but I can't imagine leaving this book unchanged. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 25, 2019)

How to Be Loved: A Memoir of a Lifesaving Friendship

by Eva Hagberg Fisher

I read How to Be Loved in two days' time, but I’ve been carrying to book with me for weeks. I mean literally putting it in my bag so I can pop it open any time, to reread one of the 30 pages I've folded over about Eva Hagberg Fisher's journey to learn how to both love herself and be loved. It’s the story of how she endured life-threatening illness while a friend who eventually dies of cancer shows her how to grow deep connections. While it sounds hokey, this book was good medicine for me. I imagine everyone wants to hear they’re worthy of love. I couldn’t help but read pages of the book to my middle school students. I wanted them to hear Eva’s friend say, “The things you think are bad, those are the things that make you lovable.... You don’t have to tie yourself up in knots to be someone else.” I remember every time someone has made this same point clear to me in my own life. It’s a joy to read an entire book that drives home the point that being completely ourselves makes us entirely lovable to some people. —Nancy

Kids Book of the Week (March 25, 2019)

The Crocodile and the Dentist

by Taro Gomi

Sure, many people are afraid of crocodiles. And many people are afraid of dentists. But what about a crocodile who (with all those teeth to take care of!) is afraid to go to the dentist? And a dentist afraid to treat a crocodile? Taro Gomi (the genius behind Everyone Poops) starts with this brilliant picture-book premise and takes it somewhere you might not expect: the croc and the doc don't become any less afraid of each other, but the croc will definitely brush his teeth from now on. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New/Old Book of the Week (March 18, 2019)

Wild Life

by Molly Gloss

For those of us who are late catching up with the Oregon writer Molly Gloss, Saga Press is doing a great service this year by bringing much of her work back in handsome new paperbacks. Her books have been balanced between speculative fiction and stories of women in the historical West; Wild Life seems like it's firmly in the latter camp, set as it is in the logging territory of southwest Washington at the turn of the last century, but it takes a fantastic turn too (or a realistic one, depending on how you feel about the legends of the Sasquatch). The turn is subtle and thought-provoking but the book's real strengths are the vivid, exact details of her setting and, best of all, Gloss's heroine, Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a flamboyantly independent woman who manages to feel fully modern without seeming out of her time. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 18, 2019)

Phinney by Post Book #51

How I Became Hettie Jones

by Hettie Jones

How did Hettie Cohen become Hettie Jones? By marrying the poet LeRoi Jones, who later marked his own transformation by changing his name to Amiri Baraka and leaving his mixed-race family behind. That's the supposed scandal of her story—which she's thoughtful and tender about—but what will keep you reading is Hettie herself, both her bold, youthful self and her wise reflection when writing three decades later. It may have taken her a long time to find her voice in the midst of the mostly male cacophony of the Beats, but she found it here, with precision insights and evocative details about youthful bohemia that make her memoir every bit the equal of Patti Smith's Just Kids. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (March 18, 2019)

Phinney by Post Kids #39

Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau

by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts

Beaty and Roberts have become picture-book superstars for their ongoing series about brilliantly ambitious youngsters—Rosie Revere, Iggy Peck, Ada Twist, and, coming soon, Sofia Valdez. And for good reason: Beaty's witty rhymes read as well as any this side of Seuss, and they are matched for inventive detail by Roberts's illustrations. One of their collaborations has been unfairly neglected, though, perhaps because it features a grown-up. But the rhymes are just as sprightly and the illustrations—perhaps because the clothes-besotted Roberts, like Mme Chapeau herself, was once a milliner—are top-notch. If your young reader can't wait for Sofia in September, bring Madame Chapeau home. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 11, 2019)

Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

Luiselli has quickly built a reputation among American readers for her short novels and, especially, for Tell Me How It Ends, her short but blistering little book about working as a translator for Central American children looking for asylum in the unwelcoming U.S. Now she has gone big, with her first novel written in English, which at first reads as if she had taken the subject of Tell Me How and built a Rachel Cusk novel around it, an elegantly but indirectly told autofictional story of marital discontent. But as the book goes on, the layers of storytelling might make you think of Roberto Bolaño as well, as she uses the deceptively companionable story of a family on an American road trip to evoke the devastating truths of history and the very present day. —Tom

Audiobook of the Week (March 11, 2019)

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers

by Bridgett M. Davis

You might think a memoir of growing up in the middle of Detroit's illegal underground numbers racket might be gritty and grim, but Davis's story is, pointedly, just the opposite. Told through a loving daughter's eyes (with an affection even more evident in her sweet, soft voice in the audiobook), it's a heroic tale of a brilliant, generous woman who wrested a bourgeois life for her family out of the most unpromising soil. Davis recalls the modest splendor of her childhood with understandable pride—the words "myriad" and "plethora" appear again and again—and rarely has hard-earned financial independence seemed like such a political act. —Tom

Teen Book of the Week (March 11, 2019)

The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

One of the things I love best about young adult fiction is that it doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff. In Emily X.R. Pan’s impressive debut, just out in paperback, she illustrates an expert handling of delicate subjects: depression and suicide. The Astonishing Color of After follows Leigh on a journey of grief and remembrance. Since Leigh’s mother died by suicide, Leigh has become certain that her mother has turned into a bird; in hopes of finding her, Leigh travels to her mother’s home country of Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. The pages are infused with a magical realism that lends itself to fully telling Leigh’s gorgeously complex story. The writing is lyrical, immersive, and—as I expect from a book with "color" in the title—visually stunning. It’s an emotional read, powerful enough to break your heart and put it back together. (Age 14 and up) —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 4, 2019)

The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

For whatever reason (having nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that publishing is dominated by intellectually aspirant professionals who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn), the New York novel is a fixture of every publishing season. Some people can’t get enough of them, some find them insufferable, and never the twain shall meet. Until now. In The Heavens, Sandra Newman has finally written one that will satisfy both camps. The meet-cute opening that takes place on an apartment rooftop is quintessentially I❤NY, but brown-skinned Ben and Kate aren’t typical WASPy protagonists, and alert readers will notice that the romantic metropolis they occupy isn’t exactly the one we know and love (or loathe). And then Ben learns about Kate’s recurring dream, in which she’s an Elizabethan noblewoman caught up in a tortuous relationship with a certain obscure playwright. As her nocturnal life grows more and more vivid, the familiar becomes strange and the couple’s grip on daily life weakens. Is Kate going mad, or can her dream actually be altering reality? Beneath its glittering surface, The Heavens asks profound questions about what kind of world we want to live in and what lengths we'll go to change it. —James

New Book of the Week (March 4, 2019)

Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

by Emily Bernard

I believe story is how we make sense of the world. This is not an original thought, but it is why I read books. Author Emily Bernard is a masterful storyteller. She makes writing her life look easy in the memoir Black Is the Body. Yet her life isn’t easy. In the first of ten essays, Bernard writes of being randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife at a coffee shop when she was a graduate student at Yale. All of these essays use her particular lens: a black woman married to a white man, a teacher and a parent to two daughters from Ethiopia. I was carried along by her beautiful writing and a need to follow her storyline (what happens next?). But when I was done reading, I had learned more about race relations in America. I plan on reading this book twice: I have more to learn. —Nancy

New Book of the Week (February 25, 2019)

The Orphan of Salt Winds

by Elizabeth Brooks

For many Seattleites, Snowpocalypse 2019 was an enforced staycation requiring the flip side of a “beach read.” And by pure luck (and Haley’s recommendation) I had a copy of The Orphan of Salt Winds on hand when the first flakes started to fall. Its isolated manor house perched on the edge of a menacing marshland was the perfect setting for waiting out the blizzard, and its double-stranded story—told in alternating chapters by 86-year-old Virginia Wrathmell and her preteen self—wove together enough well-placed clues to keep me guessing, and then revising my guesses, until her whole tragic story was revealed and the snow started to melt. Also, its 1940’s-era details and cinematic imagery gave me the sense that it would have made a smokily glamorous black-and-white film. You just might want to stow a copy next to the flashlight and bottled water in case of another storm. —Liz

Kids Book of the Week (February 25, 2019)

Front Desk

by Kelly Yang

When Kelly Yang was a child, she would hide out in the school library to avoid her bullies at lunchtime. Many years later, her love of books allowed her to turn her pain into an award-winning new middle grade novel, Front Desk. Her protagonist is ten-year-old Mia Tang, who moved from China to California with her parents two years ago. The family is struggling to get by in their new country and when they're offered a position managing a motel, they readily agree—despite the unfair terms set by the owner. Living and working at Calavista Motel while also worrying about money and trying to fit in at school is a lot to handle, but Mia gradually creates a community and begins to change her world for the better. Yang clearly recalls the deep emotions of her youth, and I felt myself becoming genuinely outraged at many of the injustices Mia faces. Front Desk doesn't shy away from dark topics like racism, bullying, and inequality, but seeing how Mia takes charge of every tough situation and works to change negatives to positives will leave her readers feeling hopeful and inspired. (Ages 8 to 12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (March 4, 2019)

Friday Black: Stories

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I’ve thought for a while now that short stories just aren’t for me, but Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut has made me reconsider. At just under 200 pages, Friday Black is an intense and provocative read. In many of these bizarre and inventive stories, Adjei-Brenyah imagines a near-future dystopia in which many of the social issues we face today, such as racism, violence, and consumerism, have escalated to grim conclusions. At times the writing is magically realistic and hyperbolic, but it is continuously sharp and clever. This collection’s dark and speculative nature is similar to that found in the contemporary television series Black Mirror, as well as Jordan Peele’s Academy Award-winning film Get Out. A worthy and necessary read. —Anika

New Book of the Week (February 25, 2019)

The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

I was enamored at first by the idea that an old, famous poet was the narrator of The Last Romantics, but what captivated me, once I started reading, was the narrator’s deep dive into her childhood with her three siblings and the course their lives took after. This novel by (now) local author Tara Conklin asks what siblings owe each other. Can you save a sibling? How well can you see someone you know up close yet may not know well enough? And how do people change over a lifetime? Was what happened at age seven a warning or just a bad tantrum? Ah, I was sad when I was done hanging out with Renee, Caroline, Joe, and the poet, Fiona. Conklin’s tale reminded me of Meg Wolitzer’s book The Interestings, and I’m thrilled that I haven’t yet read her first book, The House Girl. —Nancy

New Book of the Week (February 11, 2019)

Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

This short, intensely moving novel—an imagined dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after his suicide, written after Li lost her son in the same way—reads as though Li has invented, out of dire necessity, a form to hold the words she needs to say. But the echoes of other grief stories are there as well: like Joan Didion in A Year of Magical Thinking, Li's mother exists in a time of suspended reality; like the husband in Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, she comes at her sorrow sideways, shifting between banter and despair; like the mourning president in George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, she holds tight to a unearthly connection with the dead that could be lost at any time. —Tom

New Book of the Week (February 11, 2019)

The Climate Report: The National Climate Assessment

by the U.S. Global Change Research Program

Even as the president uses snowstorms to mock the science of climate change, the scientists working for his government quietly do their work, producing a report buried on that most deadly of news days, the Friday after Thanksgiving, but published now by Melville House. It contains few surprises for anyone paying attention and, to be honest, is mostly written, despite the full-color graphs and maps, in a mind-numbing committee-ese. But suddenly, when you reach Appendix 5, a 60-page FAQ at the end of the book (available, like the rest of the report, online as well), you have laid before you, in the clearest, least histrionic language, explanations of what is happening, why the science is so sure, and what can still be done. The language is reassuring; the facts are not. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (February 11, 2019)

The Town House

by Norah Lofts

I must acknowledge that this is the most unattractively published of any book I've chosen for Phinney by Post, but don't let the cover (or typeface inside) turn you aside: there is superb storytelling to be found here. I have my new favorite podcast, Backlisted, to thank for leading me to Norah Lofts, a bestselling historical novelist from the middle of the last century who, from the evidence of this book at least, was brilliant at marshaling historical details to dramatize how lives were bound by status, money, and capricious fate. The first in a trilogy tracing the inhabitants of an English village home from the 14th century to the 20th, The Town House follows the rise from serfdom of a smith named Martin Reed, braiding choice and cruel chance in an unsentimental, affecting, old-fashioned tale. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (February 11, 2019)

You’re Snug with Me

by Chitra Soundar and Poonam Mistry

It's our third straight snowy selection for Phinney by Post Kids, and finally it reflects the local weather (and how). That little thumbnail image of the cover can hardly do justice to the intricate beauty of this tale of a mama bear talking her cubs through their winter worries: the bears, their icy habitat, and their neighbors in nature are all evoked with patterns inspired by the traditional art of India, which make them seem made of stars, or ice crystals, or woven textiles. It's a magical companion to the authors' previous You're Safe with Me. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (February 4, 2019)

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

by Benjamin Dreyer

Being copyedited well—having a wise and sympathetic reader improve your sentences—is one of life's great pleasures, and perhaps the highest praise I can give Dreyer's English is to say it made me desperate to write a book for Random House so he might copyedit it. Apparently, though, if you're not Elizabeth Strout he doesn't do that anymore, so the next best thing is to follow him on Twitter or read this guide, whose* chatty style and loosey-goosey organization are tip-offs that the "utterly" in his title is somewhat tongue in cheek. He has standards (and peeves), but he has humor (lots of it) and an understanding that editing is an art and a dialogue. You want to be his friend, and not only because he's more likely to cite Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders than, say, T.S. Eliot. Best of all: he loves semicolons and Shirley Jackson (who loved semicolons). —Tom
*Yes, he says, it's ok to use "whose" for a non-person.

New Book of the Week (February 4, 2019)

The Weight of a Piano

by Chris Cander

Two families, separated by decades and thousands of miles, discover the physical—and emotional—weight of a certain rare piano. That piano represents love, freedom, tragedy, grief, and, ultimately, letting go of the past. This lovely third novel by Chris Cander alternates chapters between the past as young Katya discovers the freedom a 60-year-old German-built Bluthner piano brings to her life in the Soviet Union, and years later as 26-year-old Clara moves the piano—a gift from her father for her 12th birthday—that she doesn’t know how to play but can’t part with. As the piano and its owners’ histories are slowly revealed, we learn that a piano can both weigh you down and set you free. —Doree

Kids Book of the Week (February 4, 2019)

Business Pig

by Andrea Zuill

Oh, Business Pig, I can't believe it's taken me this long to put you in the newsletter. Not very proactive of me! This little tale of a pig unlike any of the others in the barnyard—he was born, apparently, in a three-piece suit, and delights in spreadsheets, flowcharts, and exchanging business cards—has been amusing us since it arrived last year, and every time I look at it and see Business Pig's can-do attitude, as well as the support of his friends in the barnyard, I can't help but smile. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 28, 2019)

The Great Soul of Siberia: In Search of the Elusive Siberian Tiger

by Sooyong Park

For twenty years, Park has spent the summers tracking the rare and regal Siberian tiger through Russia's eastern wilderness, and for each of those twenty winters he has hidden himself in tiny underground bunkers waiting, sometimes for weeks or months, for a glimpse of the big cats roaming through their territory. His memoir paints a fascinatingly detailed portrait of the tigers' habits and intelligence and of the threats they face from poachers and lost habitat, while at the same time sharing a compellingly humble philosophy of patience. "To see a tiger you must stay in one spot," he writes. "You must become a tree on a slope." —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 28, 2019)

The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: You send your child out into the world, and tragedy strikes. The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker opens with a series of small-town college students falling asleep—and not waking up. But this is no Sleeping Beauty fairy tale with a handsome prince to save the day. There is no rhyme or reason to who falls asleep and who ultimately wakes up. Not all do. Is it a virus? Mass hysteria? Doctors are baffled. Parents are terrified. And the dreamers keep on sleeping as the town is quarantined, hospitals fill up, and young men and women are forced to grow up faster than they ever expected. —Doree

Kids Book of the Week (January 28, 2019)

Thank You, Omu!

by Oge Mora

This week Oge Mora added a Caldecott Honor to the many accolades she's won for her debut picture book, and for good reason. Using a painted collage style full of muted colors, she creates a cityscape reminiscent of the one Ezra Jack Keats's Peter wanders through, though a little less melancholy, for a story of her grandmother's generosity that's like the stone soup fable turned inside out. It's a warm as a bowl of stew held in your hands. (Ages 0 to 4) —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 21, 2019)

Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a very public intellectual. A sociologist by trade, she tweets with great volume and skill and has been placing essays across the internet since grad school—writing too much, as one protective older academic once warned her. But that's what she does, turning the analytical tools of her trade as well as her lived experience into unsparing, funny, paradigm-shifting commentary about, among other things, the brutal cost for a black woman of being presumed incompetent and the rationality of the "irrational" spending of the poor. These are not essays written to make you feel good about what's possible—she's just telling you what is. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 21, 2019)

The Moviegoer

by Walker Percy

It's been over 50 years since Percy's debut novel was the surprise winner of the National Book Award, and—gulp—it's been about 30 years since I first fell in love with its sprightly tale of despair, Gulf Coast drives, and William Holden. Is it only a young person's book (young man's, really)? A little bit, surely, but when I read it again recently after many years, something about its humor, laid so delicately over the yawning pit of possible misery we all navigate, gave it the same power I had felt in it the first time. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 21, 2019)

My Heart

by Corinna Luyken

I must say that yellow is not my favorite color (or even close). But seeing what magic Olympia-based artist Corinna Luyken can work with it makes me think again. As she did in her wonderful debut, The Book of Mistakes, she adds washes of yolky yellow to her already-evocative pen-and-ink drawings and somehow fills her pages with insight, curiosity, melancholy, and hope. "My heart is a window. My heart is a slide," she writes, and her lovely illustrations are the best possible expression of such open-ended declarations. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 14, 2019)

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

I’ve read and loved all of Dani Shapiro’s memoirs, so I brought high expectations to Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love. Shapiro has a firecracker of a storyline: when she whimsically submits her DNA for analysis, she finds out her deceased father is not actually her genetic father. But it’s not the plotline that had me racing through this memoir. It’s Shapiro’s skill at weaving beautiful, descriptive sentences while sharing hard-won insights with the reader. Like this line about her deceased (but not genetic!) dad: “He smiles the hard-earned smile of a wounded man who lives for pockets of joy and is still able to feel them.” Another sentence reads “Every syllable, deliberate.” Ah, yes, that’s why I read Shapiro’s memoirs. Every syllable in this book seems deliberate, and the journey she takes me on blows insight into my own life. Which is why I read Inheritance in just a few sittings, folding pages over and underlining text again and again. Readers hungry for thoughtful deliberation in memoir form, this one is for you. —Nancy

New Book of the Week (January 14, 2019)

Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

It's a few months after 9/11, and Lane Bueche, who has long fancied himself the Bill Clinton of Lake City Way, headed from the nowhere of north Seattle toward an upscale, intellectual life of NGOs and Economist editorials, is right back where he started, slicing turkey at the Fred Meyer deli and drinking Rainier tallboys at his mom's, just off the endless strip of car dealerships and bikini-barista huts. Kohnstamm's debut novel is a love letter of sorts to his old (and current) neighborhood in all its unambitious ugliness, and Lane is the colossal screw-up at its center. It's a messy farce with a sloppy heart, a kind of underbelly, Lesser Seattle companion to Where'd You Go, Bernadette, and pretty much required reading for anyone who cares about where Seattle has been, and is headed. —Tom

Kids Book of the World (January 14, 2019)

Harold Loves His Woolly Hat

Harold's woolly hat is indeed special. Made up of nine strokes of Vern Kousky's paintbrush, five red and four yellow, plus a little dab of blue at the teetering-over top, it's the kind of deliciously beautiful object that seems to have a life of its own, the kind that makes your own life more vivid just by having a place in it. The question becomes (after a crow snatches his hat away): what is Harold's life like without it? Is it still special? Is he still special? His story presents a sweet and mildly surprising answer, but really, the true delight of the book is that hat, bright and teetering on nearly every page. You can hardly blame the crow. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 7, 2019)

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution

by Julius S. Scott

This innovative book of history comes with a history of its own: as a legendary PhD thesis shared for three decades among scholars but never published for a wider audience until now. Its innovation? Piecing together the vibrant lines of communication that existed among slaves and free blacks in the 18th-century Caribbean, not from the communication (mostly verbal) itself, but from the records of those who were threatened by it: the letters of planters and colonial governors, newspaper reports, and court records. Scott's story is not flashily told, and often, necessarily, has to stick to generalities, but once it reaches the twin revolutions of the age, the French and the Haitian, it catches fire with the excitement of discovery and till-now-unspoken knowledge, just as it did for those looking for freedom at the time. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 7, 2019)

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape

by Brian Hayes

"What's that thing?" Brian Hayes's daughter used to ask from the back seat. You might have asked the same, when seeing some strange man-made object sticking out of the ground or on the side of a building, something obviously built for function not for beauty, but whose function is obscure. Hayes wrote a book answering that question over and over, and it's one of my favorite one-of-a-kind obsessive encyclopedias, full of photographs of mud pumps, electrical insulators, and overflow inlets and—even better—explanations of how and why they work. Presenting these elements as if they were beautiful birds in a Peterson field guide, he encourages you to question where the true beauty of our landscape lies. —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 27, 2020)

The Decent Inn of Death

by Rennie Airth

Twenty-one years and five books after the release of his exceptional first historical mystery, River of Darkness, Airth continues to devise new investigations for his original Scotland Yard-trained sleuths. This new novel, set in the early 1950s, sends former Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair—currently suffering from heart problems—off to visit friends in the south of England. There he learns about a German church organist, Greta Hartmann, who recently drowned in a stream, supposedly by accident. Greta’s housemate doesn’t believe such codswallop, however, and Sinclair has doubts, too, after learning the deceased had been discomposed by encountering an unidentified man whose car had broken down. Sinclair wonders whether that driver was a Nazi war criminal and killer from Greta’s past. But before he can inquire further, the chief inspector finds himself snowbound at an isolated country manor. Meanwhile, ex-Inspector John Madden pursues his friend Sinclair, increasingly worried for his health and fearing that he may also be at risk from Greta’s murderer. Although it’s slightly compromised by a plotting coincidence, Airth’s latest procedural remains a tightly constructed, classic-style whodunit with a genuine surprise ending. —Jeff

New Book of the Week (July 12, 2021)

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

by Joshua Cohen

Yes, those Netanyahus—sort of! The Netanyahus is, on its face, a novel about Ruben Blum, an economic historian and, as the story takes place at the end of the 1950s, the only Jewish professor at small-town Corbin College. And for its first half it is a more-or-less-well-behaved campus comedy of Jewish assimilation and petty academic maneuvering. Then Benzion Netanyahu, a possible professorial hire who Blum, as a fellow Jew, has been asked to host and vouch for, arrives with his wife and three incredibly badly behaved children, including 11-year-old Benjamin, and chaos, to say the least, ensues. Or, to put it in Philip Roth terms, a book that read like Goodbye, Columbus suddenly turns into Portnoy's Complaint. Is this an authentic portrait of a "very famous" Jewish family? (Cohen claims he based it on an actual incident.) An allegory of some kind? An impish goad? All I know is it was entertaining, funny, and provocative, and I might need to read it another time or two to decide. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 7, 2019)

Sparks!

by Ian Boothby and Nina Matsumoto

An enthusiastic customer tipped us off to this graphic novel, nearly a year after it came out. All we needed to hear, really, was "two cats in a robotic dog suit," but "narrated by a sentient litter box"? That sealed the deal. And the book itself lived up to every hope raised by those oddball ideas: funny, action-packed, and not a little heartfelt. We would be delighted if Boothby and Matsumoto created many more adventures for robot dog Sparks and August and Charlie, the two intrepid cats at the controls inside. (Ages 7 to 10) —Tom