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