Hello friends, and welcome to another installment of A Good Book’s most excellent roundup of what’s new in bookland. We will be celebrating glorious new titles, reads that will transport you to fantastic places, and titles that will transform you into magnificent butterflies that will soar to such heights. We’ll change—
Ding! We’ve hit our superlative quota for the year. We can now get back to our regular programming. Sorry to show up with an overabundance of enthusiasm. It’s not that this week’s books don’t warrant such glee; it’s more that if you start strong, where do you have to go? And yes, we know it’s awfully early to start that strong.
So, let’s all take a deep breath. That’s right. Hold it. Now, let it out. All the way out. Okay, good. Ready?
Yo. ‘sup? Got some books. Want ‘em?
Like, uh, this one here by that wicked smart thriller lady, Tana French. Yeah, it’s called The Hunter, and it’s about bad stuff happening to people who don’t deserve it. But that’s life, you know? All sorts of bad things happen to good folk. Some people like writing about it. Some people like reading about it. Whatevers. It’s got a nice cover. Looks like the view of my auntie’s place that one summer when the sky was on fire. Talk about bad things.
Anyway, French’s new novel is a story about family, revenge, and what happens when not everyone is on the same page. Metaphorically speaking.
Meanwhile, one of the world’s most famous drag queens has a memoir out this week. Rupaul’s The House of Hidden Meanings is a revealing and poignant memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer, and how Ru opted to not be defined by any of those things. Publically, he makes it all look easy, but privately, the struggle is real, and The House of Hidden Meanings is a story of courage and compassion (especially for oneself) that is instantly recognizeable and totally relatable. Recommended.
And speaking of revelations of the hidden workings of things, here is Maya Wei-Haas’s What a Rock Can Reveal: Where They Come From and What They Tell Us About Our Planet. We’re going to spoiler a bit of this for you: rocks come from outer space. Well, once upon a time. Since then, they’ve been beaten and squeezed and stretched and vomited out of the mouths of volcanic gods and pummeled by young apprentices who were tasked with beating a hole in a mountain to prove their worthiness. Wei-Haas, with the assistance of colorful art by Sonia Pulido, explores the orgins of various types of rocks, and how they reflect the impressive geological processes that have created this planet. Fun for all ages!
And speaking of fun (but not necessarily for all ages), Simone St. James is back this week with Murder Road. Hey, guess what? There’s a stretch of road called the Atticus Line, and when a young couple accidentally pick up a hitchhiker, they stumble into a world where folks die—often—along that road, and the why and the what-for may be way more supernatural than anyone wants to talk about.
This is either a setup for a cozy mystery series or the beginning of a folk horror novel. It can go either way right up to the point where you realize you’re staying at the Bender Family B & B.
And look! Here’s another novel from Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter That Broke All the Records. The Sunlit Man is a Cosmere novel—Sanderson’s enormously expansive cross-pollinating megaverse—but in this one, we’re way out in the future. This fellow, Nomad, has been skipping through the Cosmere for years, trying to stay ahead of some nefariously named “Night Brigade,” and he’s recently ended up on a planet known as Canticle. His powers to hop and skip across time and space are running out, and Canticle isn’t that fun of a place to be. Not only is the place run by a heartless tyrant (aren’t they all?), but the planet’s so close to the sun that sunrise will literally melt your face off. Look, it’s The Running Man meets The Time Machine with a little bit of Crank, that Jason Statham movie where he had to keep his adrenaline flowing in order to stay alive.
(Nod to local Danny Schlitz, whose art graces the cover. Well done, Danny!)
If that sounds like an entirely too stressful a read, here’s Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Newport has been banging on about how the seductive allure of our small screens and social media dopamine hits has entirely wrecked our abilities to, you know—what’s that? No, we didn’t open eight more tabs when sourcing a bit of a thing about a thing a little while ago—where were we? Oh, yes: Cal Newport and his call for Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. Well, now he’s got a new angle: cool your jets. Working from a litany of creative philosophers, artists, and scientists, Newport lays down some advice for getting off the hamster wheel of life and finding your way to a more natural, more humane state of productivity.
This book will be the year’s most awkward Christmas gift. “So, what are you trying to tell me?” “Nothing. Thanks for the slippers.”
And speaking of Christmas presents, here’s James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool. It’s the history of jazz, specifically 1959, when these three—Miles, Coltrane, and Evans—recorded Kind of Blue. Of course, it’s not just about the making of that record, but also about the time and place and what came before and what happened after. It’s the sort of deep dive musicography that’ll rewire your brain and send you combing the record bins.
More importantly, if you pick up a copy now, you can be done in time to give it to someone else at Christmas, because you’re going to want to talk about it. Plan accordingly.
Also out this week is Thunder Song, a new collection of essays by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. Like Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, Thunder Song explores themes relating to indigenous identity, cultural displacement, and environmental degradation, while encouraging the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty. LaPointe's first book won a Pacific Northwest Book Award, the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction/Memoir, and was an NPR Best Book of the Year. We expect Thunder Song to as warmly and richly received.
We noticed that Russell Banks has a new book out this week, but the cover is so terrible we can’t even. Instead, we’ll note that the third book in Kimberly Lemming’s Mead Mishaps rom-com fantasy series is out this week.
That’s right. That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human. It’s got dragons and princesses and self-reliant protagonists. Everything you need for a good time.
(We’ve put the Russell Banks book on the bookshop.org list for this week. You can go stare wide-eyed at the cover over there.)
More Calvin & Hobbes this week, by the way. The second volume of the portable compendium is out. Plan accordingly.
Percival Everett’s God's Country is rereleased this week. Everett’s work has been getting some attention lately with the recent film American Fiction (based on Everett's novel Erasure), starring Jeffrey Wright. God’s Country is Everett’s take on the Western, which stars one Curt Marder, a “gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer.” He’s also a coward, and when a band of no-good marauders pillages his home and kill his family, he’s only of “half a mind” to do something about it. However, he does manage to get up the gumption to hire the best tracker in the territory, a black man named Bubba. The rest . . . well, it’s Everett, and while you may not know where the book is planning to go, the ride will be something else.
And finally, we’re down to the last few weeks for nominations in James Patterson’s latest efforts to pad the pockets of booksellers. The nomination form is here, and this week we’re going to highlight Jen Edwards and Scott Nicholas, who self-classify as lurkers.
Jen’ll pop up during events and the occassional week when the rest of us have been pinned at home beneath fallen stacks of books we haven’t read. She’s also a key part of our book club and writing club. None of us would remember what the heck we’ve read or where we left off in our latest project without Jen. She likes to read about magic skeletons, people wearing masks, some damn book that Teppo forgot he wrote, and a bazillion other genres. Just ask her!
Scott’s been part of the bookstore since it opened—not because he’s related to the boss (though he is), but because it’s a tesselating wormhole of opportunities and possiblities. Scott helps out with the hidden infrastructure of the store—the mailing, the shrinkity-wrapping, the making of wooden bits and bobs that prop up this and that. He’s a fan of Star Wars, roleplaying games, and informative books from Thames & Hudson—most of which he’s memorized. If the store is ever swept up by a tornado and transported somewhere else, Scott’ll be the one who will rearrange it back the way it was. The rest of us will get trapped under stacks of our making.
Previous mentions of our booksellers can be found here (Mark), here (Rich & Betsey), and here (Beckey and Evelyn). Please continue to nominate the booksellers who have made a difference. Again, the nomination form is here.
