Phinney Books Weekly Newsletter #268

The neighborhood bookstore for Phinney Ridge and Greenwood

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Remote greetings to you all. We've been very glad to have stayed busy with email orders and to see the orders through our store on Bookshop.org continue to pile up incredibly high. Thank you so much.

We've almost been too busy to think of new ways to keep in touch with each other in these socially-distant times, but we do have one thing we'd like to try: sharing recommendations from our customers. It's something we've had in the backs of our minds to do for a while—in fact, when we first opened, we often asked customers to write their own "shelf-talkers" and posted them around the store. But now, we'd like to be a little more organized about it, and so we've created a page on our site where you can submit a short book recommendation. There's more information about it there, but basically, we're just asking for a 20- to 120-word recommendation (we're not calling them reviews, because we're just looking for you to share books you've liked). And then we'll post them (with just your first name) on our Bookshop lists, and hopefully on our own site and—on that blessed day when we can welcome you back into our store—on our shelves as well.

Our first thought was that this would be for kids' books, for a couple of reasons: because cooped-up kids (and their cooped-up parents) might be eager right now for some constructive activity, and, more importantly, because we're asked most often for kids' book recommendations and there's no recommendation more convincing than one from another kid. So we'd especially love to see reviews from middle-grade and teen readers come in. But we'd love to hear from grownup readers too—about any books you love, but especially the ones we always want to hear about: the books you think nobody else might know about.

This is just an experiment, like many of the improvisations we're all undertaking these days, but I hope it'll be a fun one, and one that helps all of you find even more books you want to read.

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

New: Instagram Live Storytime with Haley!

Okay—one more experiment! For those of you who remember when Haley used to do Tuesday storytimes, she is going to bring her songs and picture books back for a virtual storytime on Instagram Live. Visit our Instagram page on Saturday, April 4, at 11 am Pacific time, and bring your cooped-up toddlers! Perhaps if this works, we can figure out how to bring Steph, our Friday storyteller, on board, virtually, soon too.

New Book of the Week
The Man in the Red Coat
by Julian Barnes
Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi, the subject of the Sargent painting adapted for the cover—it's really a portrait of an age, the French Belle Epoque, a world of dandies and duels, of beauty and rage, tied together by images from the Félix Potin trading cards, collectibles found in department-store chocolates celebrating the 500 most famous figures of the time. Barnes is a graceful and thoughtful inquisitor, but the best part of the book is Pozzi himself, once-famous, now-forgotten, a charismatic, brilliant, innovative, and flawed figure who is a delight to have unearthed from history. —Tom

New Book of the Week
The Glass Hotel
by Emily St. John Mandel
Yes, I know that Station Eleven is one of the most brilliant and entertaining books about a pandemic ever written, but I swear, it's a coincidence that I'm recommending another book by Emily St. John Mandel this week. Her latest novel has at last been published, and it's one that I've been waiting a while to be able to tell you about. It has the sort of plot that's the right amount of tricky, not overly complicated but with enough surprises that I don't want to spoil any. Suffice to say that the author has said that her working title for the book was Ghosts and Money, and that the characters within it are haunted by both, metaphorically and just possibly literally. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Paperback of the Week
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Normal People, while a coming-of-age novel about first love, is not a romance. The story is written with insight into two protagonists, Marianne and Connell, which lends a sort of he-said, she-said quality to the narrative. Each chapter moves us a little deeper into what each of them is thinking and feeling. Each chapter is also a time jump, advancing us as little as five minutes or as much as seven months into the future. In this novel, character is plot, and I found it both fascinating and frustrating to observe Marianne and Connell and the way they often talked but failed to communicate. Rooney’s simple yet distinct writing style, filled with comma splices and no quotation marks, took some getting used to but eventually began to sound like a friend telling a story: life-like, intimate, vulnerable. I’m impressed and grateful not to be offended that Sally Rooney has been called the voice of my generation. —Anika (Tom liked it too last year, even though it's not his generation)

Links of the Week
Spring Prizes
Longtime readers know that we like to follow the annual Tournament of Books, but I admit that both Liz and I lost track of the proceedings with everything else happening this month, but in the meantime they've awarded a Rooster: despite plenty of upsets, including a run to the finals by Maria Gainza's little novel, Optic Nerve, you'll see that the final vote agreed with Anika's assessment above. Meanwhile, the just-announced (very) long lists for the Best Translated Book Award don't include Optic Nerve, but they do include a number of Phinney favorites: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Death Is Hard Work, Stalingrad, The Memory Police, and Animalia, recommended by Liz, which also this week won the relatively new Republic of Consciousness prize, which honors the best from the fantastic UK small-press scene.

Cover Crop Quiz #180
A 2010 first edition. Note the Phinney-like amusement park in the background.

Last Week's Answer
Michael Crichton's breakout (literally) 1969 bestseller, The Andromeda Strain.

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.)

As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change by Solomon Goldstein-Rose

New in the Store

Fiction:
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon
August by Callan Wink
Artforum by Cesar Aira

Nonfiction:
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
The NRA: The Unauthorized History by Frank Smyth
I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir by Esther Safran Foer
All I Ever Wanted: A Rock'n'Roll Memoir by Kathy Valentine
Always Home: A Daughter's Recipes & Stories by Fanny Singer
Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking by Duncan Minshull

Kids and Teens:
Your Nose! by Sandra Boynton
Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry
Oops! by Mack Gageldonk

Paperback:
Good Talk by Mira Jacob (in Tom's 2019 Top 12)
Everything in Its Place by Oliver Sacks
The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

This Week in Virginia Woolf's Diaries

Thursday, March 28, 1929
(age 47)
"Old age is withering us; Clive, Sibyl, Francis—all wrinkled & dusty; going over the hoops, along the track. Only in myself, I say, forever bubbles this impetuous torrent. So that even if I see ugliness in the glass, I think, very well, inwardly I am more full of shape & colour than ever. I think I am bolder as a writer. I am alarmed by my own cruelty with my friends. Clive, I say, is intolerably dull. Francis is a runaway milk lorry."

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