|
|
|
|
Ridge Readers Book Club: The Overstory
 Our in-house book club, the Ridge Readers, returns for the new year, on Wednesday, January 15, to discuss Richard Powers's novel The Overstory (as it happens, our bestselling book of 2019). Come join them—newcomers always welcome. (Next month's book: Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.)
|
|
Old Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Book #60
Golden Days
by Carolyn See
This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is in See's sentences: as swervy, surprising, and suddenly breathtaking as the hairpin turns of the Topanga Canyon road on which her narrator, post-divorce, finds a home in the midst of the particular LA excess of the era. As I emailed the friend who had tipped me off to this forgotten gem, after reading the jaw-dropping first dozen pages, "Joan Didion is reading this and thinking, 'I'm getting left in the dust." Rediscover this crazy and wonderful book, as we approach our own apocalypse(s). —Tom
|
|
|
Old Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Book #61
Oil Notes
by Rick Bass
This is a young man's book, written at a particular time (the late '80s) about a subject that, in our own time, is almost impossible not to see in a different way. Before Bass moved to remote Montana for a career as an environmental writer and activist, he worked as an oil geologist in Mississippi. A contradiction between environment and oil? Not entirely, when you look at the mysteries of the earth in the way Bass does here, curious about what you can learn about millions of years of geologic history and youthfully confident in wagering thousands of dollars of other people's' money to find out more. Bass may now see the earth in a different way, but the life-loving exuberance of these early notes will make you appreciate the appeal of roughneck prospecting. —Tom
|
|
|
Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #48
A Million Dots
by Sven Völker
There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between linear and exponential growth, doubling from one dot to a million (actually, 1,048,576 to be exact) in just 21 page spreads. Your young reader might not fully understand the math, but they'll sure love all the dots. (Age 2 and up) —Tom
|
|
|
Link of the Week
Sonny Mehta, 1942-2019
I've noted the passing here of book editors who were well-known in publishing but not elsewhere. The same might be said of Sonny Mehta, who died just before the end of the year, but he was in another league entirely: the most powerful person in publishing for the two decades I've been the business, and admired affectionately by nearly everyone who called him "Sonny" whether they knew him or not. (See the NYT obituary, and his writers' reminiscences.) He published everyone from Morrison and Ishiguro to Stieg Larsson and the 50 Shades trilogy with equal skill and enthusiasm. He was also the coolest cat in town, and surely the last to exercise smoking privileges at the Knopf offices.
|
|
|
Cover Crop Quiz #169
The most recently published book we've done in quite some time.
|
|
|
Last Week's Answer
A cover I remember finding quite disturbing on library spinner racks in the early '80s: the 1979 mass-market paperback edition of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
The Fifth Season
by N.K. Jemisin
(177 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
by Grace Lin
(456 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (paperback)
by J.K. Rowling
(702 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We're also looking forward to our first in-house event of the new year: the return next Tuesday, January 14, at 7 pm of our monthly reading series, the Process, featuring a superb lineup of three Seattle poets. Alex Gallo-Brown is a writer and labor organizer whose recent collection of poems and stories, Variations of Labor, from Chin Music Press, has been praised by both the 
