|
|
|
|
Old Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Book #97
Love's Work
by Gillian Rose
I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries weight. Rose, a philosopher by profession, doesn't waste words, and among the things she doesn't tell you, until halfway through the book, is that she is dying. She's writing with urgency, then, but you sense that she wrote, and lived, with this clipped, exact intensity her whole life. There are whole sentences and paragraphs so packed with meaning I'm still sorting them out, but I never lose my faith in the clarity of her intention, or my joy at the force of her thinking, especially about those two central elements, love and death, that give life, and her "desperately mortal" life in particular, its greatest meaning. —Tom
|
|
|
Old Book of the Week
Turtle Diary
by Russell Hoban
Turtle Diary has been a favorite book of so many people in my life—and I love Hoban's Frances and Captain Najork books so preposterously much—that I half-felt like I had read it already myself, but, until this month, that was not actually the case. I expected a wry and quiet tale of two lonely people who decide to do something oddly momentous (free sea turtles from a London aquarium), and that is indeed what I got, but no summary and no second-hand report can do justice to the specific strangeness, the specific sadness, and the specific joy of their small adventure, which manages to be thrillingly life-changing and crushingly anticlimactic, all at once. Fans of the modest charms of recent Phinney favorite Leonard and Hungry Paul should pick this up pronto, but expect a few more prickles. —Tom
|
|
|
Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #85A
Animal Land Where There Are No People
by Sybil and Katharine Corbet
Are you familiar with the Weedle, which "has such dainty little ways of pulling up potatos"? Or the Boddles, which "screams and eats candles and soap"? (I hope not.) Or the Ding, which "is so happy. It makes a great Hole in the Park." (I hope so!) If not, I recommend you acquire this little book, a collaboration between Sybil Corbet (a four-year-old), who described the animals, and her mother, Katharine, who drew the pictures and whose age at the time is not reported. It was first published in 1897, when children, apparently, were as kookily creative as they are now and at least some mothers could match them, and it was recently reprinted by a great little outfit in Philadelphia named 50 Watts Books. (Age 1 and up) —Tom
|
|
|
Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #85B
How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen
by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake
I knew how great Russell Hoban was, and I knew, vaguely, that he had written a kids' book with the thrillingly promising title of How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen. So why did it take me so long to track down a copy? I don't know, but when I finally did, it exceeded even my highest expectations, from the captain's preposterous (but somehow believable) sporting competitions to the spot-on anarchy of Quentin Blake's illustrations. And as for its sequel, A Near Thing for Captain Najork, which we also happily have in stock, all I will say is that it features a jam-powered frog as well as the arm-wrestling exploits of Tom's Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork (she recently married the captain). (Ages 5 to infinity) —Tom
|
|
|
Link of the Week
Meet the Archive Moles
It doesn't take long to figure out that some of the books that get many of us here excited are old ones that have been unearthed, and Lucy Scholes, who is doing wonderful work as an editor at the new McNally Editions—her discoveries were responsible last year for both a Phinney by Post pick (They) and one of my Top 10 books (Winter Love)—gives a glimpse of the tireless (and, to me, thoroughly appealing) labors, as well as the serendipity, that go into finding and publishing lost literary gems. (Speaking of archive moles, I can't help but note that my beloved old-book podcast, Backlisted, got a lovely plug in the Seattle Times week, at the top of their list of recommended literary listening.)
|
|
|
Cover Crop Quiz #252
I'm having a hard time tracking down a cover image of the first published edition of this 1946 novel set in the Phillippines, Seattle, and California, so here is a portion (an illustration of the author) of the cover of the 1973 University of Washington edition (the one on my shelf at home).
|
|
|
Last Week's Answer
Quite a few of you (likely all from my exact generation) remembered, and even quoted from, the winner of the 1979 Newbery Medal, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game.
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Boy-Crazy Stacey
(Baby-Sitters Club Graphix #7)
by Ann M. Martin and Gale Gilligan
(174 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
The Dragonet Prophecy (Wings of Fire Graphix #1)
by Tui T. Sutherland and Mike Holmes
(261 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Scythe
by Neal Shusterman
(266 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Little Kunoichi, the Ninja Girl
by Sanae Ishida
(400 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
|
New to Our 100 Club
Hatchet
by Gary Paulsen
(832 weeks to reach 100)
|
|
|
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes we like a front window display of ours so much that it's hard to switch it out for the next one, and that was certainly the case with the Women Holding Things theme (inspired by Maira Kalman's latest book), for which we had no trouble finding cover examples, from Liz Phair holding a pink gun to Queen Elizabeth II holding a corgi. But we've had another idea in the wings for a bit, and no better time for its turn than the birthday week of the late Russell Hoban, who would have turned 98 on Saturday. Hoban, whose storytelling mind expressed itself through an incredibly wide variety of vessels, from the hilariously humane children's tales in the Frances books to the post-apocalyptic linguistic invention of 
Our new window will feature many of our kid/adult favorites over the next couple of weeks, from Tove Jansson (creator of both the Moomin tales and The Summer Book) to Ludwig Bemelmans (the Madeline author, whose books for adults, Hotel Splendide and To the One I Love the Best, are being rereleased in adorable new editions) to Lore Segal (the only author so far chosen for both our Phinney by Post Kids and Phinney by Post subscriptions, for Tell Me a Mitzi and Her First American) to Katherine Rundell (who followed award-winning middle-reader books like Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms and The Wolf Wilder with, last year, an award-winning biography, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne) to Kelly Barnhill (the Newbery Medalist for The Girl Who Drank the Moon who published her first novel for adults last year, When Women Were Dragons) to local heroes like Betty MacDonald (The Egg and I and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle), Ken Jennings (his Junior Genius guides as well as his grown-up investigations like Maphead), and Kenji Lopez-Alt (whose first picture book, Every Night Is Pizza Night, has proved nearly as popular as his cookbooks, Food Lab and The Wok).
Speaking of the Newbery, those of you who woke up earlier than I did on Monday were treated to some surprises in the American Library Association's 
