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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
mulliner has commented on (25) products
Hild
by
Griffith, Nicola
mulliner
, December 07, 2013
This book swept me away. Griffith immersed herself in the 7th century, and the way she's written this book, she takes you with her. You feel, smell, see, taste Hild's world. She, and the characters around her, are vivid and 3-dimensional. I don't know how she's done this without me ever sensing an info-dump, but she does. There's drama and suspense from the king's political machinations and wars, but also the day-to-day challenges of enough honey for mead, and worries over the flax crop for this year's linen. It reminded my of reading good science fiction, where the author does world-building that takes to a new place. The other day, I was packing up to catch the bus for work, and looking for my Kobo e-reader. I realized that I wasn't thinking "Where's my book?" or "Where's my Kobo?", but "Where's Hild?". I can't recall ever doing that before.
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Heart of Briar Portals Book 1
by
Laura Anne Gilman
mulliner
, August 23, 2013
Suspense, fascinating characters, imaginative world, and wit. Highly recommended. I couldn't put it down. The protagonist, Jan, wakes up to a problem, and the danger just keeps ratcheting up. Jan is smart and stubborn��"and asthmatic. I loved her heading into danger, patting her pocket to make sure that she had her inhaler. Like Gilman's Retrievers series, she adds supernatural beings to this world and makes them both plausible, and alien. Jan struggles to believe they're real, then to figure out what she can, and can't, trust them to do. She has to rely on a creature that looks human (most of the time) but whose nature is to charm and then kill humans. Not your usual "meet cute". She's smart, honorable, flawed and has a snarky sense of humor.
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Hundred Thousand Kingdoms Inheritance 1
by
N K Jemisin
mulliner
, June 13, 2013
If I'd just read the jacket copy, I wouldn't have read this -- looks kinda like feudal fantasy, gods meddle in the world -- but my book group picked it, so I read it. And loved it! There are some standard tropes -- for example, the young person arrives at the city as an innocent yokel, but turns out to be destined for greatness -- but for some reason(s) that I'm not analytical enough to put my finger on, Jemisin transcends the usual. The protagonist, Yeine, is simultaneously smart, and tough, and needy. I found it suspenseful, and the language and imagery beautiful.
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Nemi, Volume 1
by
Lise Myhre
mulliner
, June 08, 2013
This comic strip is a delight! The Nemi character is pure Id, in the finest possible way. She wants what she wants, and she's incredibly funny about getting it. She rather reminds me of a cat. Self-centered and lazy but fastidious with it, with grace and a moral code all her own. She's rather underemployed (when she's working at all), showing up variously working in a clothing store, a music store, or baby-sitting. The baby-sitting is wonderful.
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Without a Summer Glamourist History Book 3
by
Mary Robinette Kowal
mulliner
, April 04, 2013
I thoroughly enjoyed this new installment in this Jane Austen - meets - magic - and - adventure series. The previous one, Glamour in Glass added espionage and warfare to the Regency/Austen world. This one has high stakes political machinations, issues with class oppression, and a more private-eye element: tailing a suspect! Surveillance! Jane and Vincent's relationship just keeps getting more interesting, too.
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Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People
by
Carl Abbott
mulliner
, March 25, 2013
I thoroughly enjoyed this history of Portland. He takes if from who was living on (what became) Sauvie Island before Europeans showed up to the present day in a slim book. It's a fast read, yet he still manages to work in a lot that I didn't know. There are Wobblies, the KKK, artists, longshoremen and immigrants. it's interesting seeing the city's character emerge. I knew bits and pieces about Portland's history, but this put it into context and added more detail.
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Where the Bodies Are Buried
by
Christopher Brookmyre
mulliner
, November 29, 2012
I really enjoyed Brookmyre's earlier books, with their interesting characters, fast-paced suspense, and wacky humor. I picked this up without reading any reviews, and before I'd started reading it I saw a blurb about how he wasn't doing the funny stuff anymore. I was alarmed, because I loved the satire and humor in his earlier books. Well, I needn't have worried. This book has all his virtues of interesting characters and headlong action and suspense, and it still has humor. The man can't not write humor, but now it's grounded in a gritty crime drama instead of going over the top. No one has anything drop out of the sky onto their head. The two main characters are a mature police detective, and a fragile twenty-year-old, in Glasgow. The young woman had been working for her uncle, a private investigator, for about a month when he disappears. He's an adult, there's no sign of foul play, and he doesn't have immediate family, so there's no one to investigate but her. She follows up on the cases he was working, and when she gets shot at, she knows she's in way over her head. The police detective is quite confident in her skills, but there's a shakeup happening in Glasgow's gangs, and the bodies keep piling up, and not in predictable ways. You imagine that these must be related, but there's a lot to unravel to get to that point. Part of the pleasure of a Brookmyre book is the language. One character begins a conversation with "I'm not trying to piss in your chips, but..."
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Where the Bodies Are Buried
by
Christopher Brookmyre
mulliner
, November 29, 2012
I really enjoyed Brookmyre's earlier books, with their interesting characters, fast-paced suspense, and wacky humor. I picked this up without reading any reviews, and before I'd started reading it I saw a blurb about how he wasn't doing the funny stuff anymore. I was alarmed, because I loved the satire and humor in his earlier books. Well, I needn't have worried. This book has all his virtues of interesting characters and headlong action and suspense, and it still has humor. The man can't not write humor, but now it's grounded in a gritty crime drama instead of going over the top. No one has anything drop out of the sky onto their head. The two main characters are a mature police detective, and a fragile twenty-year-old, in Glasgow. The young woman had been working for her uncle, a private investigator, for about a month when he disappears. He's an adult, there's no sign of foul play, and he doesn't have immediate family, so there's no one to investigate but her. She follows up on the cases he was working, and when she gets shot at, she knows she's in way over her head. The police detective is quite confident in her skills, but there's a shakeup happening in Glasgow's gangs, and the bodies keep piling up, and not in predictable ways. You imagine that these must be related, but there's a lot to unravel to get to that point. Part of the pleasure of a Brookmyre book is the language. One character begins a conversation with "I'm not trying to piss in your chips, but..."
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Cecelia & Kate 01 Sorcery & Cecelia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot
by
Patricia C. Wrede
mulliner
, November 26, 2012
An epistolary novel of a Regency England that never was, but really should have been. I read that it started out as a game, with Wrede and Stevermer taking turns writing chapters, and dropping them off at each other's house, and then they realized it could come together into a novel. Naturally, I can't find that tale online now. It's the story of two young ladies in a sort-of Regency England, with magic. They live in the country and are of an age when going to London for the season is all they can think about when all sorts of excitement takes place. The story is told in letters written as beautifully as only letters in epistolary novels can be. There are mysterious goings-on in the local country houses to be investigated. There are love interests, danger, and courage! It is a pure delight. I was with a group of women a few years ago when the subject of books came up, and someone mentioned this. Every single one of us cried out "I love that book!" It's marketed as YA, and certainly is appropriate for that age group to read, but I discovered it in my forties, and adored it.
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Stitches
by
David Small
mulliner
, November 25, 2012
I read it in one sitting, and then read it again. It sounds wrong to say 'graphic memoir', but that's what this is. He's made a career doing award-winning illustrations for other people's stories. Turning to his own childhood, he lets the art tell most of the story, but uses words just so. It's as close to watching a movie while holding a book that I've ever come. His childhood was not a happy one, but it's not that he's abandoned, or beaten. He's in a home with two parents, but there's little love or nurturing. This does not endear his parents to the reader, but you do feel a trickle of compassion for his mother after you meet her mother. The only time I recall his mother seeming protective of him was when she returned after leaving him alone with her mother, and realized that was a mistake. I liked this comment by Jules Feiffer: "From its first line four pages in, 'Mama had her little cough,' we know that we are in the hands of a master."
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Califia's Daughters
by
Leigh Richards
mulliner
, November 18, 2012
I love Laurie R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and her Kate Martinelli books (police detective in San Francisco). In 2004, she wrote this science fiction novel under the pen name Leigh Richards. I really enjoyed it, too. It's a (near) future dystopia, in which war and disease caused modern society to collapse. There's now an endemic virus which causes most boys to die in infancy. The oldest remember a world before it changed, but the young and middle-aged only know a world where women are the leaders, fighters, and do any dangerous work, while the few men and boys in a community are hemmed in by protection from injury and being kidnapped. The book opens in a small community in California that's managing pretty well, farming and hunting. There's a surviving city that still has technology, and which sends out trained healers with some medicines. The protagonist is the community's warrior leader. She's in her element defending her place, but (naturally) is confronted with a challenge, and has to go on a journey that takes to her very different places. Suspenseful, imaginative ��" I want more!
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Krapps Last Cassette
by
Anne Argula
mulliner
, November 17, 2012
I love these mysteries featuring Quinn. In the first book, she's still a cop in a small town in rural Washington. In this one, she's been a private investigator in Seattle for a while. Some of the appeal for me is the location, some is that the character is an older woman, but a lot is just that they're well written. Suspense, crackling dialogue, and quirky characters!
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Whispers Underground Rivers of London Book 3
by
Ben Aaronovitch
mulliner
, August 10, 2012
I loved the first two books in this series, and snatched this one up the day it became available. I was not disappointed! These books have suspense, humor, and interesting characters. They are police procedurals, but it turns out that London's Metropolitan police includes a wizard for handling those odd things that come up. The protagonist is an apprentice to the experienced wizard. He's often in a delicate position, as a junior constable on an investigation, with senior officers who have called in help because something looks peculiar, but they don't really hold with that nonsense. It's incredibly funny. The magical people in London are brilliantly imagined, fitting in quite logically. This book sweeps from the heights of the art world down to the sewers (literally).
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Moon Over Soho Rivers of London Book 2
by
Ben Aaronovitch
mulliner
, August 10, 2012
Suspense, interesting characters, danger, love, magic, humor and -- perhaps best of all -- police procedural mockery of the highest order. Here's a sample: "Are you the SIO on this, ma'am?" I asked. The senior investigating officer on a serious crime was usually at the very least a detective inspector, not a sergeant. "Of course not," said Stephanopoulis. "We have a DCI on loan from the Havering CID but he's adopted a loose collaborative management approach in which experienced officers undertake a lead role in areas where they have the greatest expertise." In other words, he'd locked himself in his office and let Stephanopoulis get on with it. "It's always gratifying to see senior officers adopt a forward-looking posture in the vertical relationships," I said and was rewarded with something that was almost a smile.
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Midnight Riot: Rivers of London 1
by
Ben Aaronovitch
mulliner
, August 10, 2012
What a fun book! It's got suspense, humor, and interesting characters. It's a police procedural, in which London's Metropolitan police includes a wizard for handling those awkward, hard-to-explain things. I also quite like that not everyone in the cast of characters is white and middle class. BTW, this book is called "Rivers of London" in the British edition. The sequel is called "Moon over Soho" and as soon as I finished this one, I rushed out for the sequel.
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Redshirts
by
Scalzi, John
mulliner
, June 07, 2012
This is a book that's got some really splendid surprises, so be careful reading reviews of it, because you'll have even more fun if you read it without any spoilers in advance. This is a spoiler-free review. As the title indicates, this book is set in a Star-Trekkian world with hapless redshirt crew members. It works as a hilarious send-up of the Star Trek world. There's a point early in the book where I had to put it down and howl with laughter for a bit. It moves on from that satire to another level (and another, and another...) as the redshirt protagonists recognize their fate and take things into their own hands. There are twists within twists, but they are so deftly done that I was never confused as to what was going on, even while the action dashed along at high speed, from one meta-madness to the next. The structure of the book is a complete novel, and then three short pieces (the "coda" of the title) set in the same universe, with some of the same characters, taking place after the action of the novel. It's lovely seeing the aftereffects of the dashing action of the novel. The codas are at a more personal level, with characters reacting to what happened in a mad rush of life-and-death action.
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Etiquette for an Apocalypse
by
Anne Mendel
mulliner
, April 27, 2012
This is enormous (if dystopian) fun. It's set in Portland, several years after the apocalypse (massive volcanic eruption, etc) has wiped out any central government, travel or trade. The protagonist's life has pretty much settled down, with the residents of a condo in NW Portland managing to grow food and trade for necessities. They aren't quite starving any more, though they're getting very tired of kale and carrots. Sophie's living with her husband, her mom, and her teenage daughter, and if her mind often drifts off into daydreams about butter or steak, that's to be expected. There's no longer mayhem, though you keep the front door barricaded and you don't go out after dark. Alas, one of the local powers decides to muscle out the other gang, and Sophie and her family are caught in the middle of it. Sophie finds herself, and her doctor husband, to be highly unlikely action heroes, but then they've had to learn to do all sorts of things they never expected, and they do the best they can. Sophie's internal monologue, fuming as her mom comments on her "finally reaching her idea weight", sighing over her daughter's teenage rebellion, and longing for Nutella, is wonderful. The character of her husband, Bernard, is wonderful, too, and I love how she sketches their relationship. As a Portlander myself, I also got a kick out of the local setting -- how nice to see the Armory Theatre go back to its roots as an armory!
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Chocolate From The Cake Mix Doctor
by
Anne Byrn
mulliner
, March 12, 2012
I adore this cookbook. Her instructions are incredibly clear, and every recipe I've tried was reliable. I didn't know how to bake a cake when I picked it up, and yet I promptly became acclaimed among my friends for my delicious cakes. I went on to take pastry classes at the culinary institute, but I still turn back to this book for a delicious, moist, rich cake. It's not just recipes - she tells you how to get cream cheese from refrigerator temperature to room temperature when you forgot to take it out in advance to warm up; how to make substitutions; and all the other helpful hints you need. I won a baking contest using the Darn Good Chocolate Cake recipe! I think people don't believe me when I tell them, "Oh, it's just a doctored cake mix" but that's the truth.
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Human for a Day
by
Martin H Greenberg, Jennifer Brozek
mulliner
, December 24, 2011
The short stories all feature some sort of being that become human for just one day. I adored Ian Tregillis' golem-robot love story, "The Mainspring of his Heart, the Shackles of his Soul." Seanan McGuire's "Cinderella City" is a love story to San Francisco, and has a lovely magic of place. Quite a change from her shambling zombies! David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension" pulls a fun change-up, making me look at things in a different way (I'm avoiding a spoiler here), and works in a love story, too. Kristine Kathryn Rusch does a wonderful job of channeling a cat, on a cat's terms. Jean Rabe's vigilante statues are hilarious, if a bit alarming.
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Among Others
by
Jo Walton
mulliner
, January 22, 2011
The gushing reviews that are springing up everywhere are right. This is a wonderful novel. I fell in love with the voice, which reminded me of Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle". It's a precocious 15 year old's journal, as she navigates the confusions of adolescence, darkened by her sister's death. She's lost her home with her extended family in Wales, and is living in an English girl's boarding school, with holidays at her father's house — the father that she just met for the first time. Her world includes fairies, and magic, and Walton does an amazing job of making that both believable, and at the same time making it feasible for it to be all in Mori's imagination. Mori is confident and analytical. She turns that analysis on herself, what she sees around her, and the books she reads. She adores books, especially SF and fantasy. This book is a love letter to librarians, to interlibrary loan, and to SF fandom. She mentions all the books she's reading, with wonderful comments on them. It conjures up the wonder of discovering books as a child, if you were one of those kids. Someone needs to make up a bibliography of all the books mentioned (and I'm quite sure that someone will.) While many of the books she mentions are SF or fantasy, not all are. Others that come up include Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Plato, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. She is thoroughly steeped in SF, though. When she has nightmares, and wakes up terrified, she uses the litany against fear from Dune, and it works. I love Mori's observations: About she and her twin sister when they were eight years old and immersed in Narnia and Elidor: "…we were always looking for someone else to play with, preferably a boy, because in books that's the group you have to have to go into another world." On meeting a classmate at a record shop: "She was looking at a record called 'Anarchy in the U.K.' by a group called the Sex Pistols. It was a very ugly cover, but I am quite interested in anarchism because of the 'Dispossessed'." Because this has gotten so much good press, so fast, there are spoilers all over the internet. I recommend reading it before venturing onto too many blog discussions. Once you have read it, do followup. The additional information I gleaned about some of the characters set off all sort of interesting new ideas.
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Mink River
by
Brian Doyle
mulliner
, October 24, 2010
The story is set in a small town on the Oregon coast, where people are managing as best they can with little or no logging, and just a bit of fishing. He's got some magical realism going on, with at least one person and one crow having powers not normally found. There's love, courage, cowardice, selflessness, and crime. The characters are interesting. There's sufficient plot to carry me along, and I'm a lazy reader who requires a good firm tow from a plot. I love the Oregon coast setting, and the panopticon way that several different events in town are woven together in the storyline. Doyle is a poet, and you can see that in the lush language. I do love a novel by a poet. In some ways, the novel resembles Steinbeck's "Cannery Row", only without the older novel's racism and misogyny.
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Cryoburn Miles Vorkosigan 13
by
Lois M Bujold
mulliner
, October 21, 2010
I discovered the Vorkosigan saga this year, and finished up with the (then) last book in June, and have been anxiously awaiting this one. I'm so impressed at the way Bujold manages to write successive books in the same universe without having them explode out into enormous tomes. She often puts some technology at the center of a book. In this case, it's cryogenics. Miles is sent to to a planet where cryogenics is big business, to investigate whether something shady is going on in an investment back home from one of the big firms. Bujold hurtles you through fast-paced adventure, with the usual well-mixed-in humor, while spinning out some likely effects on society, business and politics from putting people into suspended animation for long periods of time. I haven't re-read it, yet.
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Shades of Milk & Honey
by
Mary Robinette Kowal
mulliner
, August 25, 2010
I enjoyed this book so much that I couldn't put it down. I finished it one day. Your results may vary, as I'm a complete sucker for anything that smacks of Jane Austen. While it's set in Austen's world of a small circle of neighbors in the countryside, exchanging proper visits, this book has rather more dramatic wooing than is typically seen—at least onstage—in Austen. The magic fits into this world beautifully, and helps drive one of the romances in a most satisfying way. In addition to the content, I just have to say that it's also a remarkably pretty book. The dust jacket is beautiful, the pages are deckle edged, and the type is lovely.
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Pinion Mainspring 03
by
Jay Lake
mulliner
, April 06, 2010
The third (and conclusion?) to the Mainspring series. I adore Jay's clockwork earth, and the characters. This one introduces the stoic, loyal, and dangerous Bernard Forthright Kitchens. (That name is second in wonderful only to Threadgill Angus al-Wazir.) I think the mysterious monk is new, too, though I suppose I might have forgotten her in the year or more since I read "Escapement". I love the strong women in these books. In addition to the monk, Paolina Barthes and Emily McHenry Childress are both back -- the teenager and the older librarian who are changing the world. Not to shortchange the men, which are interesting, too. Cataloger Wang is another librarian caught up complex politics and war, doing the best he can. Boaz the Brass is a wonderfully realized whatever-he-is, transforming into a something richer (I hesitate to say human), and falling in love with Paolina. There's a climactic battle that is too, too wonderful, but I don't want to reveal any spoilers. BTW, these books have the most beautiful damn covers out there. Of course, the artist had good material to work with. Cliffs! Dirigibles! Robots!
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Day Shift Werewolf
by
Underwood, Jan
mulliner
, September 18, 2006
Nominally a novel, it's really a set of intertwined stories -- the werewolf sees the mess left by the zombies, and so on. They're laugh-out-loud funny, but grounded in real characters that you feel for. As I flip back through the book to write this review, I can't decide who I like best. The werewolf is awfully sweet, but the evil twin, struggling between his demonic career goals and love of Play-Doh calls to me, too. Be forewarned that this does not fit in the horror genre. Look elsewhere for chills. I don't think there is a defined genre that you can shoe-horn this book into. It is funny and touching. The closest comparison I can think of is Christopher Moore.
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