Borrowed Copy

Thinking Outside the Bookstore: Bespoke Boxes from A Good Book

From A Good Book in Sumner, WA: We’re doing bespoke blind date boxes as a way to get you the good stuff during this time of anxious separation. Well, suffice to say the bespoke box has been a hit. Enough so that we’ve spent most of the week racing around the store, finding cool things to shove in boxes for you. [From the A Good Book site’s description of the boxes: “Each box comes with appropriately snarky book wraps, as …

Aug 4, 2020

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Aug

3

2020

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Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

A reader could confuse these stories for a novel because they revolve around one family. Told in a variety of narrative styles and criss-crossing generations of a (mostly) Japanese family, this book has an architectural quality in which each room is connected to every other room and in which WWII is the central room and …

Jul

31

2020

Borrowed Copy

Joe Sacco on “Covidstalgia”

Portland author and artist Joe Sacco won a 2014 PNBA Book Award for his 244-page illustrated panorama, The Great War. This month on Lithub, he has a stunning piece about our current crisis and how it might be seen in the future. It is titled Will We One Day Honor the Veterans of the Great …

Jul

30

2020

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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

Two true stories are told side by side here– that of the lead architect of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and that of a serial killer who uses the fair to lure victims to his hotel. Elevating, yet creepy. Yet elevating. Oooh, but creepy. –Diana, Village Books, Bellingham and Lynden, WA It’s not quite …

Jul

29

2020

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A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow

This summer a highly anticipated title is the YA debut by the author of the adult title Mem. Morrow sets her story in a contemporary alternative world where portions of the population have various mythical abilities and identities. Inherent in these identities are built in assumptions and prejudices, the most heightened of which are towards “sirens,” …

Jul

28

2020

Borrowed Copy

Baseball Books– as Compiled by Annie Bloom’s Books

Baseball season is finally here! Check out these new books on America’s pastime. Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original by Mitchell Nathanson From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (1939–2019) was the sports world’s deceptive revolutionary. Underneath the crew cut and behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks lurked a maverick …

Jul

27

2020

Face Out

Murder at the Mena House
by Erica Ruth Neubauer

Jane Wunderly is a young widow in 1926 accompanying her aunt Millie on an adventure to Egypt. They are staying at the wonderful Mena House… The worst Jane would have to deal with, she thought, was her aunt trying to set her up with an available rich man. This will soon be the least of …

Jul

24

2020

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Conversations

Worlds of Collision and Vision: The Sense of Home and Dislocation in David James Poissant’s Novel Lake Life

In The Heaven of Animals, and now in his first novel, Lake Life, award-winning and critically acclaimed author David James Poissant takes readers into the trenches of human relationships. Lake Life, a powerful and driving domestic drama embodies the radiance and speed of a cutthroat trout as well as the glistening underbelly, concealed, tender, life-giving. …

Jul

23

2020

Just Mercy book cover

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

How free are we as Americans if we are living under a justice system that is fundamentally unfair? Bryan Stevenson, founder of Equal Justice Initiative, is an attorney who has successfully defended some of society’s most vulnerable and oppressed people in landmark cases before the Supreme Court. In Just Mercy, he asks us to contemplate …

Jul

22

2020

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Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound translated and edited by Li Hilbert

…we’ve also got Haboo, a collection of tales from the Lushootseed-speaking peoples of the Puget Sound. Drawn from a period of oral traditions, Haboo highlights the Myth Age, a time before the world transformed. These fables feature talking animals, anthropomorphic trees, and wise old rocks, who manage to speak of the human condition without being, you know, human. …

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