Let’s Go Shopping!
Hi!
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 1961 believed 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 20th century.)
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!