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The neighborhood bookstore for Phinney Ridge and Greenwood
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I'm back in the store today after a long trip east, which included hometown visiting in DC and its suburbs and, in Baltimore, the annual Winter Institute for independent booksellers, which has grown every year we've been in business, just as the number of independent booksellers continues, improbably, to rise. Outside the conference, I appropriately stopped in at as many bookstores as I could, including Solid State Books, East City Bookshop, Capitol Hill Books, and Kramerbooks in DC and Red Emma's and Charm City Books (only three months old!) in Baltimore. And inside the conference, as always there was too much to digest, but the highlights included visits with authors Ian Williams, Ali Araghi, Philippe Lançon, and the impossibly young and energetic Solomon Goldstein-Rose, a panel on radical black booksellers featuring Paul Coates, whom you may remember from his son Ta-Nehisi's memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and, most memorably, an exchange between Ibram Kendi and Jason Reynolds that made me look forward to reading a YA nonfiction book, their collaboration, Stamped, more than anything else I saw at the conference.

While our conference was ending in Baltimore, the American Library Association meeting was starting in Philadelphia, including the annual highlight of the ALA's awards announcement, including the Caldecott Medal, which went (along with a Newbery Honor citation) to The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson and written by Kwame Alexander, and the Newbery Medal, which went, for the first time, to a graphic novel, Jerry Craft's The New Kid. We currently have both in stock, and, to my surprise, thanks to airport wifi I was able to nab a box of The New Kid before our wholesaler ran out, so we have lots more arriving on Friday. Let us know if you'd like one set aside.

 
Thanks—Tom, Laura, Kim, Liz, Haley, Anika, Doree, and Nancy
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.
Cleanness
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
The Decent Inn of Death
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)
The Boring Book
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
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.
Semicolons
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.
Cover Quiz #171
Cover Crop Quiz #171
A previous Caldecott medalist, from 1969.
Cover Quiz #170 answer
Last Week's Answer
That's Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, the 1964 first edition, with her composition book just out of sight.
The Name of the Wind
New to Our 100 Club

The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
(496 weeks to reach 100)
New to Our 100 Club

Baby Beluga
by Raffi
(1172 weeks to reach 100)



Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
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New on Our Resist List
(See this week's full list.
20% of sales go to the ACLU.)


Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes
New in the Store


Fiction:
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
Agency by William Gibson
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston


Nonfiction:
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism by Kyle Chayka
Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman


Kids and Teens:
Bedtime for Sweet Creatures by Nikki Grimes and Elizabeth Zunon
From the Desk of Zoe Washington by Janae Marks
Lawrence: The Bunny Who Wanted to Be Naked by Vern Kousky
The Best of Iggy by Annie Barrows and Sam Ricks


Paperback:
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison
Inheritance by Dani Shapiro
The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin (in Nancy's and Doree's 2019 Top 10s)
Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse #8) by James S.A. Corey
This Week in Primo Levi's The Reawakening


January 27, 1945
(age 25, the day of his liberation from Auschwitz)
"So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. Because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it."
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