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Seven More Months of Ridge Reading
The Ridge Readers, our in-house book club, had their semi-annual "Picks Night" last month and laid out their next seven months (thanks to a tie in the voting) of reading. Newcomers always welcome (let us know if you are interested) and perhaps by the end of the seven months they'll be meeting in the bookstore again:
- January 19: The Good Rain, Timothy Egan
- February 16: Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (on LIz's Top 10 list!)
- March 16: Why Fish Don't Exist, Lulu Miller
- April 20: Eager, Ben Goldfarb
- May 18: Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard (on Tom's all-time Top 10 list!)
- June 15: Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell
- July 20: Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum
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Liz's 2021 Top 10
You can get a sense of Liz's reading when the only 2021 release in her 2021 top 10 is a collection of ghost stories about old English country houses. She followed many paths into the past this year (including her delighted discovery of that English country favorite, Cold Comfort Farm), but her favorites are dominated by two pairs from the same author: a recently reprinted wartime memoir and novel by Margaret Kennedy and, most passionately, a classic novel and a collection of sadly prescient reporting from that Mitteleuropa master, Joseph Roth.
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Kim's 2021 Top 11
After a top 10 last year that was almost entirely a celebration of a single author (the celebration-worthy Annie Ernaux), Kim's favorites of 2021 range all over the place, from the tiny (A.L. Snijders's "very short stories") to the massive (the first volume of Proust's epic of memory), from Wyoming to the Pine Barrens, from the lonely to the undocumented, and with a couple of new books by old favorites (Jo Ann Beard and Rachel Cusk) too.
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Tom's 2021 Top 12
The flood of great fall fiction threatened to take over my 2021 favorites, with big books from Jonathan Franzen, Gayl Jones, and Atticus Lish, as well a sweet and odd little one by Tamara Shopsin, elbowing their way into my top twelve in recent months. But my favorite book of the year was still an older book I read early on and made our March Phinney by Post pick: Aminatta Forna's memoir of a childhood in Scotland and Sierra Leone, The Devil That Danced on the Water, a child's story of living through the upheavals of history.
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Haley's 2021 Top 10
Eclectic as always, Haley's 2021 top ten is not as kid-focused as in some years, but it does include Esme Shapiro's wonderfully kooky picture book, Carol and the Pickle Toad, as well as memoirs by Michelle Zauner and Grace M. Cho, novels by Anna North and Dolly Alderton, Claire Keegan's new Christmas tale, and two additions to her ongoing appreciation of the works of Helene Hanff and Russell Hoban.
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Anika's 2021 Top 10
Some years, Anika sets strict rules for her reading (and rumor has it she's planning something similar for 2022), but her 2021 reading was wide-open. What were her favorites? There are how to live (and how to die) books by Jenny Odell, Jonny Sun, and Caitlyn Doughty, boundary-crossing books for young readers by Molly Knox Ostertag and Elizabeth Wein, and adult novels about young adults by Emma Jane Unsworth, Ciara Smyth, and (especially beloved) Emily Austin. And, surprisingly, only one book about chickens.
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Doree's 2021 Top 11
Doree gobbles up the publishers' advance copies we get faster than anyone around here, so putting together her 2021 top 11 was particularly hard, because she has to save some of her favorite reads from this year for next year's list, when the books actually come out. But she still had plenty of recommendations left for this year's list, all fiction except for Allie Brosh's pair of graphic memoirs, and especially featuring twisty thrillers by Mary Kubica, Laura Lippman, Jane Harper, Alice Feeney, and more.
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Nancy's 2021 Top 10
When one book on Nancy's 2021 top ten is called Let's Talk About Hard Things and another is subtitled "(And Other Truths I Need to Hear)," you can get an idea of what she looks for in reading. She also found those hard truths (skillfully delivered) in Sarah Ruhl's memoir, Smile, and a range of new novels from Sally Rooney, Meg Mason, Peter Ho Davies, and others, including that master of fictional lives examined, Elizabeth Strout.
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Link of the Week
"The Abortion I Didn't Have"
In a week when the Supreme Court signaled—almost gleefully—that it will likely be overturning Roe v. Wade, I'll link to an essay in the latest New York Times Magazine by Merritt Tierce—whose only novel, Love Me Back, is still one of the best books I've read since the store opened—whose moving and nuanced account of her unwanted teenage pregnancy can be summarized in one sentence: "I love my son, and I am not at peace with the sacrifice I was required to make."
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Cover Crop Quiz #225
A paperback first edition from 1984..
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Last Week's Answer
That terrible cover, with a prominent blurb from then-prominent Alfred Kazin that ends, "It locates the American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage," is from the first edition of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road.
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New to Our 100 Club
The Unseen
by Roy Jacobsen
(86 weeks to reach 100)
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New to Our 100 Club
The Story of Ferdinand
by Munro Leaf
(986 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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And even more surprisingly to me, you might say the same thing about the New York Times Book Review's 
Speaking of which, we note that our colleagues over at Madison Books have been sharing their top 10 lists as well. They have posted all their lists on their 
