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The Process: Oliva Waite and Kitty Cook
Join us for a special romantic edition of our in-house reading series, the Process, on Tuesday, February 11, at 7 pm, with two Seattle romance authors, Olivia Waite, author of The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics and the romance columnist at the Seattle Review of Books, and Kitty Cook, author of the award-winning debut, Sleeping Together.
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New Book of the Week
Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell
I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulgaria, it's also a story of desire, and it's also elegant and intense. But, as a set of connected stories, it's more diffused, and, with a three-story centerpiece called "Loving R.," it's more open to the possibility of joy. Greenwell writes about desire and physical intimacy with a jaw-dropping candor and intelligence, but the most striking thing in this book are the sentences: cascading series of comma splices that (in a manner that might remind readers of Cusk or Sebald, though Greenwell's style is his own) create both an intimate engagement and a melancholy distance for the narrator and ourselves. This feels like life, breathed and lived, and stylishly recalled. —Tom
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New Book of the Week
The Decent Inn of Death (John Madden #6)
by Rennie Airth
Twenty-one years and five books after the release of his exceptional first historical mystery, River of Darkness, Airth continues to devise new investigations for his original Scotland Yard-trained sleuths. This new novel, set in the early 1950s, sends former Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair—currently suffering from heart problems—off to visit friends in the south of England. There he learns about a German church organist, Greta Hartmann, who recently drowned in a stream, supposedly by accident. Greta’s housemate doesn’t believe such codswallop, however, and Sinclair has doubts, too, after learning the deceased had been discomposed by encountering an unidentified man whose car had broken down. Sinclair wonders whether that driver was a Nazi war criminal and killer from Greta’s past. But before he can inquire further, the chief inspector finds himself snowbound at an isolated country manor. Meanwhile, ex-Inspector John Madden pursues his friend Sinclair, increasingly worried for his health and fearing that he may also be at risk from Greta’s murderer. Although it’s slightly compromised by a plotting coincidence, Airth’s latest procedural remains a tightly constructed, classic-style whodunit with a genuine surprise ending. —Jeff (from the Madison Books newsletter)
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Kids' Book of the Week
The Boring Book
by Shinsuke Yoshitake
Yoshitake's Still Stuck, the story of a boy who can't get his shirt off, is one of our very favorite picture books, and in his latest, a child is confronted by an even more common, and more challenging, difficulty: being bored. Turns out being bored can lead you to wonder: what does "boring" really mean? What things are fun and what are boring? Can fun things become boring? Can boring things become fun, once you aren't doing them any more? The Boring Book includes a little everyday philosophy, a handful of coping mechanisms, and whole lot of oddball humor. Not boring at all! (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom
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Non-Book of the Week
Book Cover Puzzles
We love book covers, and we love jigsaw puzzles, so of course (as you can see in our current window display) we are delighted to have a new batch of book-cover puzzles from Re-marks in stock.
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Link of the Week
Comma, Comma, Semicolon, Comma
Want to read more—much more—about Garth Greenwell's sentences? At LitHub, Christian Kiefer has parsed two short sequences from Cleanness with the sort of meticulous attention and interpretation usually reserved for poems a hundred years or more old. They hold up to the close attention.
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Cover Crop Quiz #171
A previous Caldecott medalist, from 1969.
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Last Week's Answer
That's Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, the 1964 first edition, with her composition book just out of sight.
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New to Our 100 Club
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
(496 weeks to reach 100)
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New to Our 100 Club
Baby Beluga
by Raffi
(1172 weeks to reach 100)
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Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
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