The Nurture of Nature
Hi!
I cannot tell you how much I needed spring to show up. Here’s a picture of Wally that really captured how I felt last week as the good weather arrived:
The world is still on fire, of course. The news that broke me this month was the government sending a four-year-old American citizen with cancer to Honduras. And arresting judges is real tin-pot dictator behavior.
But for now, I’m trying to get out and walk as much as I can, and get as much lush green scenery into my eyeballs as possible because it felt like an awfully long winter and it feels like there’s another awfully long winter lurking right around the next corner.
I’ve Been Writing
On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Mike Konczal about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which has become all the rage in progressive political circles.
I was excited to write about three different employees at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park for my bookstore profile series.
And I wrote about 10 of April’s best paperback releases.
I’ve Been Reading
When I worked at Elliott Bay Book Company, I was always wondering which of my coworkers would go on to write the Great Elliott Bay Novel. So many booksellers are aspiring authors, and Elliott Bay attracted so many excellent writers that I assumed it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a novel about their experiences there. Here’s a contender for the title: Kim Fay worked at Elliott Bay for years and left right before I started working there in the year 2000. Her latest book, Kate & Frida, is an epistolary novel between a woman living in Europe and a bookseller at the Puget Sound Book Company, which is a (very) thinly veiled stand-in for Elliott Bay. I don’t know if I would call this the Great Elliott Bay Novel, but the details described in the book fondly brought me back to my bookselling days in Pioneer Square. I can’t recommend this one wholeheartedly—the main characters are a little too naive and earnest for me to get completely on board with them—but it’s a charming enough story that surely will appeal to booksellers and the people who love them.
Olivia Waite’s sci-fi mystery novella Murder By Memory takes place on an interstellar ship and it stars a detective named Dorothy Gentleman whose consciousness has been downloaded in someone else’s body. I had a really good time with this one, and I’m excited to read more Dorothy Gentleman mysteries in the (hopefully) near future.
I read two books about the intersection of urban life and the natural world. Thor Hanson’s Close to Home is a short guide to observing all the miracles of nature around us. But I preferred Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, which was much more useful for my walks that take me into places where concrete highways bump up right next to wetlands that are teeming with wildlife.
The Hole is a novella about a young woman whose husband takes a job in a strange new town. Left to her own devices, she wanders the unfamiliar territory and meets fantastical animals and falls into a hole that seems to be designed just for her. If you want the bizarre touches of Haruki Murakami without all the other Murakami hangups, this one might work for you.
Forgotten All-Star is a biography of a comic book writer named Gardner Fox, who created a lot of the trappings that we still see in superhero comics today. I don’t know if a general audience would appreciate this, but as someone who reads and makes comics I really enjoyed following the arc of Fox’s career, from the golden age of comics on through the silver age and even into the bronze age as well.
I read two independent comics that offer commentary on superhero comics while still being their own thing. The Pedestrian is a comic book about a hero whose power is being a pedestrian—their arch-nemesis is a don’t walk sign. The story involves secret cults and mysterious existential threats and it all feels kind of like Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol, which is very much a compliment. I also really enjoyed Santos Sisters, which aesthetically looks like an Archie Comic, but which thematically feels more like the superhero comics that Jaime Hernandez wrote into Love and Rockets—it’s about two sisters who have adventures with an ever-enlarging cast of characters, until the whole thing becomes a sort of biome allowing the creators to tell any kind of story that they want to tell. I could read the Santos Sisters stories forever—it’s just the kind of cheery, imaginative, fun, and mysterious comic that appeals to me on a very deep level.
A Pair of Recommendations
I wanted to recommend a couple of non-book things that I’ve really been enjoying lately.
The first is the movie Sinners, which you’ve probably heard of—it’s Ryan Coogler’s first film based on original material. The less you know about the movie going in, the better off you’ll be. But I do want to say that if you haven’t gone to see it because you don’t like horror movies, I urge you to give it a try. Sinners doesn’t really feel like a horror film except in a 20-minute passage in the center of the movie. It’s not interested in horrifying audiences, or scaring the daylights out of you. Instead it’s a movie about music and community and the long pasts we all have trailing behind us. It’s the biggest and best movie spectacle I’ve seen in theaters since probably the Barbie movie. I left fully entertained, and I spent the next two weeks thinking deeply about it. I honestly don’t know what else you could ask of a movie, and I recommend you see it while it’s still in theaters.
Musically, I’ve fallen for a new electro-pop album by a performer who goes by the name Daughter of Swords. The album is called Alex, and Daughter of Swords described it as “a happy-sounding record about the death of humanity on planet Earth.”
That’s right in my sweet spot—a catchy verse-chorus-verse structure, combined with lyrics like “I feel strange/But it’s just a natural reaction/to a world coming apart at the seams.” If you like The Blow or any of the musicians who came up in Olympia on the K Records label, you might find Daughter of Swords to be up your alley.
I think that’s all for this month. This one feels more discombobulated than usual. Maybe I’ll be more coherent next month! It’s nice to have goals.
Take care,
Paul
P.S. I shared a picture of Wally, so here’s a picture of Obie being a happy older distinguished gentleman after a sunbath.
