Five Years of Visiting Bookstores
Hi!
This month, my Neighborhood Reads column at the Seattle Times—in which I profile a different Seattle-area independent bookstore every month—officially turned five years old. So I worked very hard on an article sharing the things I’ve learned from Seattle’s many successful bookstores, and on a map charting every single one of the bookstores that I’ve visited or mentioned in the column and are still in business, which totals just over 60.
The timing for this also lined up perfectly with Independent Bookstore Day, which was last weekend, and I can’t think of a better time to celebrate the fact that there are more independent bookstores in town now than there were back when I started the column.
I have to thank my editor, Yasmeen Wafai, for advocating for this project and bringing it to fruition. She’s been an absolute gem to work with—she cares about making sure that her arts pages reflect what real people are doing in the city. Every freelancer should be so lucky to have an editor like Yasmeen.
But most of all, thanks to all the booksellers who took time out of their busy schedules—some in the depths of that harrowing first year of the pandemic—to talk about how they came to be booksellers, and what they’ve learned from their neighbors. This is the best monthly freelance gig a writer could hope for.
This project took up a lot of my time, and I hope you enjoy it. I also kindly request that you hold off from adding to the deluge of emails in my inbox complaining that your favorite local bookstore didn’t get covered. I promise you: It’s on the list! I am one human being covering one bookstore a month!
Anyway, forgive the crowing, but I put a lot of work into this one and it’s really nice to see how much work I’ve done on the column over the year, how many people I’ve met and talked with, and how many amazing bookstores there are in the greater Seattle area.
I’ve Been Writing
In addition to the above bookstore profiles and the piece I’m writing about in the conclusion, I’ve also written about the It’s About Time Writers Series in Ballard, which is now Seattle’s longest-running readings series. The series was endangered by the threat of incoming library budget cuts, but it seems like they’ve made it through unscathed this time. There are more cuts coming this fall, though, so who can say? If you care about this and you live in the Seattle area, please contact your city councilmember and the mayor’s office to tell them that it is incredibly important to retain library services for all Seattleites.
I spotlighted eight new-in-paperback titles that were released this month.
And I had a delightful interview with the new owners of Burien’s Page 2 Books, who were avid customers of the shop and who firmly believe in letting the store’s amazing, enthusiastic booksellers just keep going their thing.
I’ve Been Reading
My favorite reading experience this month is Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, a novel with a twist on the Groundhog Day plot: A single woman comes home from a friend’s bachelorette party to find a husband she’s never met waiting for her. But her phone is full of reminders of her life together with the husband that she doesn’t remember: photos of their courtship and their wedding, their boring day-to-day texts. Then the husband goes into the attic and a new husband comes down, with the house and all the photos on her phone instantaneously changed to reflect his interests and their experiences together. Every time one husband goes up into the attic, a new husband comes down, and so she starts shopping for a life that she wants. Gramazio has a lot of fun with the concept—though some of the ethical choices the protagonist makes are pretty dark if you think them through—and it’s a great twist on the traditional comic novel about dating.
The opening chapters of John Scalzi’s latest novel Starter Villain are a master class in how to open a science-fiction novel that transitions readers from a normal environment into a fantastical world. Unfortunately, the last three-quarters of the book really don’t do it for me—it feels like the book is just a series of exposition dumps framed by explosions that advance the plot.
A little while ago I was complaining about how many literary families are always miserable in exactly the same way—parents yearning for something more and tempted by adultery, children hating the parents and questing dumbly for authenticity. One comic family novel that I read recently, Worry by Alexandra Tanner, proves to be an exception because it gets the complexity of the relationship between sisters exactly right. The young women in this book clearly love each other and have spent their whole lives together—and they also can’t stand each other sometimes. They struggle with mental illness and with their Facebook-radicalized parents, and they fight a lot, but there’s something sweet at the core of their relationship that those other novels about miserable people just can’t capture. Plus, the sisters adopt a troubled shelter dog named Amy Klobuchar, which is wonderful.
The Other Profile is yet another novel about how social media interacts with (and interrupts) the flow of daily life. I read it at the beginning of the month, and now I can barely remember anything about it, aside from the fact that it’s about an assistant to an influencer. If you’re only going to read one novel about the impacts of social media this month, I’d direct you to Worry, instead.
Who Are We Now? is a beautifully designed—some might say overdesigned—book exploring a deep survey of what modern people believe, particularly when it comes to love and sex. I don’t consider the findings of this one to be as groundbreaking as the authors believe them to be, but it’s nice to read an ambitious book with a confident and transformative thesis.
As someone who has published several books, I wish I had read The Design of Books years ago. It’s a guide to the design and publication process of books, explaining all the vocabulary words and possibilities that graphic designers can employ to bring books to life. I’d recommend it to anyone who has written, or who wants to, write a book. To those same writers, I would also recommend Who owns this sentence?, which is a breezy history of copyright law that I read right after The Design of Books. I was carrying around a lot of misconceptions about copyright law that this book debunked, and I feel like I have a better understanding of how the law intersects with intellectual property.
On Writing an Obituary
Also this month for the Seattle Times, I wrote an obituary of a local artist named Jeffrey Veregge, who is probably best known for his self-described “Salish Geek” interpretations of Marvel Comics superheroes. I’ve written many tributes to mark the passing of artists over the years, but I’ve never written a proper obituary before. It was an experience.
I loved learning so much about Veregge—his art, his career, his history. I read pieces about his art shows and interviews and the comics he helped create for Marvel and pretty much everything I could get my hands on. Learning about him was an absolute honor.
But if I’m honest, the emotional impact of writing an obituary is a lot. You’re basically cold-calling people in mourning and asking them to do labor for you. Veregge’s family was incredibly generous with their time and their memories, and so were his representatives at the Stonington Gallery. Their pain was so evident and so raw, and I felt that pain acutely.
I’m glad that I had the experience of writing a formal obituary, and I’m beyond honored to have the opportunity to write one for a well-loved person and respected artist like Veregge. But I don’t think I’m going to write a ton of these, and I have a whole new respect for journalists who write obituaries for a living. They must have a core of emotional strength that I’m just not able to access.
All of this is preamble to urge you to contribute to the Veregge family GoFundMe if you can, or at least consider buying one of his shirts from the Fingers Duke gallery in Bremerton. (I got a Godzilla one and it’s a super-comfy t-shirt.) He was a brilliant young artist, and his wife and three kids shouldn’t have to carry the burden of medical debt just because America’s health care system is an absolute nightmare that requires people to work 40 hours a week if they want decent coverage.
We need to do better by our artists, because they give everything they have for us.
See you next month,
Paul