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Ridge Readers Book Club: The Left Hand of Darkness
 Our Ridge Readers book club returns for its last meeting of the year, next Wednesday, November 28, at 7:30, to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Newcomers always welcome! (The next meeting, on January 16, discusses Liza Mundy's Code Girls.)
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New Book of the Week
Land of Smoke
by Sara Gallardo
I've been reading these stories for months, off and on in between other books. I'm not sure I could have read them any other way: they read easily, but take some digesting, in the best way. Gallardo wrote from the '50s through the '70s and was a well-known figure in Argentina, but this is her first book translated into English, and it landed (on me at least) like stone tablets from another world. She's described as a "magical realist," because she's South American and because there are fantastic elements in her stories, but she stands apart from her apparent peers, Garcia Marquez and Borges. Some of these many stories are only a page long, some are twenty. There are monsters, suicides, priests, exiles, and many, many animals. But more than anything there is her voice: spoken with utterly confident authority, able and willing to turn a story on a dime at any moment. —Tom
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Old Book of the Week
Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History
by Glen Berger
At some point in the previous decade, news filtered back to me that Glen Berger, the most talented person I knew in college, was writing a Spider-Man musical with U2 and Julie Taymor. What a break for an unknown playwright! Well, you may have heard how that turned out: a notorious Broadway disaster that still managed to survive for over a thousand performances. If you want to hear more, Berger told all in this 2013 memoir, written amid the wreckage left by a typhoon of artistic overambition and technical catastrophe. If there were any bridges left standing after that debacle, he burns them here, but with a rueful earnestness that makes it clear he wishes he could build them all back again. My favorite Broadway book is Act One, Moss Hart's delightful tale of his charmed debut. Glen's story is, sadly, its opposite, but a fascinating page-turner that might be just as useful for a young artist to read. —Tom
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Kids' Book of the Week
All-of-a-Kind Family Hannukah
by Emily Jenkins and Paul O. Zelinsky
When I first started to read on my own I couldn’t get enough of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family chapter books, which I recently heard called the “Jewish Little House on the Prairie.” The series follows five sisters as they grow up in New York City during the first few decades of the 20th century, recording family dramas (low-key) and traditions. So I was thrilled to see that an award-winning children’s author and illustrator had teamed up to create a picture-book introduction to these not-all-that-well-known classics. Vibrant, page-filling pictures, which often give the delicious feeling of peeking into a dollhouse, are the backdrop for the story, starring 4-year-old Gertie, who is frustrated that she’s not old enough to help make the latkes, just before finding out that she is the perfect age to light the first candle on the menorah. Any young person who enjoys the book this year will most certainly be ready to start on the series by Hanukkah-time next year. (Ages 3 to 6) —Liz
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Non-Book of the Week
Amber Leaders Reindeer Ornaments
We love local designer Amber Leaders's style, and we've enjoyed as she's branched out from cards into tea towels and enamel pins. Her latest: these stylish reindeer ornaments!
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Non-Book of the Week
Happy Hanukkah!
With the Festival of Lights coming early this year (starting a week from Sunday night!), we consider this McBitterson's card the funniest of our pretty funny selection of Hannukah cards.
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Cover Crop Quiz #122
Will this be a little harder than some of the recent quizzes? I'm not sure! It's one of my favorite New Directions classics (both the book and the cover).
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Last Week's Answer
Charles Johnson's 1990 National Book Award winner, Middle Passage.
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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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Curious what's happening with Madison Books, the new store we're opening in Madison Park? It's been a while since we've given an update here (though we get asked every day about it at the store), and that's been because we weren't quite sure what schedule would be possible. But now, as construction there has progressed, we have a better idea. Here's the current plan: we'll open for a couple of weeks in December as a bare-bones pop-up store in the space (at 4118 E. Madison Street). It won't look like much, but we'll have a lot of books, and we'll be open for regular hours every day through Christmas Eve (and perhaps a little bit after). Then we'll close down for a month or so, to get the space all ready for a grander opening, likely in early February.
