Phinney Books Weekly Newsletter #269

The neighborhood bookstore for Phinney Ridge and Greenwood

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Well, we're all settling into this, aren't we, uncomfortably or not? It is a small blessing not to have to entirely reinvent our business this week, and just stick with the same improvisations we've cobbled together so far. But boy, we would love to be able to see you all in person over the counter again. This beautiful spring week might be the first in which we would have kept the door open all day—always a small happy annual event for us. But we'll at least take the blessing of being able to step outside and enjoy the sun for a bit.

In the meantime, we'd like to thank the first among you who took us up on our request for customer recommendations last week. (Just a reminder: here's where you can submit them: our Recommend a Book page.) We had a nice first round of reviews, including two by published authors we're happy to also call customers (although we'll keep to our first-name-only policy on the recommendations). A good number of kids-book recommendations so far, but only one by an actual kid—we'd love to get more!—who happens to be the same kid whose review of Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, featured soon after our opening, remains our all-time favorite. We look forward to getting enough recommendations that we can organize them in the kinds of topical categories that are most helpful for book shoppers, but for the time being, we've posted two lists on Bookshop: Customer Recommendations: Books for Kids and Teens and Customer Recommendations: Books for Grownups. We'll add your reviews as they come in. Thanks!

And let's talk Bookshop. As we've said before, we are delighted to have this option for customers to get books easily and still support us, and the number of books that have been bought through our store is remarkable. (Just a reminder we get credit for any book you buy there after visiting our store, not just the ones on our lists.) Thank you! The number is large enough that we can even tally up a bestseller list. So what have Phinney people been buying there so far? Well, the top two, and four of the top six, are all from the list of my 2019 favorites: The Dishwasher, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Deep River, and Girl, Woman, Other. (The other two are hot new releases The Glass Hotel and Wow, No Thank You.) I could credit that to my excellent taste, but I'm sure it's mainly that that list is at the top of our page. Regardless, it's especially thrilling to see The Dishwasher, an excellent debut novel from Montreal that hasn't gotten nearly the attention of the other book published by its small press, Biblioasis, last summer (Ducks, Newburyport), find so many new homes, especially since I've always had a hard time getting folks to try it in the store.

But just as in the store, it's equally fun for me, alongside the bestsellers, to see the vast range of books that people want to read. Just to take a few, nearly randomly, from the Ws in our Bookshop orders: the 1975 picture book Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears, the kids' nonfiction book Why Is Art Full of Naked People: And Other Vital Questions About Art, and book #4 in the Noodle Shop mystery series, Wonton Terror. It's the books that make us individuals, as well as the ones we read together, that makes this business so eternally interesting.

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

New Book of the Week
Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker
In a drought-stricken California town, a teenage girl grows up in thrall to her troubled single mother and a pastor with a cultish power over his flock, struggling to assert autonomy over her mind, soul, and body. Debut novelist Bieker employs muscular language and Technicolor imagery with the deftness of a seasoned pro in creating what might be an entirely new genre, Central Valley Gothic. And from the department of small victories comes this news: while many books are being postponed this spring, the publisher of Godshot decided to grace readers with it ahead of schedule. More than a few of you will be grateful for the extra time you get to spend in the grip of its feverish intensity. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New Paperback of the Week
Afternoon of a Faun
by James Lasdun
These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly as Lasdun about how people think, and his narrator—an acquaintance of both the he and the she—recounts what he is told as well as how he processes that information. While we live with the optimism and anxiety caused by a tectonic cultural shift, when masses of received wisdom are breaking up and new standards haven’t quite solidified, it’s crucial to examine not just ideas but the motives and emotions that undergird them. Lasdun’s novella has the plotting and pacing of a thriller, each revelation causing you to reexamine the situation and your own assumptions—even after you finish it! But it’s his sly wit and quietly elegant prose—shot through with images of surprising aptness (he also writes poetry)—that elevate this ripped-from-the-headlines story into a thoroughly satisfying reading experience. —Liz (her original review from April 2019)

Kids' Book of the Week
Great
by Sara Benincasa
Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Hampton home. Naomi’s status-obsessed mother encourages her to mingle with the popular, elite crowd, including senator’s daughter and aspiring model Delilah Fairweather and her boyfriend Teddy, who never skips an opportunity to wax nostalgic about his career as a child actor. But Naomi is more interested in studying for her SATs and reading Save Me the Waltz than being social until she meets her next door neighbor, Jacinta: fashion blogger, thrower of lavish parties, and card-carrying member of the Delilah Fairweather fan club. Benincasa captures the mood, pacing, and drama of the original and cleverly updates the story with modern technology, social media, and gender swapping. The result is charming and fun, especially in picking out parallels between the two texts. I wish my high school English teacher had assigned this! —Anika (see our Bookshop list of other modern retellings of classics)

Links of the Week
Listen to LeVar and Julie
Two voices many of us grew up with have launched new storytelling podcasts into these strange times: LeVar Burton (Roots's Kunta Kinte to people of my generation, the host of Reading Rainbow to folks younger than me) is a half-dozen episodes into a new series of reading the "best short fiction" for grownups, while Julie Andrews (uh, Mary Poppins, but also the author of kids' favorites like The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles) is starting a new series with her daughter (and co-author), reading "favorite current children's books" together.

Cover Crop Quiz #181
A UK 2001 first edition, with an image also in use in the current US paperback.

Last Week's Answer
That's Robert Mapplethorpe's hat, hair and scarf, and the Coney Island roller coaster, on the cover of Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids.

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.)

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior
Afropessimism by Frank Wilderson

New in the Store

Fiction:
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez
Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang
To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek
Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Nonfiction:
Lummi: Island Cooking by Blaine Wetzel
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
Midwest Futures by Phil Christman
My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes by Hooni Kim
Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Blythell

Kids and Teens:
The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead
Bigfoot Baby! by Elias Barks and Meg Hunt
The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes by Peter Brown (in paperback)
Blended by Sharon Draper (in paperback)
A Heart in a Body in the World by Deb Caletti (in paperback)

Paperback:
Spring by Ali Smith
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux
Capital by Robert Menasse
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

This Week in Duncan Hannah's 20th Century Boy

April 1974
(age 21)
"I go downstairs to Cinemabilia to say hi to Richard Hell, who wears Godardian dark glasses, has unruly hair, nicotine-stained teeth, and fleshy lips. Big sloppy grin. He's a runaway from Kentucky. He's only been playing bass for six months, but Television is sounding better and better. Lenny Kaye called them 'the golden apple at the top of the tree.' Danny said, 'They're finally here, in full pathological innocence.' ... Being a student of pop history, I had always regretted being born too late for the birth of scenes like the Who at the Marquee or the Stones at Eel Pie Island. But maybe this embryonic scene is mine. I'm at the right place, at the right time, at the right age. This is our music!"

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