New Book of the Week (March 24, 2025)

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir

by Neko Case

"What makes you think you're so important that someone should listen to you?" It's the question Neko Case has been asked—and even worse, asked herself—her whole life, born into a spectacularly neglected childhood ("raised by two dogs and a space heater") and bounced around the rural Northwest until she found her people and her voice in the Tacoma punk scene. If you love her singing and her songwriting, it's inconceivable you won't love this starkly beautiful book, but even if you've never heard her (you should!) you'll likely never forget the childhood she recalls and the person she became. It's my favorite book I've read so far this year—easily. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 24, 2025)

The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story

by Pagan Kennedy

This short book took a long time to come together. Kennedy, a star of the zine movement in her twenties, had become a design columnist at the NYT, writing about everyday inventions, when one invention—and its little-known inventor—became her obsession: the rape kit, a simple, transformative technology created in a very unlikely place (the '70s Chicago police department). Credited to a man, it was actually the brainchild of a woman, the tireless, fascinatingly complicated, and biographically elusive activist Marty Goddard, and Kennedy's search for the facts of Goddard's life and her subtle, wide-ranging, and often deeply personal analysis of forensics and justice for the crime of rape make this single tale into a compelling American story. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 24, 2025)

Phinney by Post Book #123

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945

by Milton Mayer

When I finally picked up this book from 1955 about the 1930s, I can't deny I had current events in mind. We look for echoes in history, to see how a society—or part of a society—could embrace authoritarianism, but what struck me most about this story was how specific it was. The most familiar elements of Nazi history—the atrocities and the leaders—are at a distance here; instead we have the story of ten "little men" (their own description) in a small German city, told by Mayer, an American reporter (and a Jew, which he never revealed to his subjects), who slowly got to know these "friends," a term that gathers a sharp edge of irony and even disgust, especially as he learns that few, if any, of them regret what they had been a part of. —Tom

Young Adult Book of the Week (March 24, 2025)

I Am Not Jessica Chen

by Ann Liang

I Am Not Jessica Chen is a haunting portrait of social pressure and academic burnout. When Jenna Chen's wish to become her golden child cousin literally comes true, she's initially elated. She finds herself aglow in a constant stream of positive attention, praise, and validation. Being Jessica Chen is so intoxicating to Jenna that when she discovers her own body is missing as well as her cousin's consciousness, her primary concern is keeping up the charade. Even when little by little, reality starts to crack through the surreal glamour of Jessica Chen's life, Jenna can't help but prefer it to her suffocatingly average one. It's only when Jenna discovers that the memory of her very existence is corroding—first, in the self-portraits she painted for an upcoming art show and then in the minds of the people who loved her best—she begins to comprehend what she stands to lose instead of gain. —Anika

Kids' Book of the Week (March 24, 2025)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #111

Every Monday Mabel

by Jashar Awan

Young Mabel has a very important appointment every Monday morning. Her sister thinks it's boring, her mom thinks it's cute, and her dad thinks it's funny. But to Mabel, watching the garbage truck rumble up the street and dump the trash cans is the best thing in the world. This is a book for all those kids who can relate to the glorious excitement of watching the garbage truck! —Haley

New Book of the Week (March 3, 2025)

Here Beside the Rising Tide

by Emily Jane

Emily Jane’s very funny debut novel, On Earth as It Is on Television, was one of my favorite books two years ago, and I frequently recommend it to people who want something hilarious yet also poignant about what it means to be human (despite the fact that it’s about aliens). Her follow-up, Here Beside the Rising Tide, is in a similar vein, as there’s something maybe alien-like out in the water off Pearl Island, the childhood home of 10-year-old Jenni. She spends a glorious summer with a kid named Timmy who loves carnivals and swimming and general kid stuff just like her and isn’t in a hurry to grow up. But then Timmy disappears into the water…and somehow reappears 30 years later, still 10 years old, while Jenni is going through a divorce, trying to finish the latest in her successful romance novel series, renovating her late mother’s home, letting her kids eat way too much sugar, and flirting with a hunky contractor who may or may not be flirting back. Meanwhile, Timmy tries to get her to help him save the world. As a solo parent with far too much on her plate this summer, how can she say no to her old friend? —Doree

Old Book of the Week (March 3, 2025)

Phinney by Post Book #122

The Light Years

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Does your heart race with anticipated pleasure when you see not only a list of characters but a family tree on the first pages of a fat novel? If so, prepare to luxuriate, as this is just the first of five volumes in Howard's Cazalet Chronicle (all published after her 65th birthday, late in a glamorous literary life that sometimes overshadowed her writing). The large cast consists of the Cazalets, a family wealthy from the timber trade, and their similarly sized staff of servants, and it's Howard's special genius to be able to inhabit them all (the children especially, in all their fussiness, intelligence, and ignorant charm). What delights me more than anything is the vivid texture of how people lived, how they planned and prepared their meals, picked out their dresses, and arranged their adulteries. This volume is set in the late '30s, as WWII approaches—I look forward to following them, with the series, for two decades more. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (March 3, 2025)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #110

We Needed a You

by M.H. Clark and Olivia Holden

We Needed a You is my new go-to baby shower recommendation. This delightfully sweet picture book features soft and colorful artwork and gentle text describing all the beautiful things in the world ("there were treats made for sharing and savoring," "cats in the windows, blackberries to eat") but ultimately something was missing, the parents tell the child. We needed a you! A great way to remind little ones they are loved. —Haley

New Book of the Week (January 20, 2025)

We Could Be Rats

by Emily Austin

As I've come to expect from Emily Austin's previous two novels, the beating heart of We Could Be Rats lies in its deeply flawed but lovable characters. However, where we were given the singular perspective of Gilda (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead) and Enid (Interesting Facts About Space), in this one we get the perspectives of two sisters: Sigrid and Margit. And where Gilda and Enid grappled with profound anxiety, Sigrid struggles with suicidal ideation. Sigrid's older sister Margit is a university student working toward a conventionally attractive future, while Sigrid is a queer high school dropout working at Dollar Pal. At 20, Sigrid is grieving her childhood, having become disillusioned with adulthood, her small, conservative hometown, and her dysfunctional family of origin; the novel opens with her penning her suicide letter. Sigrid's hopeful Margit will eventually edit it for her, making it more palatable for their parents and relatives. She writes, "I'm worried my death might bum you out, so I want to leave you with something to cheer you up." All that follows is strange and tender and dark and imaginative and sad and funny. I'll read anything this woman writes. —Anika

Newish Book of the Week (January 20, 2025)

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay

by Jeff Young

Imagine a book about post-war Liverpool that takes 90 pages to even mention the Beatles (and then only to say his mum was sad when they broke up). Young loves—has always loved—his home city, but the gods of his north England are the intensely local memory films of Terence Davies and the inscrutable pugnacity of Mark E. Smith and the Fall. He started walking its streets and back alleys and stairwells in the late '50s with his mum and granddad, and he's walked them ever since, open at all times to the sounds and sights and smells around him, but especially to the memories, his own and others, of Victorian smoke, Blitz bomb sites, and urban-planning delusions, of dockworkers and punks, of stale pints of brown and mild. It's a personal memory book that makes you understand what it means to love a living city, and all its ghosts. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 20, 2025)

Phinney by Post Book #121

A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

by Stanley Crawford

Only when Stanley Crawford died a year ago, at age 86, did I realize that the same person was the author of two very different books that had long intrigued me: the notoriously weird experimental novel from 1972, Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine, and this much more straightforward memoir of garlic farming, published twenty years later. And so, intrigued, I finally read both. Mrs Unguentine is indeed fascinatingly weird (I'll say more when it's rereleased later this year), but I loved A Garlic Testament. It is a romance of sorts, built around the dream of remote self-sufficiency, on the small farm in the mountains outside Santa Fe that Crawford and his wife Rose Mary operated for fifty years, which also allowed him quieter winters for writing. But the true beauty of his story, as Crawford knows, is not their isolation, but their many connections: with friends and family who help with the work, with neighbors who share their scarce water resources, and with the people who buy their bulbs and flowers. In this, it reminds me of the best thing about running a neighborhood bookstore. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (January 20, 2025)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #109

All in a Year

by Chihiro Takeuchi

This picture book colorfully illustrates a year in the life of the five-member Tanaka family, following them through holidays, milestones, meals, and seasons. Chihiro Takeuchi's detailed papercut illustrations provide plenty to look at on each page (my favorite background character is the neighborhood lady with the pet alligator). A great introduction to the rhythm of the seasons for young readers. —Haley

New-ish Book of the Week (January 6, 2025)

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072

by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

I love oral history and I love speculative fiction so I grabbed this as soon as I saw the title. But after reading the author and publisher profiles, I started to doubt that it would be an immersive imaginative experience. I was right—this is creatively packaged polemic. And I loved it! Hard-core lefty activists and people who thought the CHOP was romantic will find vindication and wish-fulfillment. But if you’re like me, and cafeteria meals, talk therapy, and dance parties are not your idea of utopia, you can still have a blast mentally debating the interviewees and pondering how history is produced. Contrary to the title, this book acts less as history and more as commemoration. Isn't it a bit ominous that we don’t hear from a single disgruntled communard? Once again, it’s history written by the victors. —Liz

P.S. I was sympathetic to a lot of the ideas but found the worldwide governmental collapse much more convincing than the ensuing worldwide organic communization. But it was an invigorating start to my reading for the year that is, alas, here.

Old Book of the Week (January 6, 2025)

Phinney by Post Book #120

Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean

At the center of this novel is a single, inexplicable incident from the end of the Spanish Civil War, when an unknown Republican soldier caught a leader of the right-wing Falange escaping a Republican firing squad but then walked away, sparing his life. Writing six decades later, Cercas frames his own investigation into this mystery with a tale at once goofy, sad, and movingly sweet that transformed Spanish history and literature (the novel sold millions there and broke a national silence about the war and its aftermath). For an American reader like me, it captures the horror, the poignancy, and the bewildered humor of what it's like to live through, and outlive, history. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (January 6, 2025)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #108

Frostfire

by Elly MacKay

Fox sisters Celeste and Miriam explore a sparkling winter wonderland in this cozy picture book. Older sister Miriam tells Celeste all about snow dragons—they collect "diamond dust," breathe frostfire, and pretend to be snowbanks. But are snow dragons actually real? Elly MacKay's beautiful papercut photo-illustrations make winter look dreamy and magical. —Haley

New Book of the Week (November 26, 2024)

Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

One of the first books I reviewed for this newsletter was Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which soon after won the Booker Prize and remains one of the best books I've read in the last decade. Somewhat inexplicably, I've hardly read him since, but his new book must have been what I was waiting for: it's every bit as good. A memoir (if you can call it that) rather than a novel, it returns to the same source as The Narrow Road (his father's harrowing time as a Japanese prisoner during World War II), but in this book that memory, beginning with the moral question of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (which Flanagan is sure saved his father's life), sets off a chain reaction of its own, from H.G. Wells to physicist Leo Szilard to the near-destruction of Aboriginal Tasmania (Flanagan's home) to his own near-death experience in his 20s. It's a book of deep seriousness worn lightly, and one worthy of a lifetime's thought and experience. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 26, 2024)

Final Cut

by Charles Burns

I returned to another author of an all-time favorite this month. I often name Charles Burns''s 2005 graphic novel, Black Hole, a jet-dark story of a disease sweeping through '70s teens, as my favorite Seattle book, but I've never found another book of his that wove a spell like that one. This new one, set in a similar place and time, is a smaller story, without the majestic scope (or the granular weirdness) of Black Hole, but it's a very good one, an almost simple tale of looking and wanting so much you lose sight of what you were looking at (if you ever really had it in the first place), made concrete, yet again, by the meticulous strangeness of Burns's inky-black lines. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 26, 2024)

Brothers

by Alex Van Halen

Two mixed-race immigrant kids, who spoke Dutch until they moved to California when they were nine and seven, where they won citywide competitions in classical piano. That may not be your image of the origin story of the kings of party rock, but that's where Van Halen began, with two music-loving brothers who decided they'd rather be rock stars, and met a flamboyant egomaniac named Dave Roth who wanted to be a star even more. Despite all their partying (which he hardly regrets), drummer Alex's memoir (as you might sense from the cover) is in part an elegy for his late brother Ed, the guitar virtuoso, and also for their band at its most combatively creative. For all the drama their stardom kicked up, the brothers (like their Dutch father) were music professionals above all, and while Alex might settle a few scores here, he's mostly sober (and insightful) about those intoxicating years. As he says about the bandmate he hardly speaks to now, "we never fought better with anyone than Dave." —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 12, 2024)

Big Vegan Flavor

by Nisha Vora

Unless you have your own test kitchen, reviewing a new, 600-page cookbook can only be a partial exercise, but after using Big Vegan Flavor for the last two months as a part-time, non-expert cook in a mostly vegan household I can say that it has been a slam-dunk success every time. Vietnamese Rice Noodle Bowls with Crispy Tofu & Mushrooms? Yes! Lemony Pasta with Sausage & Broccoli? Yum! Cheesy Herb Bread Pudding with Caramelized Leeks? Delish! Braised Carrots & Chickpeas with Dill Gremolata? Our handwritten note on this page: "So. Damn. Good." The flavors are indeed big, the recipes are straightfoward, and we're just getting started. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (November 12, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #119

Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

Mary Colby and George Oppen met in a college poetry class in Corvallis in 1926; they spent a night together, for which Mary was expelled, but by then they had chosen to leave their pasts behind to share a life full of "conversation, ideas, poetry, peers." In the 50 years that followed, they found all of those, as well as hoboing, art-making, sailing, donkeys and horses and dogs, war, the Communist Party, parenthood (after many lost attempts), labor and labor organizing, exile (both chosen and not—they spent many blacklisted years in Mexico) and return. Mary's account of their shared life—in her first book, published in her 70th year—is told with deliberate, simple eloquence, and it's a pleasure and a provocation to read of lives lived with such originality and courage.  —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (November 12, 2024)

I Know How to Draw an Owl

by Hilary Horder Hippely and Matt James

I Know How to Draw an Owl is my favorite picture book of 2024. Beautiful and heart-wrenching, yet as quiet as an owl gliding through the trees, it depicts a serious issue with subtlety and sensitivity. Belle and her mom have been sleeping in their car in a forested park. It's scary being in a strange new place, but one night Belle finds comfort in the huge eyes of a majestic owl who seems to be welcoming them. Through minimal text that packs a punch, local author Hilary Horder Hippely has crafted a meaningful book that stays with you for a long time. —Haley

Old Book of the Week (October 29, 2024)

The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

This book reminded me of the 1983 movie, The Big Chill, but with more nuance and an off-beat soundtrack (and an Australian setting). Published just a year later, it’s also about college classmates from the sixties whose orbits recross in the eighties. But while the film is smugly (says a smug Gen X-er) focused on Boomers’ disillusionment, Garner seems to see the era not as a failed revolution but a nudging open of the doors of convention. After graduating, paterfamilias Patrick and spiky-haired, loft-dweller Elizabeth made different life choices, but Garner never judges, only observes. In fact, she shows us characters through each other’s eyes—with only brief glimpses into their thoughts—making them less knowable, but more alive because of that. I adore Garner’s realism because it’s spare and straightforward and then she’ll throw in a fillip of particularity—a physical detail, a line of dialogue—that almost shifts the tone from fiction to documentary. Garner is a national literary treasure in her native Australia and she deserves a higher profile here. And YOU, Discerning Reader, deserve to be introduced to her unique style and sensibility. —Liz

Kids' Book of the Week (November 12, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #107

The Little Chefs

by Rosemary Wells

Anyone who has ever had a kitchen mishap will wish they had the Little Chefs on speed dial after reading this creative picture book. The next time your cookies burn or your soup is tasteless, look for a tiny phone hidden somewhere in your kitchen (every kitchen has one) with a direct line to the tropical hangout of the Little Chefs. This quirky book includes three separate young protagonists' tales of culinary woe. Each time disaster strikes, these miniature cooks and bakers swoop in to dry tears and save the day with their cooking expertise. Perfect timing for the holiday season! —Haley

New Book of the Week (October 29, 2024)

The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

What began as a book about the craft and politics of writing—addressed to his Howard University students, as his bestseller Between the World and Me was written to his son—became something else as Coates, following his own dictum to make writing concrete by reporting, was changed by the three places he visited: Senegal, in his first trip to the African continent; South Carolina, where a high school teacher put her job on the line to teach one of his books; and Palestine. That third section, the longest, has rightfully received all the attention, and not only because of the ongoing war. It's there that Coates is most engaged, and most confounded, by witnessing Israel's systemic subjugation of its Palestinian subjects, seeing its echoes of American Jim Crow, and realizing how little of that story had reached American eyes. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 29, 2024)

Traces of Enayat

by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Moger

When Mersal, a young Egyptian literary scholar, encountered the novel Love and Silence by chance at a Cairo bookshop, she was drawn to the book's beauty and strangeness, but also to the author, the nearly anonymous Enayat al-Zayyat, who had killed herself at age 27, thinking her only novel would never be published. Mersal's years-long search for answers about her life, a kind of Egyptian Quest for Corvo, ends up as much a portrait of a time as of its still-elusive subject: the revolutionary era of Nasser, the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, and a woman struggling against traditional culture and artistic isolation, who still can speak through pages she never knew would be published. —Tom

Newish Book of the Week (October 29, 2024)

The Book of Sleep

by Haytham El Wardany, translated by Robin Moger (yes, the same translator as Traces of Enayat)

Forget space, or the dark depths of the oceans: the true unexplored human frontier is the third of our lives we spend suspended in the strange netherworld of sleep. For all the talk of dreams, how little has been written of those hours! This slim book, by an Egyptian writer who lives in Berlin, grants that world its inaccessibility—the "neglected excess that everyone knows about and no one speaks of"—but speaks of it nevertheless, in lovely, exact, mind-broadening philosophical vignettes that make it one of my favorite discoveries of the year, and the one I'm likely to keep by my bedside for years to come. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 29, 2024)

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

by Matthew Walker

Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, has made the one-third netherworld of sleep his life's work, and when you're a reader in his hands, it's hard not to be convinced there's nothing more important to understand than this hallucinatory, death-like interlude that nearly every living organism requires to survive. As he shows, citing study after study of recent research, we don't merely rest during sleep: we repair, we organize, we create, we restock, in our brains and in every cell of our bodies. And, crucially, too few of us (this writer included) give sleep the one-third of our time it deserves—Walker cites insufficient sleep as a contributor not just to exhaustion but to everything from depression to cancer to Alzheimer's. It made for great bedtime reading, except that I felt guilty for not putting it down and letting sleep do its good work. —Tom