This week, booksellers from around the country with a specific interest in children’s books gathered in New Orleans for the American Booksellers Association’s annual Children’s Institute, an annual educational conference that was hosted last year in Portland. I attended in my role as children’s book buyer for Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle, but I …
Dinner at the Center of the Earth is a real tour de force with an unforgettable cast of characters: Prisoner Z who has gone from being a Mossad agent to traitor, a comatose general (who may be Sharon), the guard’s mother who could star in her own story. Many questions are posed and the answers, …
Yesterday was World Read Aloud Day, but at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle every third Monday of the month, grown-ups get their own read-aloud time! (Ravenna Third Place also offers a more traditional kids’ storytime today and every Friday at 11:00.) We were delighted to read all about the adults-only read-aloud recurring event, Grown-Up Storytime, …
A half a million glass photographic plates hold the only visual record of the night sky between 1885 and 1992. This dazzles me and I’m not an astronomer. It dazzles me even more to learn that a group of dedicated women (mostly unpaid) spent decades attending to these glass slides with utmost dedication well before …
Did you know that the second Monday of the month (in March, the 14th) at 7 pm, Seattle’s Ravenna Third Place Books hosts Magic Mondays? Each show features the Pacific Northwest’s finest magicians performing feats of mystery, wonder, and the bizarre. With its origins in the theaters of London and New York, Magic Monday is …
The story line is quite simple: Genly Ai has arrived on the planet Winter in an effort to enlist the people in a growing association of intergalactic civilizations. There are many layers to this classic science fiction novel, but foremost is the exploration of gender roles. On this planet, the people are androgynous and sexless …
Summer is here and baseball is in full swing. The greatest game has the written rules of the umpires and the unwritten code of the players. Turbow’s book sheds light on the Code using hilarious anecdotes of players past and present; tracking the evolution of the Baseball’s Code to the modern era. This book had …
“Populated with dreamers, artists, and writers, this fun novel gives a glimpse of an exciting time, as revolutionary ideas are brought the to screen and women gain independence at home and at work.” –Emily Adams, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA Sounds like Funny Girl would pair very nicely with a copy of Rad American …
“My favorite trilogy of 2014! Now collected in an eye-catching single volume. Vandermeer’s words read as if horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft and film director Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a script together. Gift the journey into Area X to a science fiction reader this holiday season.” —Alex, Ravenna Third Place, Seattle. Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, three-in-one, available from …
“If you haven’t read D’Ambrosio before this is a good place to start. These essays, many of which appeared in the Stranger, are intense. His writing is immediate; full of a love of language, probing and wide-ranging. He writes of suicide; the puzzling aspects of experience; family and its fragility. D’Ambrosio is a rare talent …
