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New Book of the Week
When We Cease to Understand the World
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
In the relative quiet at the end of the year I caught up with one of the most acclaimed books of 2021 (including by James at Madison Books when it came out in October). I suspected it would be right up my alley, and indeed it was. In chapters that read at first like essays and then increasingly like fiction, Labatut elegantly traces the lives and ideas of some of the 20th century's most prominent physicists and mathematicians. But those elegant tales lead again and again into horror, both in the personal lives of these obsessive thinkers, which span the most murderous decades of the century, and in the consequences of their ideas. Reading of their struggles to push the margins of our comprehension, you feel like you are standing at the edge of the abyss that faced one of his subjects, the German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, who, while dying at the front in World War I, madly solved equations that led to an unthinkable conclusion: the existence of black holes. —Tom
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Old Book of the Week
A Pin to See the Peepshow
by F. Tennyson Jesse
There’s a literary True Crime wave cresting in 2022 and it is Meta: teeming with books of all types that dissect our long obsession with the genre. Centuries before Penny Dreadfuls were condemned for corrupting Victorian youth, Executioner’s Tales were providing grim titillation. In the modern era, True Crime began using the lenses of psychology and sociology to focus on the “why” of a crime. And by replacing moralizing with “science,” it became horribly easy to see oneself as the victim or—gulp—the accused. In this 1934 novel based on an infamous 1922 murder case, crack storytelling and rich historical detail reanimate accused murderer Julia Almond and the rigidly patriarchal middle-class milieu which incubated the deadly act. Her tale gains intensity as the scene shifts to the courts and those same prejudices pervert justice and compound the crime. Long out-of-print, this cult classic has just been reissued in the British Library Women Writers series and is recommended for those who can’t get enough period crime series from the BBC. —Liz
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Old Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Book #85
Act One: An Autobiography
by Moss Hart
There's a reason that Act One, a massive bestseller when it came out in 1959, is still beloved by theater kids everywhere as the great Broadway memoir. Hart himself was as stage-struck as they come, and his story of how he rose, through lucky breaks and setbacks, from poverty in the Bronx to hit plays and major prizes, is charming, funny, and as brilliantly observed and constructed as any script he wrote. But you don't have to be a theater kid to love it: the book's final third especially, the story of his first Broadway production, is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that shows just how much sweat, anxiety, and ingenuity goes into putting on even the fizziest of farces. —Tom
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Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #73
The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess
by Tom Gauld
One of the best things a fairy tale can do is take a bizarre premise and make it seem natural, following wherever its strange rules lead. What would happen, for example, if a childless royal couple had two children made out of wood? In the hands of Gauld, who you may know from his Snooty Bookshop postcard set, the result is a tale told with all the lightness, heart, and adventure you could hope for in 32 pages. (Age 2 to 6) —Tom
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Link of the Week
"On Becoming Lucy Sante"
I first learned about the change last fall, when the writer @luxante, who I follow on Instagram, and whose byline I followed in print for decades when it was Luc Sante, announced there that she was now Lucy Sante. Now in the new Vanity Fair, she explains, with the same sharp and subtle style that has always made her one of my favorite writers, the very individual path she's taken along a route she's traveling with many others. to the point where she is, "at 67 years of age, undertaking something enormous that should have been done decades ago."
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Other Link of the Week
Ben McFall, 1948-2021
I also wanted to note, if you missed it over the holidays, the passing of a friend of Sante's, and of many other literary New Yorkers: Ben McFall, who presided for decades over what we at Phinney would call the "Made-up" section of Manhattan's legendary and labyrinthine Strand bookstore. His New York Times obituary cites one detail any bookseller—or any person—might aspire to: "Ben never had an official position.... Ben’s title was ‘Ben.’" I will also note one quote of his that had a particular resonance with me: to the amazement some showed at his recall of the amount and location of every book in his section, he replied, "It seems like a feat, but if it were your house, you’d know where things are, too."
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Cover Crop Quiz #228
In honor of the author's birthday yesterday, a 1938 first edition that is not her best-known book, but possibly the most literal of her covers (designed, like many of her books, by her sister).
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Last Week's Answer
The answer to last week's answer is "vegetable," since I think that's a handful of beans on the cover of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
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New to Our 100 Club
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
(838 weeks to reach 100)
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Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
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Well, January is supposed to be a quiet month in the store, but if you stopped by this weekend you might have thought, from the crowds, that it was mid-December. For that extra traffic, we have Paul Constant to thank, for his 
And then on Monday, we woke up to some more good news: Issaquah's own Donna Barba Higuera had won the Newbery Medal, perhaps the biggest prize in children's books, for her novel The Last Cuentista. As you may recall, Donna was one of the authors who stopped by the store in December to sign their latest books, and on Monday we still had a small stack of signed copies available. Those didn't last long, but we should have more copies (unsigned, at least for now) in a few weeks, along with the new Caldecott Medal winner, Watercress, by Andrea Wang and Jason Chin (which also achieved the rare feat for a picture book of being named a Newbery runner-up). Let us know if you'd like to reserve one of either when they come in.
