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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
jfair1 has commented on (5) products
Treasure Island
by
Sara Levine
jfair1
, September 16, 2012
I beg to differ with this book's many reviewers. "Screamingly funny", yes, in places. But the heroine makes herself into a full-blown sociopath, stealing $1000 from a frightened old woman and eventually suffocating the pet she buys with the stolen money because she can't stand having him around. We all have anti-social feelings, and they can be devastatingly funny -- but this book rapidly gets too ugly to be funny any more. Unless you're REALLY mad at everyone, you really don't want to spend a whole evening with this woman! It's like spending the time watching someone beating OTHER people against a brick wall. (P.S. - This is the only negative Daily Dose I've ever written.)
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Storks Nest Life & Love in the Russian Countryside
by
Laura Williams
jfair1
, August 08, 2010
If I had told my parents in 1957, the year of Sputnik, that an young female Ivy League graduate would write a book about going to Russia to give WWF grants to Russian nature preserves and end up marrying the Director (read: "only park ranger") of a park so remote that the nearest village has has fewer than 20 residents, all of them people who are simply too old to leave -- my parents would have had me committed. Or possibly just conveniently "lost" me in one of our own National Forrests. Laura just knows, from her first year of college, that she wants to work for wildlife in Russia. Her Russian professor mentions perestroika, and, when Laura asks what that is, demands to know why she is even taking Russian. But Laura knows why. Igor, Laura's now husband, is equally incredible to a 1957 American. He is being paid by the Russian government to safeguard a nature preserve. He is well educated and speaks English and engages in constant and effective PR for his reserve. His brother is a young independent filmmaker(in Russia?!) Igor has a stork's nest in his front yard, even though his house -- like those of all the villagers -- is exactly the country-life version of the 2-room Moscow apartment shared by 15 people that we've all heard about. Except that Igor's house is occupied by just Igor, Laura, her cats, a rescued baby moose and periodically other stray animals. This is an enchanting, peaceful read.
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Life of Pi
by
Yann Martel
jfair1
, January 15, 2010
THE most stunning book of the decade. No matter how you take this book, it makes an excellent case that which cannot be scientifically proven, without any need to deny science in the process of belief. As Pi says, "Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing & shelter. . . . But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater." (Chap. 99) Martel gives his answer to the fear of some Christians that a belief in science, particularly evolution, results in atheism. Yet no one in the debate between fundamentalist Christians and liberals ever mentions this bestselling book which so many in the middle of the debate MUST have read. "So tell me," Pi asks, "since it makes no factual difference to you and since you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story?" And why don't we accept that it is our choice whether to believe in the better story, whatever that may be to us, and combine it with science if we darn well choose to?
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Invisible World
by
Stuart Cohen
jfair1
, November 11, 2006
Antique textile smuggling in South America, plots in Hong Kong, lost monasteries in Mongolia, and a personal invitation by the protagonist's best friend to his own funeral. This book has everything, but unlike your average potboiler, it's complex and well written. At the end of his rope in Inner Mongolia, Clayton checks into a hotel in the capitol. "I could see immediately that it was the kind of room people commit suicide in," he remarks to another traveler in the hotel dining room. The man looks at Clayton strangely, but tells him, "I had that room last trip," and they agree that Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is one hell of a metaphore, whichever way you slice it. In Stuart Cohen's grip, I could feel that region myself just then, located somewhere behind and below my heart, where one's fears lie in wait. What is Clayton doing in Inner Mongolia, anyway? Committing suicide or searching for his Holy Grail? And is it with good or evil intent that he lures his childhood friend to follow him? I was reminded of The Magus, another book in which another's hand manipulates the characters. But unlike that heart-of-the-60's book, which confounds spirituality with sexuality, this is a 90's book and works at the borderline of spirituality and the desire for possession -- possession of money, of a perfect work of art, of spiritual accomplishment. High adventure, travel, layers of betrayal, the mysteries of the spirit, and the mysterious plan which Clayton, the now-deceased genius, has left behind him, are awesomely combined by the author. "A good unknown," Cohen writes, "is the best thing you can give somebody." And, he adds, finding a good unknown becomes rarer and rarer the older we get. With Invisible World, Cohen gives us that rare gift: the book contains a good unknown, in all senses of the word. Cohen gives us just a glimpse or two of that polymorphous, barely imagined, completely invisible world that we all seek.
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Unburnable A Novel
by
Marie Elena John
jfair1
, October 29, 2006
An incredible novel -- an emotional and intellectual "tour" of the many kinds of Africans brought to the new world, and the many conditions in which they lived after they got there, and how variably all those differences affect their descendants. A review on the book jacket says that the novel illuminates the "diversity of the African diaspora [that] is often overlooked in modern African American literature". This is true, and immensely valuable, but I would have said that it illuminates ways in which the diversity of humanity make us feel different, and hence separate, from each other, when we are not separate. The book took me a long time to read. This was because both the super-cool, super-accomplished urban yuppie black couple and the Domincan Maroons in the hills, with whom the author begins her story, are initially hard to identify with; and also because, as the author began to reveal what lies under the characters' surfaces, the excitement of each discovery sent me off on long trains of thought as I started making connections with everthing I've ever thought and studied about the evolution of the human race. Unburnable offers another, complementary rather than competing, answer to the question that inspired Jared Diamond's Guns Germs & Steel -- why the white man got so much cargo, and the black man got none. But where Diamond focuses on economic forces, John focuses on the emotional results of those forces, and how those emotional forces have shaped people, so that by the end of the book it feels absolutely self-evident that the "primitive" appearance of African societies are the result of terrible differeneces in circumstance rather than any difference between races. I have always believed, intellectually, in the oneness of humanity. But after reading Unburnable, I can FEEL it as an absolute and perfect truth. And what's more, the book is one heck of a thriller!
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