On Wednesdays, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Bestseller list is published. Every week, we love to see what has been most popular in independent bookstores around our region. As we peruse the list, we ponder patterns. Then we present this weekly feature: Thursday Themes. We’ve seen a lot of Barbie-pink displays lately, but this week’s bestseller display naturally …
It’s time for a Thursday Theme, where we shine a spotlight on some of the titles featured in this week’s Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional bestseller list. I’m dating myself with my reference to the “Calgon, take me away!” bubble bath ads from the 1980s, but I couldn’t resist as I read through the hardcover bestsellers’ titles. …
It’s time for a Thursday Theme, when we shine a spotlight on some of the titles featured in this week’s Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional bestseller list. Simple shapes can represent many things* or just be abstract design choices. Is that circle a moon? An eye? An alveolus? What are those rectangles doing on the cover? Is …
What a treat it was to read Colson Whitehead’s new book Harlem Shuffle. It is the best trip I have taken during the last year. I did not actually “shuffle” around Harlem in the early 1960s, as that would have included using my feet, but I spent time riding on a truck bed, sometimes accompanied …
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, is out in paperback. . . The Nickel Boys follows Elwood Curtis as he is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy. Curtis falls in with a fellow “delinquent” named Turner, and the novel explores the very different reactions to the terrible system that …
Audiobooks. More specifically, audiobook narrators and the ability of said narrators to make or break an audiobook experience. I was going to try to do this without naming names, but I’ve never before shied away from being upfront about what I don’t like, so why would I now? I think it stemmed from some …
The escape from slavery is one of the most powerful of American stories, but it usually leads in a single direction: north. Whitehead’s railroad, as you might guess from the cover image, doesn’t run in such a straight line. An escape might lead to a greater hell, or to an oddly unsettling heaven. Whitehead doesn’t …
