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Ridge Readers Book Club: Barbarian Days
 Tonight at 7:30 pm at the store, the Ridge Readers book club meets to discuss William Finnegan's (excellent) memoir of a surfing life, Barbarian Days. Can't make it this time? Next month's book is Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone.
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New Book of the Week
The Gallows Pole
by Benjamin Myers
The Gallows Pole recounts the rise and fall of the Cragg Vale Coiners who, as the pastoral moorlands of their native Yorkshire were being transformed by the architecture of industry in the 1760s, so tirelessly counterfeited currency that the local economy almost crashed. In spite of a dim sense of social justice, they were less Robin Hood’s Merry Men and more The Sopranos, and demands for loyalty and the impossibility of trust, a neighborhood co-opted through intimidation and largesse, and reputations built on brutality and even more bravado all make for a tale as propulsive as—well—the best gangster stories. And like those, what elevates the familiar plot is the telling. Myers’s just-over-the-top style is the perfect pairing for the harsh yet otherworldly environment and its true-myth-in-the-making. And be sure to read aloud (in your head) the alternating chapters of King David Hartley’s phonetically rendered jail cell confession so you get every last pungent drop. This book is not for those with delicate ears or stomachs. Take that as either warning or added inducement. —Liz
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Old Book of the Week
How to Watch Soccer
by Ruud Gullit
That is a banger of a book! —Peter
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Audio Book of the Week
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Perhaps you read Snyder's bracing pamphlet, On Tyranny (or the Facebook post it was based on)—from its title, I had imagined this new, much larger book as an expansion of those ideas, but, while it's written in the same level-headed-but-urgent tone (which Snyder's voice for the audiobook perfectly represents), it's doing something related but different, focusing less on tyranny in the abstract than on the very specific case of Putin's Russia. And while there are many excellent books on that subject, what's most impressive, enlightening, and disturbing is the way he systematically traces the intellectual structure of Putin's regime and his foreign interventions, introducing concepts like "eternity politics" and "implausible deniability" that give some order to the disorder we're living through. —Tom
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Links of the Week
Stanley Cavell, 1926-2018
Philosophers, and their deaths, don't make much noise in our culture these days, but I wanted to note the passing, at age 91, of Cavell. The New York Times hasn't yet caught up with the news (I assume they will?), but the NYRB and the New Republic have short, evocative remembrances of his interests and idiosyncrasies. I admit I've read very little of him myself, but he's always seemed tantalizingly approachable: working with straightforward language (without ever settling for its surface meanings), and digging deeply into such subjects as screwball comedies and Thoreau's Walden as well as more traditional philosophical topics. As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, I was delighted to run across a copy of his Senses of Walden in New York recently, which I've been carrying around, hopefully, ever since.
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Cover Crop Quiz #102
The top right corner of this first edition from 1973, which has been reused in at least one paperback edition since then.
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Last Week's Answer
Well, I thought I'd get a few more correct replies on this one (I got one!), but it's still worth it for the punchline: it's Taro Gomi's picture-book classic, Everyone Poops.
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New to Our 100 Club
Pickle
by Kim Baker
(223 weeks to reach 100, thanks in part to two recent school events for our friend and neighbor, Kim)
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Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
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