Phinney Books Weekly Newsletter #191

The neighborhood bookstore for Phinney Ridge and Greenwood

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There's been enough going on this month that I was in danger of forgetting our birthday. It also may be that we've settled into what we do so thoroughly by now that our anniversaries, now that we've had four of them, don't feel quite as momentous as they once did. But four years old we are (as of last Wednesday, June 20), and we are thoroughly grateful that you have all made those wonderful years possible.

Our traditional method of marking the year is to add up our bestselling books over that time, and you can see our top 50 books from June 2017 to June 2018 on display in our front window, and our top 100 listed on our site. (The top 10 are pictured here.) The first thing we all noticed in looking at the list: what a group of good books! Again, thank you: it's such a joy to be able to take chances in what we buy for the store, and stack interesting and challenging books high on our tables, because we know people will give them a try. (Of course, when I say "challenging" I'm referring mainly to Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kitties as well as Dog Man and Cat Kid.) And great to see three Seattle authors in our top four books, including Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race, easily our top-selling book in 2018 so far. And we take special pleasure in some of the books whose success, we assume, is relatively particular to our store: The Secret Lives of Color at #10, Ghosts of Seattle Past at #27, Liz's pick Reservoir 13 at #35, our Resist List-mainstay The U.S. Constitution Explained at #49, The Long Haul at #65, Golden Hill at #72, and, of course, the book I still can't shut up about, Joan London's The Golden Age at #14, after finishing at #17 last year.

You might notice something new on top of the shelves behind our counter (no, not the giant stacks of unshelved books—those are always there): our new t-shirts from Slow Loris. Do you know Slow Loris? They are a little clothing company on Guemes Island, whose shirts you can usually only find at fairs like Urban Craft Uprising or their tiny store in the bowels of the Pike Place Market. We love their designs, and recently, after a friend of the company spotted me wearing one of their shirts in the store, they suggested we start carrying them here, one shirt at a time. We thought it was a great idea! So each month we'll bring in a small supply of one t-shirt design, in a variety of unisex sizes, and it seemed fitting to start with this one, both because that orange crab has been my favorite shirt for years and because, as those of us with late-June birthdays know, we're in the season of Cancer the crab. So come in and get one while they last, and keep your eye out for our next featured design! It's a bit of an experiment for us, but we love getting the chance to share the work of one of our favorite local businesses.

One last note: next week we're taking one of our few store holidays, so we'll be closed as usual on July 4. And to make it a real holiday, I'm taking a week off from the newsletter as well. Back in touch on July 11!

Thanks—Tom, Laura, Kim, Liz, Haley, and Molly

New Book of the Week
There There
by Tommy Orange
Where? Oakland, mostly: the center of a dozen or so lives, all of them Native American by some calculation, though each is working to define that for themselves. They are, in Orange's words, "Urban Indians," knowing city streets better than any other landscape, but few of them feel at home anywhere. As in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (or, closer to home, Donna Miscolta's Hola and Goodbye), their stories are loosely threaded together by family and circumstance, and in this case by the inaugural Big Oakland Powwow, where their paths converge. In his debut, Orange is expert at managing the form and chaos of his fully populated novel (often, the chaos wins), but he is most masterful at opening himself to the pain and yearning of these voices, as if each of them were gasping for air through his. —Tom

Old Book of the Week
Salvage King, Ya!: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque
by Mark Anthony Jarman
One small pleasure of bookselling is discovering that an old favorite of yours, which you had for some reason assumed was unavailable, is in fact still in print. That was the case recently with this 1997 novel, which I was delighted to see is still available from its small Canadian press, so I rashly ordered a handful. Jarman's better known as a short story writer, but this novel, his only one, about a journeyman hockey pro who inherits his family's junkyard and balances (or, rather, careens between) three women, is a wonder. I'm quoted (anonymously) on the back cover as saying it's "funny, cluttered, driven, as if Denis Johnson had written a hockey novel," and I stand by that very high praise. It's so full of everything: love, chaos, hockey, ambition, inertia. Open any page and a sentence will floor you. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week
Find Colors
by Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford
You may remember Shopsin as the author of one of my favorite books of last year, the funny, odd, and wise memoir of her family's Greenwich Village diner, Arbitrary Stupid Goal. Her day job, aside from still working the grill for Sunday brunch at her dad's, is as an illustrator and designer, under which hat she created (with her husband) this lovely conceptual board book, printed entirely in black and white, in which you find all the colors by yourself, by looking through the cut-out shapes inside. (Ages 1 to 4) —Tom

Cover Crop Quiz #103
I thought a crop of the UK first edition (from 1938) might be a little tough by itself, so I've added the US first edition (which didn't appear until 1952) below. Does that help?

Last Week's Answer
The abstraction of the crop didn't stop quite a few of you from correctly guessing this 1973 first edition (perhaps the date helped): Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

New to Our 100 Club

Mercy Watson Goes for a Ride
by Kate DiCamillo and Chris Van Dusen
(442 weeks to reach 100)

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.)

What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

New in the Store

Fiction:
The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
The Secrets Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li

Nonfiction:
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart
John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy by Frank Abe
I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox
Swimming Holes of Washington by Anna Katz

Kids and Teens:
Fairy's First Day of School by Bridget Heos and Sara Not
Counting on Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Saved Apollo 13 by Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk
The Lost Continent (Wings of Fire #11) by Tui T. Sutherland
Girls Resist!: A Guide to Activism, Leadership, and Starting a Revolution by Kaelyn Rich

Paperback:
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

This Week in Henry David Thoreau's Journals

June 26, 1852
(age 34)
"I have not put darkness, duskiness, enough into my night and moonlight walks. Every sentence should contain some twilight or night. At least the light in it should be the yellow or creamy light of the moon or the fine beams of stars, and not the white light of day. The peculiar dusky serenity of the sentences must not allow the reader to forget that it is evening or night, without my saying that it is dark. Otherwise he will, of course, presume a daylight atmosphere."

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