The thing that drew me to M. Arusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.”
It’s really that simple: All you have to do to get me to read your sci-fi novel is set it in a future that doesn’t suck. And I loved living in the world of this novel—Wehm has clearly thought about what a climate-friendly, post-capitalist society might look like, and they establish a very lived-in world for the characters to move around in. Even better, none of the ideas in the book are presented as outrageous or groundbreaking. The future just is the way it is. The casual, no-big-deal air around the setting is luxurious, like slipping into a warm bath.
Unfortunately, the central mystery of the book didn’t really pull me through the story. Every time something happened to advance the plot, I found myself wanting to squint at something Wehm gestured toward in the background, instead. I’m glad I read it, but it’s very much a journey-not-the-destination kind of reading experience—and oh, what a journey! I wish I could live inside this novel.
I was born in 1976, so I obviously don’t recall America’s big bicentennial birthday bash. But the celebration of America’s 200th birthday was a big enough cultural event that artifacts from the bicentennial celebration were kicking around throughout my youth. I’d occasionally encounter the special 200th birthday quarters, which featured a minuteman playing a drum on the back, for instance. Jack Kirby wrote and drew a giant Captain America comic for the bicentennial that was one of my favorite comics growing up. And so on and so forth.
When I was a kid, I did the math and determined that I’d be 50 years old when America celebrated its 250th birthday. Even though I couldn’t fathom being 50 years old at the time, I recall that I did wonder what America’s quarter-millennium celebrations might be like. I was envisioning a future full of robots and American flags on Mars and all the other sci-fi trappings we were promised back then.
And now that I’m 50 and America’s 250th birthday is here, I imagine trying to explain to my four-year-old self that the celebration is shaping up to be a dud. The president, you see, is the worst person in the country, and he’s ancient and clearly losing his mind and he’s been making everything in the world about him for the last decade or so. The economy is so bad and America has been embarrassed so solidly on the global stage that even Republicans don’t seem to be in a mood to go full star-spangled bananas right now.
All that is to say that the one and only thing I’ve done to acknowledge America’s big 2-5-0 is read Meg Elison’s brand-new sci-fi novel, Foundling Fathers. It’s a story about teenaged clones of America’s Founding Fathers figuring out that they’re not in the 18th century anymore.
The book has a stellar first line:
“It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.”
That pretty much sets the tone: The clones of Adams and Washington and all the rest maintain their essential character traits, and they slowly begin to realize that the world around them isn’t as it seems. I don’t want to spoil anything, so that’s all the plot you’ll get out of me.
Foundling Fathers is a short and funny book, and it doesn’t exhaustively explore its concept. Instead, it makes a point and then ends well before it wears out its welcome. It’s thoughtful enough and well-researched enough that it inspired me to consider the men who started the American experiment and what they might think of where we are now.
I enjoyed it a great deal, and now I’m officially done thinking about America’s 250th birthday—except to hope that things might be better for kids born this year when, or if, the 300th birthday rolls around.
By the time my next newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be 50 years old. I know some people who hate aging and getting old, and that’s always felt so hopeless to me. You might as well try to win a fistfight with the ocean.
In fact, I’ve always felt good about aging. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a grownup. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be a stable adult. I loved being in my 30s and I loved my 40s even more. Obviously, at some point aging becomes a game of diminishing returns, but for now I’m enjoying myself.
I don’t like to make a thing about my birthday, but 50 feels like something that should be observed. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as he was turning 50 as a way to ball up all the childish thoughts in his brain, throw them away, and start fresh. Based on his later work, that plan didn’t succeed—he was just as obsessed with sex and death and absurdity at age 51, 52, and so on.
But I think Vonnegut’s idea was a worthwhile one. All those memories you carry around with you for decades start to get heavy. I don’t have the time or the talent to write a Breakfast of Champions. I’d like to build a little balcony in my mind so that I can ball up all the elementary school embarrassments and ancient advertising jingles and throw them off it, into thin air. The past gets heavy after a while and I’ve got a craving for weightlessness.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Paper Pushers, a new zine pop-up store in the heart of downtown Seattle. It’s run by three young artists, and they have a lot of big plans for the space during the six months or so that it’s open.
I also wrote about 13 of the best paperback releases in the month of May.
I’ve Been Reading
I enjoyed Seattle writer Olivia Waite’s second Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery novella, Nobody’s Baby, more than I enjoyed the first installment in the series. While Murder By Memory had to establish the generational starship and its cast of characters, Nobody’s Baby could just dive right into the story. It’s a cracking good yarn about a baby who’s born on a starship where the entire population is on birth control to prevent overcrowding. And while there is a mystery at the heart of the story, it’s also interesting to explore the impacts of a child born in a purposefully child-free society.
Emily Jane’s Mr. Yay is an enjoyable novel about a hip-hop group that names themselves after a children’s entertainer who doesn’t seem to exist. It starts as an amusing novel about burnouts and transforms into a gentle sci-fi epic.
Automatic Noodle is Annalee Newitz’s entry into the cozy sci-fi category, a short novel about robots who open a noodle shop in a post-second-Civil-War future California. I liked the book but found myself wondering if it would have hit me even more if it were just a realistic novella about a group of friends opening a noodle shop. The sci-fi trappings were interesting, but I think I might have felt more emotionally connected to more finely wrought realistic characters.
Transcription is just such a hyper-realistic novel, and it really worked on me. Ben Lerner’s novella is about a journalist whose phone breaks hours before an important interview. It’s a meditation on technology and how it shapes us, and it’s a delightful quick audiobook experience—the book only runs four hours and it feels like a one-man monologue read by a charismatic actor.
Did you know Oprah is still picking book club titles? Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability has that O right on the front cover, and it’s the kind of contemporary novel that’s always appealed to the Oprah brand—a social novel that explores the impacts of a trend ripped from the headlines. In this case, the book is about artificial intelligence from AI friends to self-driving cars, and while the book opens with a bang, asking some of the most important questions of our time, it ultimately runs out of gas about halfway through and then just sputters to a stop.
How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?
If I were forced to offer political advice to Donald Trump to help overcome his historically low approval ratings, my advice would be simple: shut the fuck up and disappear for a while. In a hyper-partisan environment like this one, any president’s polling numbers are likely to bounce back to something like 40 or 44 percent if they can just get the spotlight off them for long enough.
But our president is a deeply broken person who compulsively dives for the spotlight. He literally can’t help himself. And so his approval ratings keep plummeting—as low as 30 percent on his economic performance, which is basically his floor. A full third of the American people wouldn’t hold a negative opinion of Donald Trump if he personally foreclosed on their homes.
I don’t know where we go from here. The economy is likely only going to get worse. Ordinarily that would result in a massive swing in the midterm election, but the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to allow racist gerrymandering means that the midterms are probably not going to result in as significant a swing as they should.
It’s been over ten years since the media began its sick fascination with Donald Trump and I am so tired. I’m sick of hearing about him, I’m sick of living with the unending parade of shit that he’s foisting on us, and I’m sick of watching virtually every powerful institution bend to his will without putting up a fight.
The bad news is that we’re all stuck in a weird psychosexual relationship with a narcissist, and there’s no end in sight. The good news is that thanks to Trump’s abysmal polling,I know I’m not alone. There’s a little bit of comfort in that—knowing that across the country, hundreds of millions of Americans shake their heads and make a little tsk noise out of the corner of their mouths and mutter “that fuckin’ guy.”
More Americans now fear for the future of the economy than at any time in the history of polling. President Trump has responded by publicly fretting over the type of marble used on ballroom floors and the proper blue shade of a reflecting pool. He’s even more that fuckin’ guy than ever.
I have never in my life seen any public figure’s name come closer to transubstantiating into a curse word. I believe that with a little bit of effort and a whole lot of his trademark cluelessness, Donald Trump can permanently befoul his legacy and elevate himself into a generational laughing stock and object of scorn. If anyone can do it, Donald can.
In which I walk around Lake Washington and urge you to buy a bookstore or three.
Hi!
Last Saturday, I did my annual walk around Lake Washington. It was a little early in the year, and I almost undertook it impulsively. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to complete the full loop without a few weeks of psyching myself up for it first.
It turned out to be one of my easiest trips around Lake Washington ever, assisted in large part by the fact that long-standing construction projects in Juanita at the top of the lake and Mercer Slough at the eastern edge of the lake have both finally ended. Without having to take long detours, I wound up walking a relatively short 49 miles—102,297 steps.
Dawn over the Montlake Cut.
I left the house at 4:19 a.m. and returned at 8:59 p.m. I mostly ate protein bars bought from grocery stores along the way and drank Gatorade—though I’m happy to report that fresh watermelon juice is just as reinvigorating and electrolyte-laden as any sugary sports beverage. I made no major stops, aside from bathroom breaks. My heart rate for the day is kind of astonishing to see—not too high, not erratic at all. Just steady, all day.
I am unfortunately very addicted to my Apple Watch’s metrics.
One unfortunate variation this time around: The trail running shoes I have sworn by for the better part of a decade, Brooks Cascadia waterproof runners, are a little bit different this year. Brooks has unfortunately fallen for the trendy Hoka shtick of overinflating the cushioning of their shoes, and the Cascadias were too goddamned cushy. I wound up developing a bad blister in the center of my left foot that I’m still feeling five days later. It’s the most painful and long-lasting injury I’ve ever had from one of these walks.
Brooks has been very good to me so I’m not eager to give up on them yet. But if next year’s Cascadia models are as over-cushioned as this year’s, I might have to find a new trail-running brand. When will this marshmallow-footed athletic shoe trend finally die?
Part of the reason that I took my yearly walk around Lake Washington so early in the year is that I’m thinking about adding a second circumnavigation of the lake at the end of summer or the beginning of fall, before it starts to get dark early. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, to be honest.
This one long walk has become so important to my mental health—a pillar of my emotional life and something that I dearly look forward to every year as winter draws to a close—that I wonder if adding a second walk might be good for me. Or maybe it’ll be the equivalent of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by making it less special somehow.
Because coming home after walking steadily in a giant circle around an enormous body of water is still, after all these years, an emotionally powerful experience. I still feel a little high, filled with a glow that stays with me for days afterward. I might not be able to jog, or throw a ball, or hold a yoga pose. But I can walk a really, really long goddamn time.
I’ve Been Writing
On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Jamie Keene, a former Biden administration economist, about her new report that makes a very compelling case for a very important point: Whenever the next progressive wave takes the White House and Congress, it’s important that they not waste time trying to repair the social safety net that the Trump White House has left in tatters. Instead, they should build new programs that invest deeply in people who need food, unemployment, and income assistance without all the means testing and terrible constraints that have been written into the system over the last 40 years or so. It was a great conversation.
I’ve Been Reading
I had been saving Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, Long Island Compromise, for a vacation, and I’m so glad I did. What an absolute pleasure this big, sprawling novel about generational trauma and its impacts on one rich family full of frustrating twerps turned out to be. It’s deeply funny and while it is about trauma, it also satirizes modern novelists’ overuse of trauma as a narrative crutch. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but this one is a phenomenal reading experience. I recommend taking it out for a spin the when you’re taking some time off and have extra attention to commit to reading.
Michael Pollan developed a very clear pattern to his career in the early 2000s: first he writes one important and culture-changing book (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and then the publishes a few books on the same subject that just aren’t as compelling because they feel made up of outtakes from the big important book (In Defense of Food, Cooked, Food Rules). But while How to Change Your Mind, his treatise on psychedelics, was clearly supposed to be the big important book of this new cycle of his work, I actually enjoyed his most recent bits-and-bobs book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, even more. It’s a swift-moving and wide-ranging guide to human consciousness that unfortunately takes a long and unnecessary detour into AI, but it still changed my understanding of how my own brain works. (I wish Pollan had asked all the interview subjects who claim that we have a moral responsibility to treat AI humanely if it develops consciousness why they don’t seem to give a shit about human suffering at home and abroad, even though we know that starving children in Sudan, Gaza, and Haiti are just as conscious as you or me.)
Unplugged is one of those books you accidentally read on vacation because it’s suddenly available after you’ve read everything else. It’s a memoir from Tom Freston, one of the founders of MTV who got his start importing goods from the Hippie Trail in Afghanistan and India, and it’s a pretty generic American business story with a couple of great anecdotes spread around to keep you interested. The opening chapter, when Freston is fired from his job as CEO of Viacom and is greeted on his way out the door by dozens of applauding employees, is pretty cringy, but things improve from there.
Walking Into the Night by Olaf Olafsson is a novel that fictionalizes the story of William Randolph Hearst’s real-life butler, Christian Benediktsson. It’s a slender novel that asks how someone could possibly take on a role that forces them to supplant their very personhood in service to a wealthy eccentric, and I enjoyed it. But Benediktsson’s pre-butler history wasn’t as interesting as his time serving Hearst, and I wanted the book to offer more hot gossip about Hearst’s inner sanctum. It was all a bit too chilly and austere for my tastes.
Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World is a novel set in a dystopian Japan in which the breeding of children is outsourced entirely to in vitro fertilization. Through the application of omnipresent government propaganda, the marriage between a man and a woman is considered to be a strictly family arrangement, to the point where sexual activity between husband and wife is considered a taboo. Instead, people are encouraged to develop romantic relationships with fictional characters in their manga and anime. This was a short, zippy novel that asked some truly bizarre questions and pushed some ideas of sex and gender roles in child-rearing to the absolute limit.
Don’t Cry Because It’s Over—Smile Because You Should Buy a Bookstore
Lots of people have come to me in a state of panic about the announcement that Ada’s Technical Books on Capitol Hill will be closing. Does this portend doom for Seattle’s independent bookstores, they want to know? Are books finally finished once and for all?
Honestly, this news doesn’t freak me out at all. For one thing, the owner of Ada’s, Danielle Hulton, is one of the most straightforward people I know in the local book scene, and I take her at her word that she was ready to move on from bookselling for personal reasons. So far as I’m concerned, this says nothing about the industry at large.
And also: Ada’s 16 years of independent bookselling is not a failure. Businesses come and go. Not every bookstore can be a precious legacy business handed down from generation to generation. It’s perfectly okay for a business to shutter after a good run. This is one of my pet peeves about sites like Vanishing Seattle—they treat every business closure as a tragedy or a death, when in fact cities are meant to change. It sucks when one of your favorite places goes away, but I guarantee you there are other favorite places out there waiting for you. Seattle has dozens upon dozens of independent bookstores, and while none of them are as specifically devoted to science and technical books as Ada’s, I promise you can find another bookstore out there that speaks to you and your needs.
Which kind of leads to my big point: Hulton is now ready to sell off the three Fuel Coffee locations that she bought and transformed into small bookstores six years ago. If you’ve ever wanted to run a small neighborhood bookstore/cafe, I urge you to consider this your big chance. These are beautiful spaces in Montlake, Capitol Hill, and Wallingford that are just dying for an opinionated and passionate bookseller to come in and take them over.
I personally feel as though the three Fuel locations were underutilized in terms of programming to activate the communities. I think they’d be ideal spaces for book clubs, small readings and musical performances, and other creative community events.
I know there are at least three people out there who have always dreamed of owning a bookstore in Seattle. To those people, I urge you to check out the Fuel Coffee locations and dream big. There’s bookselling magic waiting to happen in those spaces. All it would take to make it happen is someone like you.
Dream big! Paul
P.S. Confidential to those of you who are just here for the dogs: Obie and Wally just had their annual vet visits and are doing very well. Obie’s on a pain management program for his arthritis but he is doing spectacularly well for a 12-year-old greyhound. Wally is a sporty little fireplug whose teeth need a deep-cleaning that he is sure to not enjoy, but he is otherwise the picture of health.
Slightly different format this month, starting with three random points:
I’m thinking about changing the frequency of this email, from monthly to biweekly or weekly. It would still be free, of course, but each individual email would be a lot shorter rather than one big one at the end of the month. I sometimes miss the cadence of blogging and being able to write about something immediately—writing shorter pieces about politics, movies, news, art, Seattle stuff. I’m curious what those of you who receive this email think about that. Too much? Don’t mind? Let me know if you have any opinions.
For you poets out there, I wanted to let you know that the excellent crew at Expedition Press will open submissions to their broadside contest from October 1st to 31st. The winner will receive 20 letterpress broadsides of their poem and $100 cash. I’m sharing this because Expedition Press does gorgeous work printing literary works by hand, and even if you’re not a poet you should be aware of them.
And you should get excited for this year’s edition of the Short Run Comix Festival, which features comics and art from around the country and the world. This year’s festival happens on Saturday, November 1st, and it will be Short Run’s first outing in a new venue: The Seattle Design Center in Georgetown. You can learn about riso printing, watch some hand-drawn animation, and even hear from the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who recently resigned her job at The Washington Post after they axed one of her cartoons that was mildly critical of Post owner Jeff Bezos. This is, for my money, continually the most important (and fun) arts festival in Seattle, and I’m excited to see how it grows and changes in its new home in Georgetown.
I’ve Been Reading
Seattle author G. Willow Wilson’s latest comic with artist M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register, is a quiet little masterpiece. It’s about a young journalist who gets a job writing at a tiny newspaper in a coastal Washington state town where weird things happen. It’s a perfect mix of Our Town and Twin Peaks, and a hopeful refugee narrative. It’s right up there with my favorites of Wilson’s work.
Ken Bruen’s The Guards is about a disgraced alcoholic former police officer in Ireland who tries to become a private investigator, even though Irish law doesn’t recognize private investigators as a thing. The mystery in this book takes a back seat to the protagonist’s beautiful observations about addiction and depression—a lyrical and funny and thoroughly Irish novel. I loved it and I’m looking forward to reading more in the series.
Jordan S. Carroll’s short book-length-essay Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right got my attention when it won the Hugo Award earlier this year. It’s a scholarly work that looks at the close relationship between white supremacy and science fiction, and it just may forever change the way you think of the genre.
Celine Saintclare’s Sugar, Babyis a novel about a poor young woman who begins flirting with and dating wealthy older men in exchange for favors. It’s a sharp and sad novel about class, power, and sexuality.
My favorite thing about Richard Russo is that he writes amazing smartasses. Unfortunately, there aren’t any smartasses to be found in his novel Chances Are. Instead, it’s the story of three young men and their friendship with (and lifelong obsession over) a young woman who disappears soon after they graduate. It’s a very readable novel, but I missed the wiseass spark that Russo brought to his novels Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool.
Gifts of the Crow is a super-interesting book from local authors about crow behavior, but in the decade-plus since it’s been published a lot of its most interesting factoids have been chopped and channeled and shared on the internet, so it felt like I had read about 65% of this book already.
William Sloane wrote two short novels of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. They’ve been collected under one cover by the New York Review of Books and titled The Rim of Morning, with a new introduction by Stephen King. Unfortunately, these are hardly lost classics. Sloane slowly builds the terror in his stories and then fails to pay them off in any meaningful way, resulting in one long build to nothing much at all.
On vacation this month, I embarked on my annual re-read of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a collection of short scenes about a grandmother and her granddaughter spending a bittersweet summer on an island off the coast of Finland. It’s an incredibly special book for me, and I always find something new in it every year. This year, the sequence that most stood out for me centered around a filthy old semi-haunted bathrobe. The week that I read The Summer Book, a movie adaptation of the book starring Glenn Close opened in a few theaters. I’m still not sure if I’m going to watch it or not—I think my relationship to the book is strong enough that my relationship to the characters won’t be changed by seeing them onscreen, but I’m not entirely sure I want to risk it.
I’ve Been Writing
My bookstore profile column this month focuses on Haunted Burrow Books, a horror-centric bookstore on Capitol Hill. It’s in a temporary space that’s planned to be torn down, so the future of the shop is uncertain. But I hope it picks up enough fans in the meantime to ensure its continued survival. I wrote about the most interesting new-in-paperback debuts for the month.
And I also interviewed RF Kuang, who’s one of my favorite young authors, about her very funny new dark academia novel Katabasis. She was so smart and forthcoming in her conversation with me. She admitted that her novel Yellowface was probably too mean—it was written during the pandemic, when she mostly was seeing the world through Twitter scrolling—and that she would probably never write another book like it again.
In one part of the conversation that didn’t fit in the published piece, Kuang also explained why she hasn’t taken to Bluesky in the same way that she used to post on Twitter. “People just aren’t as funny on Bluesky,” she explained. “When Twitter was funny, the humor was amazing. People could be hilarious on Twitter. There’s just not a public commons where people can be that funny anymore.”
She also talked about art that’s in conversation with her latest book, including the movie Whiplash and the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
Kuang also gently corrected me when I referred to the protagonist of her novel The Poppy War as a hero. “I just don’t really believe in singular heroes, solving widespread social problems,” Kuang said. “I think it takes collective action and a tremendous amount of solidarity” to make lasting change, “and that is antithetical to this very neoliberal idea of the singular hero.”
This is something I’ve wrestled in with my few attempts at writing fiction—the idea of one person changing the world has always felt hollow and childish to me, and maybe that’s why Kuang’s fiction appeals to me on such a fundamental level. She’s struggling with real ways to change the world in her novels, and as I age that becomes, more and more, my favorite kind of fiction.
That’s all for this month. Maybe I’ll see you a little sooner than next month. I hope you’re doing well.
I hope to keep it brief this month because, let’s be honest, the politics are eating our collective brain.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I’m volunteering at the Beacon Hill International School’s 2024 Read-a-Thon. It’s one of the school’s biggest annual fundraising events and also an all-day celebration of books and reading.
I’ll be reading to first and fourth grade classes that day, and I’m hoping that I can help the International School reach their $12,000 goal to fund student enrichment programs. It is obviously not optimal that our public schools rely on PTA fundraisers in order to support basic programs and student literacy, but that’s a bigger problem that requires system-wide solutions. Until then, we do what we can.
If you’d like to donate to the Read-a-Thon, you can do so at this link. I thank you and the students of the International School thank you.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked to Peggy Bailey from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about a report she co-authored explaining the potential catastrophic effects of the House Republican Budget and the Trump campaign’s Project 2025. Bailey is a smart and empathetic thinker who read all the national Republican policy proposals so you don’t have to. This conversation is worth your time.
For the Urbanist, I wrote an op-ed explaining that even though Seattle leads the nation with its high minimum wage, the city needs to do much more to establish affordable housing for working families.
I took a lot of time with it, so I’m very happy with how my piece about a new book called Seattle Samurai came out. It’s a profile of a mild-mannered dental technician who in his spare time was a cartoonist inspired by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Eventually, he created a comic strip for a local newspaper that documented the Japanese-American experience in Seattle. Now, years after his death, his daughter has finally compiled his comic strips into a gorgeous book that also serves as a tribute to her amazing father.
For my bookstore column, I wrote about Collins Books, an amazing used book warehouse operating out of a home in a north Seattle neighborhood. It’s not a traditional bookstore at all—in fact, I think it’s the most unique book-browsing experience in all of Seattle.
I also spotlighted a few of the most noteworthy paperback releases of October.
I’ve Been Reading
C.E. McGill’s Our Hideous Progeny is a novel that expands the Frankenstein story, creating a great-niece of Victor Frankenstein who gets into the family business. I enjoyed the way this book built on the feminist tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, but I did think that it was maybe a hundred pages too long.
Evan Friss’s The Bookshop is billed as a history of bookselling in America. And I was riveted throughout the beginning of the book, which demonstrates how bookselling is intertwined with the creation of America thanks in large part to a bookseller named Ben Franklin. I was disappointed, though, to find how New York City-centric the rest of the book is. For hundreds of pages, the only bookstore west of the Mississippi that’s deemed worthy of Friss’s attention is Powell’s. The stuff about the economics of bookselling is a little bit facile, too. While there are currently fewer bookstores now than there were in the 1990s, I’d argue that the quality of bookstores has improved immeasurably, and I also think that today’s booksellers are much better at the business side of things than their predecessors.
Some book reviewers have positioned Creation Lake at the center of a firestorm. Rachel Kushner’s novel about an American spy infiltrating a radical environmental group is shaping up to be a real love-it-or-hate-it affair. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the book most for its leisurely thematic explorations—the riffs on neanderthals, French culture, and farming techniques. The central plot felt more like a distraction to me, but I enjoyed Kushner’s prose and will happily follow her to whatever novel she decides to read next.
I must have watched Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film 20 or 25 times. It was the first movie I ever bought on videocassette, and I wore that sucker out. So the kid in me couldn’t resist the appeal of John Jackson Miller’s new novel Batman: Resurrection, which is a direct sequel to the 1989 film (and a prequel to Burton’s Batman Returns.) It feels like a novelization of a movie that never existed, and all the characters feel very true to the original films. Miller also devotes a ridiculous amount of space to obsessively solving minor continuity problems in Burton’s original film, like how the Joker’s goons got inside the cathedral where Batman has his final showdown with the villain. It’s all silly fun, but if you were ever a fan of the biggest comic book movie of the 1980s you might find yourself swept up in the drama of this love letter to Michael Keaton’s excellent interpretation of the character.
Remember to Vote
As a resident of a vote-by-mail state, I voted as soon as I possibly could—the morning after the ballot arrived in my mailbox.
I delivered my ballot to the dropbox by 9 am, I received a text saying they had picked up my ballot by 2 pm, and then by 3 pm I got another text saying my signature was confirmed and my ballot would be counted. It was my easiest, fastest voting experience yet, and another reminder that voting can and should be as easy as humanly possible.
If you can vote early, please do. If you live in a state that doesn’t do early voting, please vote on November 5th, and then reach out to your state representatives to demand that they institute a transparent and inclusive vote-by-mail program. Democracy is better when everyone can easily and comfortably participate.
Hold tight—we’re almost there. I’ll see you next month no matter what happens.
Summer 2020 was the opposite of what we’ve been told a summer should be: it wasn’t carefree, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t restful or rejuvenating or rehabilitating. From the pandemic to the clamoring hoards of aggrieved white supremacists in our streets to the wildfire smoke that’s clotting the air over the Northwest as I write this, the summer was in fact uncomfortable and grim.
But at several points in the summer, I tried my best to shut down the world and attempt to be just another mammal relaxing in warm weather by a body of water. And I actually got a fair amount of reading done in those times! What follows isn’t a list of every book I’ve read this summer, but it is a list of the books that I finished (and mostly enjoyed) while trying to enjoy that fabled joy of Summer Reading which has captivated magazine editors since the dawn of time.
I started my vacation with Today Tonight Tomorrow, a charming YA romantic comedy written by Seattle author Rachel Lynn Solomon, which follows two high school seniors as they race around Seattle in a scavenger hunt. Solomon has a lot of fun with the opposites-attract framework, forcing two overachievers into what might be the most charming romantic mortal combat you’ll read all year.
The mainstream success of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer is kind of breathtaking to behold. Just fifteen years ago, this dark comedy narrated by the jealous sister of a glamorous sociopath would likely have been buried deep in the backlist of a college press somewhere. But now it’s a huge hit, and a very worthy one. The story, which moves at a pace that could put some readers in a neck brace, is told in a sparkling voice that never shies away from the darker side of things. Patricia Highsmith would blush with envy.
Is it weird to call a pair of YA alternate history horror novels the most timely books I’ve read this year? The all-stars of my vacation reading were Dread Nation and Deathless Divide, the breakout alternate history duology from Justina Ireland. Set in a United States in which zombies walked the earth in the wake of the battle of Gettysburg, these two novels really stand out for their world-building and their character work. If you’re exhausted by zombies—and God knows, I went into the pandemic expecting to not read a single zombie novel, yet alone two—this story is still very much worth your time, with a complex understanding of race in America and a cracking good sense of dramatic timing.
Miles Harvey’s The King of Confidence seemed like a smart follow-up to Ireland’s duology. It’s non-fiction, but it’s set in an American wilderness not too very long after the Civil War. I enjoyed learning about James Strang, the Mormon con man with a utopian messiah complex at the heart of this book, but Confidence’s pacing is its greatest obstacle. Even at less than 400 pages all told, I kept wishing the story would lose about 100 pages and gain a more propulsive sense of narration. Strang’s story is tremendously resonant with the moment—can anyone else think of any big-talking American con men who’ve swindled their way into leadership of an out-of-control cult?—but in the end, the story got into its own way a few too many times.
Luster, a debut novel by Raven Leilani, begins with a barrage of scathing scenes set in the high-minded publishing industry, revealing the racism (and sheer intellectual laziness) that’s still at root in the biggest presses in the world. Our protagonist, a twentysomething Black woman named Edie, is so used to playing the dumb games that white people put her through that she’s basically sleepwalking. When she stumbles into the open marriage of an affluent white suburban couple, though, Edie finds an opportunity to take action—particularly when the couple’s adopted daughter, a Black girl named Akila, begins to take notice of her. I liked the first half of Luster, with its elaborate performative cynicism, a lot more than the second half, but it’s beautifully written throughout, and Leilani is such a confident storyteller that I have no doubt she’s on the way to a successful career as a novelist. I’ll be there for her second book, and her third and fourth and…
Audio books either completely work for me or they don’t. And weirdly, I can’t seem to predict which ones will hit my subconscious in just the right way—there’s no one genre, narrator, or even length of an audiobook that is guaranteed to appeal to me. So I was surprised by how taken I was with the Libro.fm edition of Margarita Montimore’s novel Oona Out of Order. Brittany Pressley’s narration has something to do with it, I’m sure: Pressley puts in just enough acting to push the book off of the page and into the realm of drama, without distracting from Montimore’s prose. The premise here is elaborate and also catchy: On New Year’s Eve 1982, a young woman named Oona Lockhart is just about to turn 19 years old. Instead, she wakes up in an older version of her body on New Year’s Day in the far-flung 21st century. Oona is told that she’s living every year of her life out of order, that on every New Year’s Day she awakens, seemingly, at random, in a younger or older year of her life. The book follows Oona’s first few years in this state, bouncing around from the future to the past and back again. If Oona sounds vaguely like The Time-Traveler’s Wife, that’s probably not entirely misleading, though I found it to be not as deeply considered, and with the twists more telegraphed in advance. But it’s a fun book with passion for its characters, and it’s very well-told.
Hari Kunzru’s new novel The Red Pill, about a do-goodnik liberal artist who begins to flirt with nihilistic right-wing memelord culture, is likely to strike up a huge debate on all the usual virtual literary watering holes. But I don’t think the book is especially controversial, or intended to be a bomb thrown at polite society. It feels to me like Kunzru is curious about the failings of 21st-century liberalism, and he’s seriously investigating how so many of our mediocre-est thinkers have fallen into the Trumpian nationalist honey pot. This isn’t some dumb Amis flamethrower of a novel, or a disingenuous Houellebecqian anti-life treatise disguised as a novel. It’s a work of genuine curiosity, and an attempt to get behind the eyes of some of the worst people in the world today.
To someone who was unaware it was published in 1990, William Styron’s self-described “Memoir of Madness,” Darkness Visible, might read like a fairly banal account of what it’s like to be deeply depressed. But those of us who were alive in 1990—I was just starting high school, and just starting to wrestle with some new melancholic tendencies at the time—will understand how remarkable Styron’s account must have been at the time. Styron is taking great steps in this book to communicate with a whole new vocabulary that had previously existed only in the hands of psychiatric professionals, and at the time he must have been putting his career on the line by admitting to feelings that in larger literary culture were widely interpreted as weakness. Hell, some of the more lame-brained macho posers I come across on social media could learn a lot from spending time with Darkness Visible. I bet many of them would, if given the opportunity, see themselves in its pages.
Now comes the fall. I don’t think I’ll have as much time for novels this autumn, with the presidential election consuming ever-larger portions of my brain until November—and God knows what will happen after that. I look at this stack of books on my floor and I already feel nostalgic for those times when I was able to shut off my phone and get lost in a book—experience the pleasure of reading for reading’s sake. Who knows when I’ll get that chance again?
At the end of May, Ada’s Technical Books co-founder Danielle Hulton made a remarkable announcement: Ada’s would be taking over operations of local minichain Fuel Coffee. By any metric, buying three neighborhood coffee shops in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse is a bold move. Even more surprising, though, was Hulton’s announcement that the three Fuel locations will also become small indie bookstores, with each eventually carrying roughly 1,000 nonfiction, fiction and children’s titles.
Fuel Coffee seems like a wise investment no matter what the business climate. Owner/founder Dani Cone expanded Fuel from one location in 2005 to three beloved neighborhood hangout spots in Wallingford, Montlake and Capitol Hill. (Cone is keeping 10% of her stake in Fuel.) But conventional wisdom would argue that opening three small neighborhood independent bookshops in Seattle in the year 2020 is, to put it gently, a little bit of a risk.
Luckily, Hulton has never paid much attention to conventional wisdom.
When she and her husband David founded Ada’s 10 years ago, she had no bookstore experience, but coming in fresh proved to be a strength. While many new bookstores flounder around for a few years before honing their stock and discovering their audience, Ada’s almost immediately found its own rhythm as a scientifically focused bookshop, cafe and STEM community hub. Three years after it opened, the store expanded from a tiny annex at the end of Broadway to a lushly renovated house on 15th Avenue East, where it has thrived ever since.
“Ada’s is what I want to exist in the world, and I’ve gotten lucky that other people want it too,” Hulton explained on the phone in a recent interview with The Seattle Times.
With Ada’s firmly established, Hulton had been looking to expand into new businesses. When Cone asked if Hulton and her husband would be interested in buying Fuel back in January, they were enthusiastic about the opportunity. One statewide lockdown and two massive quarterly plunges in GDP later, Hulton found herself in charge of four independent bookstore/coffee shops and a staff of 20 bookseller/baristas…
Is it sacrilege to admit that I prefer Zadie Smith’s essays to her fiction? If you asked me to identify Smith’s most admirable qualities, the clear and precise thinking of her non-fiction work would be at the top of the list.
Thankfully, there’s very little end-of-the-world-ism in Intimations. Instead, Smith does what she does best, reflecting on the smallest details of the world remade by coronavirus: the way people interact, the noises that have disappeared, the language that people use. The closest Smith gets to End Times squalor is an essay hinging on President Trump’s March statement that “I wish we could have our old life back.”
Instead of blood and thunder, we get nuance and delight. Smith compares our willingness to keep working through the early days of the lockdown “like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on.”
Smith compares the thought of carrying on small talk in the middle of all this to a meme of Mel Gibson talking normally to a hyper-gory Jim Caviezel in full costume for the bloodiest moment of The Passion of the Christ. She wonders how “all that prior abundance fit[s] into this new habitat.” She doesn’t make grand proclamations for the human race, just notices how we settle in the dust of this weird new world.
Intimations isn’t a heavy lift or a shocker. Most of its essays will likely be repurposed and absorbed into future editions of Smith’s essay collections. But for right now, it’s a visit from a friend a time when you most need it—a calming acknowledgement that, yes, the world has gone sideways, but we’re still here.
The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating.
Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 has basically been cursed from the start for Push/Pull: “There was major construction on the street for all of this year up until just a few weeks ago,” she says. “So we were already struggling and trying to figure out how to reach more people and establish different revenue streams.”
It’s not like it’s ever been easy; you don’t create an underground arts hub to get rich. Push/Pull was founded by Follis-Goodkind and her now-husband, artist Seth Goodkind, as a stall in the Greenwood Collective communal arts building. In Push/Pull, she says, “we wanted a space that was about art and illustration and comics and printing, encompassing the entirety of an artist’s career.”
