Hello!

I have a very special appearance coming up soon that I wanted you to know about. On Wednesday, October 9th at 7 pm, I’ll be interviewing Irish novelist Paul Lynch, author of the 2023 Booker Prizewinning dystopian novel, Prophet Song, at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. It’s free, and it should be a fantastic conversation. 

Prophet Song takes place in an Ireland that’s lurching to the far right. A mother tries to hold her family together as secret police keep the population in fear and a guerilla war unfolds in slow-motion. It has a lot to say about the global rise of fascism, of course, and also migrant crises and whether everyone is complicit when a whole society turns sour. 

It might be a lot to ask people to think about dystopia in the year 2024 less than one month before a presidential election, but I have reason to believe that this will be a hopeful conversation. Unlike say, The Road, Prophet Song is too unapologetically human to be a hopeless book. In any case, Lynch is an uncommonly talented, brilliant writer, and it’s always hopeful to hear from someone who can craft heartbreakingly beautiful prose. 

I hope you’ll join us. Here’s a graphic that someone at SPL made for the event, in which Paul Lynch looks like a rock star and I, uh, do not:

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote a little preview of the Bainbridge Book Festival, the first-annual literary festival in Winslow, just steps from the ferry terminal. It takes place this Saturday, October 4th, and it’s absolutely free. (There’s a fundraising event with Nicola Yoon on the 3rd that looks great, too.)

I interviewed two sisters who are taking over one of the smallest bookstores in town, Madison Books. The bookstore was founded by Seattle bookselling legend James Crossley, who moved away to found a bookstore in St. Louis last year. Crossley’s fingerprints (and heart and soul) were on nearly every book in Madison Books, so I was skeptical that anyone could take such a personality-driven bookstore and turn it into something new. But having talked with Sarah Trainer and Christina Leber, I have no doubt that the store is in good hands as a sister act.

And I previewed 11 of the most interesting new-in-paperback September releases for the Seattle Times, and also I wrote about the 2023 Washington State Book Awards shortlist and winners. It was super-fun to see that so many of the WSBA shortlisters this year were people who had written for or otherwise participated in the Seattle Review of Books back in the day; I was proud to see folks like Robert Lashley and E.J. Koh get the attention they deserve. I’m sure this isn’t the last time they appear on an awards shortlist, and I’m certain they both have awards in their future.

I’ve Been Reading

Because I read and enjoyed Charlie Huston’s novel Catchpenny a few months back, a social media pal sent me a spare copy of Huston’s earlier novel Caught Stealing. I really enjoyed this one, which tosses an on-the-skids baseball fan into a dark criminal underworld where everyone is out to get him. Unlike Catchpenny, which blends crime and urban fantasy, this is a straight-up crime thriller that would appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard—but be aware that it’s way more violent than a typical Leonard book.

I’ve enjoyed pretty much every novel Stephen King has published lately, but I found his new short story collection, You Like It Darker, to be a bit of a mixed bag. I actually got into King through his short story collection Skeleton Crew, so I was surprised to find that about half these stories bounced off me. But I am so glad that I read this if just for the last story, which is a story about a supernatural being called the Answer Man that a young King started decades ago and then dumped in a drawer, only to be completed by the older King recently. That collaboration by one man across decades is especially fitting for a story about aging and taking a life in full, and it’s absolutely beautiful.

The premise of Natalie Sue’s novel I Hope This Finds You Well is a good one: The office miscreant accidentally gets access to her entire office’s emails and chats, giving her godlike omniscience over her workplace’s gossip. But that idea doesn’t really get developed—instead it just sets the stage for a fairly obvious romance plot. I enjoyed the voice and character details quite a bit, but I wish Sue had kept the energy of the first hundred pages going a little longer.

Dash Shaw makes a lot of huge comics, but I think Blurry might just be my favorite of his. It’s a big thick novel of a graphic novel, and its structure is basically people telling anecdotes to each other. Every time the main character of a section starts to listen to another character tell a story about themselves, that new character takes over the focus of the book. The way it all unfolds is clever, and Shaw manages to tie everything together in a satisfying, and not heavy-handed, way. 

Simon Rich is a very funny writer: He started writing for SNL at a very young age and now he’s a New Yorker regular. I’ll read pretty much everything he writes. But I especially recommend listening to the audiobook version of his latest short story collection, Glory Days, because the book is read by Rich’s longtime friend, John Mulaney. Mulaney clearly hasn’t read many audiobooks, and so he brings a tentativeness to the book that makes it feel even more interesting. I especially liked the story narrated by a middle-aged Mario who is called upon to rescue the Princess one more time, even though his back is failing him. This one is great for road trips.

M.E. Thomas’s Confessions of a Sociopath is exactly what the title says: A diagnosed sociopath tries to explain how she views the world. I started and failed to finish several memoirs this month—people are getting a little too comfortable revealing their worst selves to the world—but I finished this one. It was interesting, though not revelatory.

Nicholson Baker was an early favorite of mine, though I’ve been less interested in his late-career nonfiction. Finding a Likeness is a book documenting Baker’s progress in learning how to draw and paint through the pandemic. It’s heavily illustrated, with multiple artworks per page, and I thought it was an interesting, if slight reading experience. I do think the book designer should be harassed out of the industry for the good of humanity. Who decides to publish a book in white text on a dark gray background? And who in their right mind then prints the whole thing on super-glossy paper so any light directly on the page obscures the text? Straight to book-designer jail for you. 

John Ganz’s new book When the Clock Broke was probably my favorite reading experience of the month. Ganz tries to make the case that you can find all the foundations of our current hyperpartisan political mess in the politics of the early 1990s. The book walks us through the careers of some of the biggest political figures of the time, starting with David Duke and continuing through Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton. There were lots of new perspectives that I hadn’t considered and I also enjoyed the nostalgia of remembering the political scene that was active when I was first becoming aware of American politics.

Summer, Again

I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before that every summer when I go on vacation to the Washington coast, I reread Finnish cartoonist Tove Jansson’s novel-in-short-stories The Summer Book. This year was no exception. I think it’s the fifth or sixth time I’ve read it, but it could be the seventh. 

I’m not the kind of person who rereads books that often. There are too many interesting books that I haven’t read for me to spend a lot of time on reruns. But I do think there’s some value in revisiting books now and again. Just as you can never step in the same river twice, you’re never the same person when you reread a book. Your experience is going to be different every time. 

And revisiting the same book on multiple occasions creates a weird time-warp sensation. When I reread the Summer Booknow, I feel a certain closeness to myself at other times in my life. Once I read it sitting on a log on a hot, sunny day at the beach. Another time, I spent a cool and dewy morning with it on a porch with a full French press of coffee. This time I sat in an easy chair late at night and read it as I felt weariness settle over me like a comforter. The veil between those moments of reading feels especially thin—like I’m in conversation with the book, and with myself through time.

The Summer Book is a book about summer, and grief. A young girl named Sophia and her grandmother spend the summer at a house on a small island off the coast of Finland. It’s mentioned, in passing, that Sophia’s mother has died, but they don’t really talk about that. Instead, they just spend time together. They get on each others’ nerves and talk each other into having adventures and make each other laugh a lot. The vignettes are short, but the emotion running underneath each of them can be explored by submarine. 

Every time I read the book, different stories stand out. Sometimes I connect more emotionally with Sophia. Other times, I identify with the grandmother. Once, the writing about the weather and geography of the island moved me more than the characters. This time, one story hit me hardest: The little girl adopts a cat named Moppy that absolutely hates her. This passage nearly killed me:

“It’s funny about love,” Sophia said.

“The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.”

“That’s very true,” Grandmother observed. “And so what do you do?”

“You go on loving,” said Sophia threateningly. “You love harder and harder.”

Her grandmother sighed and said nothing.

That “threateningly” had me howling this time. I can’t recall ever catching on that passage in the past, though I’ve always loved this particular story. And I can’t wait to see what stands out next year, and who the person reading the book will be.

Take care,

Paul

Lots of states have been updating their flags recently. Some of them are eliminating blatant racist iconography—shout out to Mississippi for going from the most hateful state flag to the prettiest—but lots of others are just moving away from the boring old “seal featuring a white guy or two on a field of a single color” formula. (Minnesota is a good example of the latter.)

People online have recently been calling for my home of Washington state to change its flag, and I could not agree more. Just on aesthetic grounds, we deserve a better flag than a boring pointillist portrait of George Washington on an ugly seal in the middle of a bland field of green.

But I want to go a step further than the folks on the internet: I think when we change Washington state’s flag, we should also change the state’s name.

Washington state was named to honor George Washington, a man whose name is already on a very large iconic monument in the seat of our nation’s power, which is also, confusingly, named after him. His face is on our flag, as I mentioned, and it is also on the roughly 11 billion one-dollar bills and hundreds of billions of quarters currently in circulation. All of which is to say that we as a nation are not in danger of forgetting about poor old George Washington anytime soon.

George Washington never visited the area that would become Washington state, and the people who decided to name the state after George Washington never visited here either. They changed the name from Columbia, for fear that people would confuse it with the District of Columbia. Now, people frequently confuse Washington state with…Washington DC. There is literally no good reason to call this land Washington.

So what should we call it? Even though I like the sound of the word, we don’t necessarily have to change the state’s name back to Columbia. We could call it Tahoma or another local indigenous name. We could name it Cascade or Cascadia after the bioregion, or Evergreen after our state’s nickname. The important thing is that it’s time for us to move on from Washington. It’s a name that looks back in history, while we deserve a name that celebrates the amazing people and beautiful land that make this state such a wonderful place to live.

I’ve been writing

First, I wrote about all the great paperback releases of August.

And second, I wrote about Kingston’s Saltwater Bookshop—a great independent bookstore that shares space with a delicious bakery. You might think that Kingston seems too far away from Seattle for a day trip, but there’s a delightful fast ferry that zips from downtown to Kingston in about a half an hour.

I also talked about some of the economics books that attracted my eye this summer on a special summer reading list episode of the Pitchfork Economics podcast.

I’ve been reading

Let’s open with an admission: I’ve been kind of awash in the politics this month, scrolling nonstop and watching almost every minute of the DNC, and so I’ve read far fewer books than usual.

I started re-reading Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower on July 20th, 2024—the day that the the narrative begins in the book. Reading the book on the day that the protagonist begins writing the book was a unique thrill, and given that the story is told in diary entries that stretch out beyond 2025 I’m honestly surprised the publisher didn’t offer a service in which chapters of the book are emailed to readers in “real time.” Though I’m very burned out on dystopian fiction, it’s astonishing how much of our present world Butler got correct.

I’m addicted to reading books about the craft of writing. I’ve read dozens, if not a couple hundred, of these kinds of books. Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words is a book that urges would-be-writers to sit down and slam out 1000 words per day to get into the habit of writing, but it also includes a number of short essays by writers about the craft of writing, so it kind of serves as a compendium of how-to-write books. For me, it was kind of a generic, repetitive reading experience since I’m well-versed in the form. But if an aspiring writer told me that they wanted to read only one how-to-write book, this might be the one that I suggest because it offers so many different flavors of writing lessons.

Kent State, Derf Backderf’s non-fiction graphic novel (man, we have to make a better term for these) is a truly impressive comic. It’s an account of the shooting of Vietnam War protestors that weaves many different viewpoints and experiences into a single narrative. The shooting was a catastrophic failure that required many different procedures, rules, and social norms to fail all at once, and that failure changed the country forever. My one complaint about the book is that Backderf reported on what happened to the major players in a single text page at the end of the book, rather than drawing their fates in comic form. I’m sure he was running up against deadlines and constraints of the medium—it’s hard to span several years in a single page of comics—but the comic does such excellent work documenting what happened before and during the shooting that the “after” part feels a little like an afterthought.

Taha Ebrahhimi’s Street Trees of Seattle has been all the rage in local bookstores this summer, and it’s always nice to see books about being a pedestrian in Seattle top the local bestseller charts. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t as compelling for me as, say, Seattle Walk Report—but that’s a personal failing. I’m just not as interested in trees as I am the human-made landmarks that Susanna Ryan writes about in her walking guides. But this is still a must-have for any Seattle pedestrian’s personal library.

I enjoyed Todd May’s short philosophical exploration of whether the human race is a net good in the universe, Should We Go Extinct? Like most philosophical books I found it to be a little bit silly—May keeps returning to the idea that the human race can be said to be worthwhile if the “total number of units of happiness” that we produce is higher than the misery we cause, which is just quantifying something that is completely unquantifiable. But I enjoyed it as an extended thought experiment, and I also appreciated the book’s brevity.

My friend (and newsletter reader) Dave recommended the audio version of Sam Anderson’s civic history of Oklahoma City, Boom Town, and this is exactly the kind of book that I love to read on audio: The story of a place told in endearing anecdotes that capture the eccentricities, big personalities, and outright crimes that make a city so interesting. I visited Oklahoma City once when I was younger, and I found it to be positively delightful—a slow-moving city with a lot of civic pride. Anderson’s take on the city feels similar. There are some writerly flourishes that I think don’t necessarily work—the passage that suggests Timothy McVeigh’s frustrating experience as a sports fan is a direct cause of the Federal Building bombing felt like it was reaching way too hard—but this is a great account of an underrated American city, and I wish more writers would tackle this kind of big-hearted, open-minded civic history.

More President Talk

In last month’s issue, I said two things that turned out to be surprisingly controversial with readers. I wanted to address those both here.

First, several of you wrote in to ask why Entertainment Weekly was my favorite magazine growing up. To do that, I think you have to put the magazine in context. EW was really the first magazine to look at the business of entertainment as a business. It didn’t have the salacious gossip of The Enquirer or the sugary-sweet personal-interest profiles that People magazine offered of celebrities. Instead, it provided an overview of the big movies, TV shows, books, and music that were being released that week, and the critics approached every piece of art on its own terms.

EW wasn’t a fawning fan publication, but it did take popular culture seriously. It wasn’t perfect, but the magazine’s collective voice resembled how I approach pop culture: With a sense of humor and irreverence, but also an eagerness to get swept up in the good stuff. I read it cover-to-cover for many years, and doing so made me feel conversant in just about every aspect of American pop culture. Of course, now the culture is too broad and too fractured to accomplish that in a single weekly magazine, but from the 1990s through, say, 2012, EW did a pretty good job of hitting the highlights.

Second, I was surprised by how many of you wrote in to say you were surprised by the fact that I called Joe Biden the best president in my lifetime. This one might take a little more time to unpack.

Okay, so first I think I have to address the fact that every person who wrote in was surprised that I passed over Barack Obama. And it is true that Obama is the second-best president in my lifetime—and the gap between Obama and Biden is much smaller than the yawning gap between Obama and whoever comes in third (technically, I was around for Carter’s presidency though I don’t remember any of it because I was too busy chewing on the lead paint on the windowsills of my childhood home.) It is true, as reader David wrote, that the Affordable Care Act is a huge achievement that changed the political discussion in America, and I don’t mean to take anything away from Obama.

But Joe Biden, to my mind, is at least the most transformational president we’ve had since LBJ, or maybe even FDR. (To be clear, since my day job is immersed in political economy I place a lot of emphasis on economic achievements. That’s the yardstick I’m primarily measuring with.)

I don’t think you can underestimate the transformative power of the Green New Deal passed under the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Act. We haven’t seen all the benefits of these three pieces of legislation yet, but it has drastically sped up our transition to green energy and the fight against climate change, returned manufacturing jobs to parts of the country that were decimated by NAFTA and other free trade agreements, and fixed a lot of regional problems like lead pipes and inequitable digital access.

I believe income inequality is the single greatest problem facing American right now. And I realize that a lot of the economic benefits of the Biden Administration have been temporarily dulled by the global inflation crisis caused by pandemic-era broken supply chains, but the fact is that Biden has single-handedly reversed a third of the income gap that started under Ronald Reagan. (PDF) He’s the first president in my lifetime to oversee a huge rise in wages at the bottom of the income scale. He’s the first president in my life to doggedly combat monopolies and huge corporate mergers. And he’s the first president in history to walk a picket line.

There’s a lot more, but I worry that this is getting too dense. I can direct you to some resources if you’re still curious after all that, but I suspect most of you have closed this email by now.

Anyway, one final note: Please know that none of this means that I think Biden should have kept running for president. In fact, I think stepping down from his campaign for reelection and unequivocally endorsing Harris is another huge point in his favor. Assuming that Donald Trump doesn’t become president and undo everything he’s accomplished in the last four years, I think history will remember Biden as one of the greatest presidents, and I think he established the foundation for tremendous, transformational developments in the future.

That’s all for this month. I’m working on a special project that I can’t wait to unveil later this fall, and I’ve got a couple of exciting literary events on the books, too. I’m excited to share them with you in the months ahead.

Hope you’re well,
Paul

Because it’s been such a rough week in politics, I wanted to open with a quick piece of advice from my boss at Civic Ventures, Zach Silk, that has helped me at moments like this. It’s okay to allow yourself to feel bad after a rough political loss, or an especially disappointing event. You’ve got to give yourself a moment to be human, to feel the feelings, and to absorb the punches. 

But then you’ve got to get back up and get back to work. 

So if you’re feeling bad about the Supreme Court or presidential politics, I’d urge you to give yourself a moment of grace, and then commit to doing something positive that is very small and very local—donate to a city political campaign, or volunteer some time at a local nonprofit, or show up for a candidate you support. 

A lot of big things are happening right now and it’s easy to feel powerless when big things are happening. But you have tremendous power to positively affect your neighborhood, your city, and your state, and that work makes a tremendous difference in the world. Whether it’s feeding the hungry, picking up litter, supporting a good local candidate, making some calls, or knocking on some doors—you have the power to do that.

For lots of people, local politics matters much more in their day-to-day lives than whatever’s happening in the headlines of the big newspapers. By doing what you can, you will absolutely make a difference in their lives, and you’ll feel better for doing it.

Events are back on the menu

It’s been a while since I’ve done an onstage interview. Back when I was full-steam ahead at the Seattle Review of Books I did at least one or two a month, and during peak book release seasons I often would do multiple interviews in a week. Then, as you may or may not have heard, there was a global pandemic. I did a few online-only events but I hated every second of doing Zoom interviews—the rhythm was just screwy and it was really hard for me to incorporate audience questions via the always-moving comment streams.

Most local bookstores didn’t have any safety precautions in place for events when they reopened after lockdowns, and from 2021 to 2023 I just didn’t feel like book events were worth the high risk of Covid infection. I essentially started to say no to everything until people stopped asking. Finally, I’ve done a handful of events over the last year, but they’ve been pretty sporadic.

Last month, I did my first onstage interview in a while, with Seattle author Stacey Levine at Elliott Bay Book Company. And I had almost forgotten how fun onstage interviews can be. It helps that I’ve known Levine for years. She was a recipient of the 2009 Stranger Genius Award for Literature, and I’ve always enjoyed talking with her about her work.

Levine very clearly believes that her stories are something permanent and real, made of solid materials like concrete and bone. She knows that her stories have a precise meaning, and she believes she can impart that meaning to the reader if she only crafts her sentences perfectly enough. I’ll always remember a moment in our first conversation when she seemed to think I cracked the code of what she was trying to say in a story: “I really want you to understand. I don’t know if I can make you understand. I feel like I may have made you understand a little more,” she said, before deflating a little more. “It’s hard to communicate an inner world,” she concluded.

Levine’s new novel, Mice 1961, is the story of two sisters in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by their obsessive housekeeper. The protagonist, who is nicknamed Mice, is the subject of intense curiosity and gossip, and the novel is packed with characters who only have a handful of lines but who feel like they are stars of their own novels, with fully fleshed-out personalities and histories. They serve as a Greek chorus of sorts, sharing gossip and underlining the raw emotion of a moment to the reader.

It took a little bit for me to get back in the swing of onstage interview, but I the event turned out to be a delight. Levine was forthcoming about all the research she did into the historical aspects of the novel—she traveled to Florida and interviewed crystal radio hobbyists, among other things. (Levine also expressed some dismay that a reviewer of Mice 1961believed that radios powered by crystals were elements of fantasy and magic in the otherwise realistic book, not realizing that crystal radios were a real and popular phenomenon for much of the 20^thcentury.)

Lots of people in the audience brought phenomenal questions, too. Someone asked Levine to comment on her suggestion, made earlier in the evening, that omniscient narrators are no longer in fashion. Others who had already read the book asked incisive questions about the characters and settings. I wish every reading audience was so well-prepared.

It was, on the whole, a pretty successful evening and it was lovely to catch up with Levine, who is every bit as generous with her process and her observations as ever. And I got an email several days after the event from a frequent literary event attendee who said it might have been his favorite book event ever. It was nice to be reminded why I devoted so much of my time to these events, and while I don’t think I’ll ever go back to doing two or three of them a month, I’m still excited at the prospect of literary events being back on the menu after a few years away.

I’ve Been Writing

First, I profiled Paper Boat Booksellers in West Seattle, and I also broke the news that the store is looking to expand and possibly open a café, if they can find an appropriate space in the West Seattle neighborhood they call home.

And then I interviewed the new owners of Greenwood’s beloved Couth Buzzard Books. They’re an enthusiastic young couple with lots of big plans for improving the bookstore while also keeping the very busy calendar of community events largely untouched.

I jumped on the Pitchfork Economics podcast this week to talk with Chandra Childers, an amazing economic researcher who has explored the Southern economic development model, which is an extractive form of capitalism that builds on the racist legacy of slavery in the south. Childers is such a smart and compelling thinker, and I loved having the chance to talk to her about her research.

I also wrote about ten new paperback releases for the month of June.

I’ve Been Reading

Maybe you’ve seen Clare Brown’s Tik Tok skits, in which she flips both racial and gender dynamics by presenting a world in which Black women, and not white men, are society’s default position. In those skits, her Black characters condescend to their white peers with the same casual racism and sexism that white men deliver in the real world—she complains that their “yellow hair” is so “unnatural,” asks why men get so “testerical” about the fact that women don’t clean up after their messes, and frets that she can never pronounce the name “Meghan,” instead opting for “Margin” or “Margarine.” Brown has written and stars in a new full-cast audiobook called New Nigeria County that blends a lot of those Tik Tok skits together into a novella about a Black woman who calls 911 on the teenaged “outer city” son of a new white neighbor. The boy was wearing cargo pants, you see, which is a clear sign that he’s part of the “Live Laugh Love Gang.” The book is about 3 and a half hours long, which is just long enough to take the joke about as far as it will go, and I really enjoyed it. This brief full-cast, audio-only format seems to be an underexplored one, and I hope more authors give it a shot.

Speaking of fictional Black communities, Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind is a thriller about a wealthy Black family that moves into an exclusive Black utopia with some dark secrets hidden in the luxury day spa at the top of the hill. I enjoyed this propulsive story for its Ira Levin-style satirical-thriller energy, though it was a little bit predictable.

Every summer, I re-read Finnish author Tove Jansson’s novel-in-stories The Summer Book. Its tone is exactly right for that kind of regular reinvestigation—it’s about a grieving young girl and her somewhat bitter grandmother living on an island for the summer, and it’s sweet and sharp and simple and complex, depending on what kind of emotions you bring to it. I’ve also gradually been dipping into Jansson’s other work—she was a cartoonist whose Moomin strip was a kind of Peanuts of Europe, and she also wrote young children’s chapter books starring her Moomin characters that have become beloved classics. This month, I read a new biography, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, written by Boel Westin and translated into English by Silvester Mazzarella. If you’re not a hardcore fan of Jansson I don’t know that I can recommend the book, but it does offer a lot of insight into her work and life. Jansson wanted to be appreciated as an artist, but she always felt trapped by her fame, and she was always stretching and struggling to find the next logical step in her artistic development. If you’re a Jansson fan, you’ll want to add this one to your library.

To stay in the Tove Jansson space a little longer, I also read The True Deceiver, which is largely regarded as Jansson’s most adult novel. This book, about two women in a remote town who can’t seem to stop themselves from picking at each other, was well-crafted, and it certainly has some rabid fans, but I personally prefer Jansson’s more whimsical side.

I spent time with two graphic novels that couldn’t be more different from each other. Kyle Starks’s book Karate Prom is a comic for young readers that combines the teen romantic comedy genre with the kung fu genre for a battle royale that takes place at a senior prom, where love blossoms between kung fu champ Don Jones and the woman who kicked his ass at a recent tournament, Sam Steadman. This was a delightful romp of a book, and while it has a little bit of a pacing problem—the narrative stops dead about halfway through and then takes a while to restart—it’s a great book for the comics-lover (teen or adult) in your life.

Rick Altergott’s comic Blessed Be: A Flowertown, USA Adventure, on the other hand, feels like the graphic novel equivalent of one of those sexy Ace Doubles paperback novels that you could pick up from a wire rack at your local drug store 60 years ago. It’s got sex and violence and mystery and drugs and a creeping sense of menace squirming just beneath Altergott’s absolutely gorgeous cartoons. I loved Altergott’s comics when I could find them back in the 1990s, and Blessed Be both expands on and concludes the story he hinted at all those years ago.

Charlie Huston’s urban fantasy Catchpenny has maybe my favorite form of magical rules that I’ve ever encountered in a novel: Items that are heavy with nostalgia or emotional value contain magical energy that can be used by people who know how. A Sinead O’Connor t-shirt figures heavily into the plot here, and while the book doesn’t really ascend to a soaring climax, I enjoyed spending time in this world and I never felt like the magic was used to cheat the readers.

Don’t Fear the Retail

Finally, I wanted to talk about the most delightful book I’ve read in a long while. Pioneer Square bookseller Peter Miller, whose Peter Miller Books is a destination for lovers of architecture and design from around the world, has published a small memoir of his bookselling life that also serves as a guide to running a shop. It’s titled Shopkeeping: Stories, Advice, and Observations. If you’ve ever taken pride in working retail, or if you ever wanted to open a store of your own, I can’t recommend this book enough.

“We walk to look at the shops, we dress up to visit them, we feel our own excitement when we go into them Miller writes early in the book. “Shops are the measure of a town…

…In your mind, you keep careful track of your best and favorite shops. You judge a city by them. When you are in the city and when you think of the city, it is the shops that best organize your plans. You judge your civilization by them.

You expect them to be there; you expect them to be good at what they do.

A good shop is more literal than sentimental.

In reading this book, I spent hours thinking happily about the best shops I’ve ever been in. The Million Year Picnic, a fantastic comic book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That vintage store whose name I forgot in Iowa City where I bought a gorgeous Japanese baseball shirt almost 30 years ago. The Way Way penny-candy shop just outside Biddeford, Maine. Solid State Books, a newish bookstore I encountered on a recent brief trip to Washington DC, became one of those shops on a recent visit and I look forward to stopping by every time I’m in town. . Peter Miller’s bookstore is one of those shops, and so are several other Seattle-area bookstores

These shops hold a special place in my psyche. I look forward to visiting them, I fondly remember the items I bought from them, and I even sometimes dream about them. But we have a tendency now, to think of retail stores as something cheap or disposable. It feels dumb and silly to admit that one of the consistent highlights of my regular trips back to Maine is the late-night visit to the sprawling LL Bean flagship store in Freeport, which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Late in Shopkeeping, Miller admits “There is no literal need for shops.” But in fact, the book perfectly describes why we need shops so much. The act of visiting a shop is a social act and a statement of preference and a careful examination of possibilities. We try things on, we weigh objects in our hands, we imagine them in our houses and as a part of our daily lives.

And Miller explains why the best shopkeepers are magicians and performers and psychiatrists all rolled up together. He shares a handful of anecdotes from his four decades of bookselling experience, and before too long you realize that the book itself is kind of a shop—a display of his best thoughts and experiences and observations about keeping shops. Like the best shops, I’m going to revisit this book often, and I’ll probably find something different to take with me every time I drop in.

“A shopkeeper puts on essentially the very same show each day,” Miller writes. “It is always Oklahoma!—and it is good fortune if you like the music and are cheered each time you see the show. And even greater fortune if people like the show.”

Bravo, Peter Miller. Encore, encore!

Hi there!

I got an email from Seattle writer Lesley Hazleton earlier this month, which was, on its own, not an especially unusual event. I had become Lesley’s friend after I gave her a Genius Award for literature at The Stranger years ago, and she’d occasionally drop me brief emails letting me know about books or articles that she’d found interesting. 

But it was pretty apparent from the very opening that this email wasn’t like that. This was a Serious Email. Lesley explained that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and that three months ago she was told she had six months to live. She also explained that, as a lifelong proponent of a person’s right to choose, she had decided to exercise her right to die as established by the state of Washington.

What’s more, Lesley explained that by the time her friends were reading this email, she had already died on her own terms under medical supervision. It was a very Lesley thing to do: Incredibly dramatic (I never dreamed I’d actually get a “by the time you read this email, I’m already dead” message) but also deeply considered. It was hard to be too sad, because she went out exactly as she desired.

My relationship with Lesley Hazleton stretches back a quarter-century, even though it was quite one-sided at the start. When I was a bookseller in Boston, I came across an advance reader’s copy of her collection of automobile industry journalism, Driving to Detroit. Even though I do not care about cars, I was riveted to the book because of her writing—direct, thoughtful, clever. And the loving way that Lesley described her adopted home of Seattle was especially enticing to me—so much so that I credit Driving to Detroit for clinching my decision to move to Seattle over New York or several other options. 

Lesley continued to amaze me. She pivoted from cars to religion, writing biographies of religious figures like Mohammed, Jezebel, and Mary. And I think her greatest book, Agnostic, helped me accept the beauty of admitting that sometimes you can never have the answer you’re looking for—that “I don’t know” is often the most powerful, and correct, answer a human being can give. (If you’d like to read more about her, Lesley’s New York Timesobituary is excellent.)

There was a celebration of Lesley’s life on the same night that the whole Northern hemisphere was treated to the most vibrant display of auroras that anyone had ever seen. A klezmer band played and people drank grappa until the sun went down. 

And while everyone was sad to have lost such a brilliant, caring friend, it was hard to feel too sad for Lesley. She lived and died exactly as she wanted. She didn’t want to hear tearful tributes from the people who loved her. 

But I do feel like it’s important to get it in writing, somewhere, that from my very first encounter with Lesley’s writing to the very last, she was my hero. And Lesley is that rare personal writing hero who became even more impressive when I actually met her in real life. 

I’VE BEEN WRITING

I have a story in the new Project: Cryptid collection from AHOY Comics. It’s a comics anthology featuring stories about monsters like Bigfoot, Nessie, and—in my case—the Pacific Northwestern exploding bear known as the Gumberoo. The story was illustrated by the great Peter Krause, who is an artist I’ve loved since I was a kid, and it’s about a pioneer couple who move to the Washington territories only to start a new life. Things don’t go well for one of them. There are so many great comics in this book, by comics creators I really admire including Mark Russell, Richard Pace, and Jamal Igle. 

For the Seattle Times, I published a preview of the best-looking May paperback releases and an overview of some of the most exciting upcoming summer book releases. 

For the Times, I also interviewed local author Frank Abe and Smith College professor Floyd Cheung about their new Penguin Classics anthology of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, a remarkable book that collects dozens of voices together to create a narrative of one of the most shameful moments in American history. 

I’VE BEEN READING

Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot is definitely not for everyone. It’s a sci-fi story told from the perspective of a lifelike domestic companion robot sold to a lonely man in the near-future. She’s essentially a high-tech sex slave, and the novel would no doubt be very triggering for people who have been in abusive relationships or survived assault. But this was the book I read this month that I’m still thinking about, almost a month after finishing it—it’s a frustrating but compelling reading experience.

The title of Dana Mattioli’s non-fiction book The Everything War feels like it’s supposed to be a play off Brad Stone’s hagiographic corporate biography of Amazon, The Everything Store. And in every way, this corporate biography is an improvement on Stone’s glowing account, which gets more embarrassing in retrospect with each passing year. Mattioli offers a deeply reported history of all the unethical and downright illegal ways that Amazon has broken laws, rules, and mores to dominate the retail space. If you’re on the fence about canceling your Prime account, I’d urge you to read this book.

I was excited to read Vinson Cunningham’s novel Great Expectations, a very thinly fictionalized account of Cunningham’s own experiences as an early volunteer on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, the book didn’t hold up to my own great expectations—the presidential/candidate stuff didn’t offer any new insights, and the personal story didn’t really resonate with me. 

Blake Crouch’s bestselling novel Dark Matter has just been adapted into a TV series by Apple TV Plus, and I wanted to read the book before I started streaming. This multiversal thriller is the definition of a page-turner—though as someone who grew up reading comics with way weirder multiversal concepts, I didn’t find the premise to be especially mind-blowing. But ultimately it’s a solid, compact, down-the-middle sci-fi thriller, and that’s a pretty good deal.

Okay, fine: The Lincoln Highway is a pretty fantastic big-hearted old John Irving-style novel, and Amor Towles actually is probably the closest thing we have to an heir to Irving in his prime. The road trip story of two orphans who go in search of their mother only to be sidetracked by a pair of escaped convicts is funny, wise, and fun—although the race dynamics of this book feel shallow and are begging for a deep exploration.

My Husband is a short novel by Maud Ventura told from the perspective of a woman who is terrified that she loves her husband much more than he loves her. Her entire life revolves around keeping her husband interested in her, even as she feels him slipping away. I really enjoyed this book until I read the epilogue, which I felt kind of undid everything that came before in exchange for a cheap thrill.

I traveled to Washington DC for a business trip this month and based on a recommendation at Kramer Books I picked up Diary of an Oxygen Thief, an anonymously written novel from the early 2000s from the perspective of a misanthrope who loves emotionally hurting women. It definitely feels like one of those books—Catcher in the Rye, Youth in Revolt, Girl—that attracts a small cult of young people who praise it for its unflinching honesty, but that kind of art is not anything that I feel the need to celebrate or appreciate at the advanced age of 48. 

I had somehow not read RO Kwon’s super-buzzy novel The Incendiaries until this month. And now that I finally have read it, I must say I don’t really get the hype. It’s a book about a charismatic cult, but none of the characters are especially interesting and the story lacks the propulsive energy that a story like this needs.

I’m Walkin’ Here!

Earlier this month, I traveled to New York for the express purpose of taking part in The Great Saunter, an organized walk around the perimeter of Manhattan that takes place on the first Saturday of May. I first heard about the Saunter over a decade ago and it’s always been something I wanted to do.

Over 3000 people participated in the Saunter this year, and I’m happy to report that my friend Davida and I were among the 1600 people to finish. We started at the southern tip of Manhattan, followed the coast north to Harlem, and then made our way south again for a total of 32 miles. We started around 7 am and came in to the finish line around 6:30 pm. 

I have nothing but kind words for the organizers of the Saunter. It’s an incredibly well-organized event, and in exchange for the $30 entry fee participants get a free hat, snacks and drinks, and volunteers to make sure walkers stay on path. It’s a bargain, is what I’m saying.

In my youth I spent a fair amount of time in New York City. But the city is too damn big to really, fully, comprehend. By walking around the whole perimeter I at least have a better understanding of how huge Manhattan is, and how people can spend whole months—even years—of their lives living inside the boundaries of that 32-mile perimeter.

My big regret from The Saunter is that I didn’t stop and eat at Cake Burger, the restaurant “Where cakes and burgers are our specialty!” It’s a genius business model, and it’s going to haunt me that I didn’t go in when I had the chance.

If you’ve ever wanted to test your walking endurance, I can’t recommend the Saunter enough. It’s arranged in such a way that the hardest part of the walk—the vertical gain on the northern tip of the island—is almost exactly in the middle of your walk, before exhaustion sets in, and the people who work for the organization really seem to care for both the coastline and the people who choose to walk it. This is one of those bucket-list aspirations that actually was even better in reality than I’d ever imagined it could be. 

That’s a nice place to leave off this month, I think. I hope your summer is off to a pleasant start.

Paul

Hi!

Seattle’s Labor-Day-weekend music and arts festival, Bumbershoot, announced their arts programming earlier this month. There’s a fashion exhibit, an animation show, performance art, kinetic sculptures, a “comedy dome,” a cat circus, wrestling, gymnastics, skateboarding, and more.

You know what they didn’t announce? A single damn literary event of any kind.

This is a tremendous bummer. Bumbershoot has always celebrated literary arts. Jim Carroll headlined the festival’s arts programming in 2000. They’ve welcomed brilliant graphic novel creators like Allie Brosh and Harvey Pekar. Literary organizations like McSweeney’s and Sister Spit performed at the show. And big-time novelists read, there, too, including Terry McMillan, Larry McMurtry in 1977, and Ursula K. LeGuin in 1998.

This year—so far, at least—there’s bupkis. Not even roving groups of local poets entertaining crowds as they wait to get into venues, as was featured at a Folklife festival a while back. Organizers couldn’t even be bothered to throw a little money at a great local literary magazine like Moss, or a literary organization like Jack Straw or Clarion West.

It’s just preposterous to me that Seattle’s preeminent arts festival doesn’t seem to feel the need to represent Seattle’s literary arts at all. We are a UNESCO-recognized City of Literature, for crying out loud! But the summer-ending arts festival, the big event that brings the city together to celebrate art for art’s sake, can’t even be bothered to host a single lousy reading?

I’m not going to suggest that people write Bumbershoot’s organizers and demand including a literary arts program. They’ve made it pretty clear they don’t want book people at their party. 

I’m just mentioning it here because I think it’s a goddamn shame. That’s all.

I’ve Been Writing

But while I am incredibly disappointed about Bumbershoot, I want to put it on the record that I am positively thrilled with this year’s Seattle Reads selection. Seattle Public Library is spending this spring and summer celebrating Octavia Butler and her incredible sci-fi book Parable of the Sower in book clubs, readings, panel events, and other programming all over the greater Seattle area. I wrote about it for the Seattle Times. I was especially thrilled to talk to local sci-fi writer Nisi Shawl, who was friends with Butler in her last few years here in the Seattle area. 

I also previewed some of the best-looking March paperback releases for the Times. 

And I profiled a pair of local authors this month, too. First, I talked to graphic memoirist Tessa Hulls about her astounding generational story Feeding Ghosts, which I think should be this year’s breakout graphic memoir. And then I talked with Seattle journalist Reagan Jackson about her new collection of journalism, Still True. These two women are positively crushing it, and I look forward to decades of great work from them.

And finally, I wrote about Kent’s Page Turner Books, a nerd-friendly new and used bookstore that has survived two disastrous ceiling collapses, only to come back bigger and stronger than ever. If you ever want to soak yourself in genre, you should get lost in the shelves of mass-market mysteries and sci-fi at Page Turner. 

I’ve Been Reading

Speaking of genre mass-markets, I went on vacation this month and took an armload of pulpy paperbacks with me, so this section will be a little longer than usual. I read a collection of short pieces by Harlan Ellison, Stalking the Nightmare, that I remember loving toward the end of my teen years, but which didn’t do much for me anymore. Ellison’s work in general seems not to be aging too well, though big-name writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman still speak fondly of him. 

Bob Fingerman’s Pariah is a post-apocalyptic novel about a woman with the power to repel zombies in a zombie-ridden world. Some of the characterization—particularly of the titular pariah—is killer, but the book’s pre-MeToo take on misogyny and sexual assault prevents me from recommending this too heartily.

I read two novels by popular 20th-century novelists who are now largely forgotten. The Storyteller is a semiautobiographical novel by Harold Robbins, who was one of the best-selling authors of the latter half of the 1900s. It was a positively dreadful read: sexist, racist, self-aggrandizing, no plot—trash in the most disparaging sense of the word. (I do recommend Andrew Wilson’s biography of Robbins, The Man Who Invented Sex, though—Robbins’s life is way more interesting than his work.)

Ira Levin, the other forgotten 20th-century giant, is a favorite novelist of mine. The plots of his novels are as taut as harp-strings, and he always has interesting genre ideas that feel deeply resonant with the human condition. You’ve definitely heard of movies based on his books: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver. This time I read A Kiss Before Dying, a Highsmith-style dark thriller that puts the reader into the head of a murderous sociopath and then shows the repercussions of his actions through the perspectives of people around him. I loved this one—a dark amusement park ride of a novel, for sure.

Gene Smith’s When the Cheering Stopped is a non-fiction account of President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and his White House staff’s herculean efforts to hide the president’s poor health from the American people. This is a story that is somehow simultaneously more salacious and less salacious than what you’ve heard.

I read an old biography of Stanley Kubrick a few months ago, and it left me wanting something a little more comprehensive. So I read Robert Kolker’s Kubrick: An Odyssey, the latest biography of the director. This one scratched all my itches—behind-the-scenes gossip of the making of his films, insight into films that he never made, and mythbusting explanations of his strengths and weaknesses. Related: I watched Barry Lyndon for the first time last month and I was delighted to watch a film that was so transparently willed into being by one person. 

I love the premise of Frederik Backman’s novel My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It’s told from the perspective of a young girl whose eccentric grandmother dies and leaves her a list of unfinished business to accomplish, and while some of the book is quite funny and tender, too much of it is mawkish and overwrought. It’s a great idea with nowhere to go. 

Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People is one of those short books about grief that seem to have become a standalone literary genre. In this case, Crosley is writing about the death of a beloved friend who worked with her at the publicity department at Knopf. I’m not, thankfully, in the middle of grieving anyone, so I can’t attest to its healing power. But it’s a smart and clear-eyed story of friendship and loss, and even if it didn’t feel like the book successfully tied all its loose ends together, I still appreciated its elegance and emotion.

Acts of Service is a debut novel by Lillian Fishman about a young woman who gets swept into an open relationship. It’s one of those books where every character, in the right light, is a normal person disguised as a monster—but at the same time, you could easily see a nice young person in their 20s absolutely identifying with these characters on a fundamental level. 

Katherine Min worked on the novel that would become The Fetishist for years. She envisioned it as a kind of Lolita, only about white men who fetishize Asian women. Now it’s been released as a posthumous publication, and it’s one of the better novels I’ve read in a while. 

Betting on Dread

I don’t follow sports at all. And I mean at all. From the Olympics to baseball to soccer to a child’s tee-ball game, anything sports-related just bounces off my big dumb head. But I did briefly take notice in 2018, when the Supreme Court basically took the reins off sports betting in the case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association and 36 states soon legalized sports betting.

At the time, I noticed it because it had the characteristics of most other modern Supreme Court decisions—smugly irresponsible, with the very real threat of dire consequences for ordinary people looming just overhead. 

I feel like a bit character in the early part of a zombie movie—terrible things are happening in the background and I’m just barely noticing that something is amiss. Because I don’t watch sports on TV or read about sports in the media, I’ve been noticing small consequences lurch around slowly in the background. 

For instance, I’ll be listening to a comedy podcast and a sports betting ad will come on—something that never would have happened ten years ago. I’ll glimpse an ad for a betting service on a cable TV playing at a restaurant. A pundit will make a reference to gambling in a way that feels so much more casual than it would have years ago.

Now, I’ve gathered from headlines that supposedly one of the best baseball players in America—a guy whose name I’d literally never heard before—is swept up in a gambling scandal. The consequences of the Court’s actions are gaining speed now, and they’re starting to do some damage.

The amazing thing about all this is how utterly obvious it is. We’ve seen what happens when you loosen the rules around sports betting. I am allergic to sports, but even I know about the Black Sox scandal. When you put this kind of temptation in front of a bunch of athletes—which is to say a dozens of highly competitive and impulsive young men with a lot of extra money and a shared feeling of invulnerability—they’re going to fall for it. This might be the first major scandal of the post-Murphy era, but even I know it won’t be the last.

And that’s just the beginning of this particular monster movie. I suspect in the next five years we’re going to see an uptick in young men ruining their lives, now that it’s ridiculously easy to bet on sports. We’ll see some app finally perfect making sports betting as addictive and easy as pulling the arm on a penny slot machine and then you’re going to have a small city’s population worth of 22-year-old men pondering suicide because all of a sudden they’re $75,000 in the hole and they only make $22,000 a year. There’s a lot of misery, pain, and destruction coming our way, and along the way a handful of people are going to get insanely rich.

Again, anyone with an ounce of foresight could have predicted how this was going to go. But the Supreme Court, as it stands, is only interested in looking backward—at wondering what a bunch of dead slave owners in powdered wigs would do about gambling, or guns, or abortion. And the Court’s colonial cosplay is going to immiserate and kill hundreds of thousands of people before we get the opportunity to repair the damage they’ve done.

We’ve got to fix our judicial system. We need term limits for judges, because only royalty should be given titles for life. We need to make sure that judges have to live with the consequences of their actions, the same way all of us do. Top to bottom, we need to reform the whole damn judicial system so judges don’t just wallow in their own corruption. That’s my point. That’s what I want to say. 

This has been an intense one! Sorry. Hope your spring is going well. See you at the end of April!

Paul