Phinney Books Weekly Newsletter #267

The neighborhood bookstore for Phinney Ridge and Greenwood

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As much as I'd like to talk of other things here, for the second time in two weeks we've changed our way of doing business, so I want to make sure you know how you can keep getting books from us, if you like. In keeping with the governor's Stay at Home order on Monday, we've closed the store and have shifted entirely to online ordering and shipping. (If you're out on a walk, stop by to see Laura's new Where the Wild Things Are mural in our window: we're all Max, stuck in our room, now.) You can still get just about any book you might have gotten from us before, but we'll be doing it in a different way. (And for those of you who already ordered books to pick up at the store: we're getting in touch with you to make sure you get your books, but if you haven't heard from us already, please feel free to email us at info@phinneybooks.com to check in.)

There are two main ways to get your books now:

Ordering through us. If you'd like to order directly from us, the best way, since very little of our inventory is available to order on our own website, is to email us at info@phinneybooks.com. (You can try calling the store, but we're not there regularly, and we're not checking our voice mail.) We'll take your order, can answer questions, and will ship you your books, either from inventory we have at the store or directly from our supplier's warehouse, and send you an email link to pay via Square (which is quite easy, we're told). Our email inbox has been very busy, but we've generally been able to respond within a day.

Ordering through Bookshop. As I've mentioned in previous newsletters, and as we link at the top of our website, we have a new partner for online book ordering called Bookshop.org. If you purchase books there via the Phinney Books store (bookshop.org/shop/phinneybooks), the books are shipped to you directly from that same supplier's warehouse (Ingram, for those of you who know the books business), and we receive 30% of the purchase price. There's been some understandable confusion, so I want to clarify: Bookshop is not our website. We don't fulfill the books, or have any control over that process: we just get a significant portion of the purchases we send there, and—equally importantly to us—we also get the benefit of an easy-to-use place for our customers to order a very wide range of books (far more than we could ever carry in our store). But they also are a very new site, still in their beta phase, and while the ordering process is simple and well-designed, and, from what I've seen, the shipping and delivery of the books works well, they also don't have much of a customer-service side to their business yet. (I know they are building that out as fast as they can.) If you have anything to share about your experience there, we'll be happy to hear it, and of course if you have any trouble ordering there, we want to hear that too. So far, it seems to be working well, and we've been delighted to see how many sales have come through our store there—it really makes a difference in how we can weather these times. (All the book links I've added below go directly to Bookshop, by the way.)

And so the question a number of you have been asking us: which do we prefer you do, order from us, or from Bookshop? The short answer is: we're delighted either way. Our 30% share from Bookshop sales might not seem like that much, but it's really substantial, especially for sales that require almost no work from us, and it's already added up remarkably. Thank you! We do make a little more (generally 40-45%) from sales made directly through us, so we're of course happy to take those orders. And we're also glad that those orders help us keep in touch with you. So my response would be to order the way you prefer, and just know that we are very thankful to be getting you books either way. We've had a fantastic amount of support over the past few weeks, and it means everything to our business, and our place in the neighborhood, over the long term. We fully expect to be here for a long time, and that's all because of you.

Sorry for the lengthy note, but I do want to make the ordering process as easy and clear for you as possible. And I expect we'll be operating under these conditions for more than a week this time, so I won't have to yammer on about the process for a while. Hunker down, surround yourself with good books if you're able, and we'll see you on the other side. And maybe next week we can just talk about books, and not logistics.

Thanks—Tom, Laura, Kim, Liz, Haley, Anika, Doree, and Nancy

New Book of the Week
House Lessons: Renovating a Life
by Erica Bauermeister
Erica Bauermeister's memoir-in-essays is a treasure for anyone who, like me, can't resist the intrigue of an open-house sign. House Lessons beckons you inside a trash-filled hoarder house in Port Townsend, where a family is determined to transform it into a beautiful, memory-filled home. The project proves to be an undertaking that is easier dreamt than done, and Bauermeister is transparent about the frustrations inherent in the process. This book is in part an education in architecture, informative as well as interesting, and its structure is strong enough to hold this story, with its cast of eccentric real-life characters and stranger-than-fiction moments. Told with loving language and such respect, this was a most enjoyable read. —Anika
P.S. As a close family friend, I can personally attest to the remarkable end result of the renovation.

New Book of the Week
The House in the Cerulean Sea
by T.J. Klune
The House in the Cerulean Sea is a heart-swelling wave of sweetness and hope. Mild-mannered government caseworker Linus Baker is sent on a secret assignment to an island orphanage he's never even heard of. The astonishing inhabitants he gets to know there will change his life and make him reassess everything he thought he knew. This book will leave you believing in the good in everyone—even those society has given up on—and contemplating how huge changes have to start somewhere. —Haley

Paperback of the Week
The Fifth Risk
by Michael Lewis
If you're looking for a book that has something useful to say about the current situation that isn't too, you know, on point, look no further. In previous books (The Big Short, Flash Boys, etc.) Lewis took on the issue of deregulation of the financial markets, but in this, his most recent work, he casts a wider net and does a cost-benefit analysis of government as a whole. Embedding himself in the lives of workers in what he expects will be the most superficially dull and least important sectors of the federal system (Agriculture, Energy, etc.), he finds unsung heroes at every turn, displaying expertise and professionalism essential to the smooth functioning of democracy. When asked by an interviewer last year what it would take to remind Americans about the true importance of those qualities, he said, "For people to suddenly start to value what good government does, I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California, or a hurricane in Florida, is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it, something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich. I think that might do it." —James (from the Madison Books newsletter. Tom recommended this book too when it came out in 2018)

Link of the Week
Jeff's History of Seattle Crime Fiction
Over at Madison Books, we are privileged to have as a bookseller one of our city's—and our country's—most knowledgeable experts on crime fiction, Jeff Pierce (who you may remember from Santoro's Books too). His byline, as a crime-fiction critic, is J. Kingston Pierce, and at CrimeReads he has just posted a fascinating account of Seattle's crime-fiction history, including a list of 10 notable novels, most of which were unfamiliar to me.

More Links of the Week
YouTube Storytimes
Among the many book folks turning to the internet to keep children's storytimes going, two for you to choose from this week. In one, Madison Books's own James Crossley does his first video storytime, reading four picture books in front of the Madison shelves. In the other, recorded a decade ago but still available to introduce your children to the highest points of narrative art, there is Christopher Walken, or someone who sounds a whole lot like him, reading Where the Wild Things Are and adding his own commentary: "There's trees in the water—it's crazy."

Cover Crop Quiz #179
Okay, I'm going to be a bit on-the-nose with this 1969 first edition.

Last Week's Answer
Last week's was indeed a toughie, but our only correspondent to answer correctly (Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision: the green beret was the clue, true-crime fans) spiked the ball in the end zone by also naming the book-about-the-book (Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer) that has come to overshadow it.

New to Our 100 Club

The Titan's Curse
by Rick Riordan
(625 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.)

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

New in the Store

Fiction:
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
Lakewood by Megan Giddings
The Last Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

Nonfiction:
Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s by Andy Greene
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich
Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Kids and Teens:
Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang
Warren the 13th and the Thirteen-Year Curse by Tania Del Rio and Will Staehle
The Spirit of Springer: The Real-Life Rescue of an Orphaned Orca by Amanda Abler and Levi Hastings
Child of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana and Raul Colon

Paperback:
Coders by Clive Thompson
Autumn Light by Pico Iyer
The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

This Week in the Letters of Henry James

March 29, 1870
(age 26)
To his brother William on the death of their young friend Minny Temple
"A few short hours have amply sufficed to more than reconcile me to the event & to make it seem the most natural—the happiest, fact, almost in her whole career. So it seems, at least on reflection: to the eye of feeling there is something immensely moving in the sudden & complete extinction of a vitality so exquisite & so apparently infinite as Minny's.... The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought. There she may bloom into a beauty more radiant than our dull eyes will avail to contemplate."

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