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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
Cheryl Klein has commented on (20) products
Flash
by
Jim Miller
Cheryl Klein
, January 13, 2011
Reading this novel, about a journalist who becomes obsessed with an old Wobbly named Bobby Flash (Wobblies were IWW workers, who caused a stir in San Diego in the early twentieth century), I got the impression that Jim Miller moves through a city much like I do: seeing the past as a ghostly imprint over the present, falling in love with cultural idiosyncrasies, wondering what my history classes never taught me. There's an interesting tension in Flash between artistic individualism and social-justice collectivism which plays out as journalist Jack bumps up against organizers and activists but never quite joins them. His dreamy loneliness is compounded by his semi-estrangement from his grown son and the gaps in his family history. But as his research reveals, the pursuits of individual and communal happiness aren't mutually exclusive. This book is a must-read for history geeks, labor advocates, Southern Californians, people intrigued by alternative communities, and border dwellers in all senses of the phrase.
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Silver Lake
by
Peter Gadol
Cheryl Klein
, May 20, 2010
The most literary page turner or the page-turningest literary novel I've read in a long time. Silver Lake is the story of two men who have been together for twenty years, most of which have been devoted to making a good life even better: They have a house with a lake view, a semi-successful architectural practice and their weekends are devoted to tennis and expensive cheese. But while the core is not exactly rotten, there are definitely a few loose threads in the fabric of their relationship that could unravel if pulled. Enter Tom, a lonely and charismatic drifter who does just that. The plot is actually much more interesting than that, but I don't want to give too much away. So I'll just name a few of the things I loved about this book: the all-too-rare in-depth examination of a long-term relationship (and a gay one at that); the way Gadol introduces new bits of backstory at just the right moments, making the reader as distrusting as the characters; his amazing ability to retell a story by shifting the angle of the camera; the idea that every relationship has a shadow history--a different way things could have gone; the reminder that it's healthy to be needy; the way a neighborhood where I know almost every store and corner becomes beautifully timeless. As I tore through it, I kept lamenting how few pages I had left.
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Cranioklepty
by
Dickey, Colin
Cheryl Klein
, May 03, 2010
People use the phrase "dead and buried" to imply just how very over and complete a thing is. This true tale of famous composers, writers and mystics whose heads were stolen by phrenologists and their contemporaries proves that no person or subject is guaranteed eternal rest. As the poor skulls of Joseph Haydn and Emanuel Swedenborg bounce between various collectors and pseudo-scientists, Dickey paints a portrait of a unique period in history, when Enlightenment reason overlapped with relic-worship, artistic flourishings and eugenics. They were the scariest of times. They were the wackiest of times. But unlike other "thing histories" that claim to explain the entire history of the world through, like, potatoes, Dickey doesn't try too hard to extrapolate. After all, he's telling the stories of people who thought they could determine the cause of genius by rubbing a person's head. I suspect he doesn't want to be the writerly version of a phrenologist. Instead, he does what writers do best: weave intriguing narratives, juxtapose facts and let people draw their own conclusions. One of mine was that I would like to be cremated, thank you very much.
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Tomorrow They Will Kiss
by
Eduardo Santiago
Cheryl Klein
, December 22, 2009
Like the heroines of the telenovelas they love, the characters in this book (three women from the same gossipy village in Cuba, now working in a New Jersey doll factory) are painted with somewhat broad strokes, but they're each more complex than the others think. And, also like novelas, their stories are pretty addictive. Santiago has created a great, classic diva in Graciela, a bad girl with a heart of gold. And when her bitchy "friends" relentlessly try to take her down for such transgressions as daring to take fashion design classes, Santiago shows how suffocating small-town life can be, so much so that it can follow you across an ocean. But of course Graciela's not one to taken down easily, and for that you can't help but root for her.
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Shoot an Iraqi Art Life & Resistance Under the Gun
by
Wafaa Bilal
Cheryl Klein
, December 05, 2009
For me, this book put a personal face not only on Iraq and the war there, but on conceptual art, which can seem as distant and confusing as a foreign war. For Bilal, art and survival are almost synonymous. When he builds a mud-brick hut to protect his paintings from sandstorms in a brutal Saudi refugee camp--and when other refugees follow his example by creating art, building huts and eventually creating a working village--I got shamelessly misty-eyed. Sadly, the case for art and against war is one we have to make over and over again, but not many do it better than Bilal.
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Normal People Don't Live Like This
by
Dylan Landis
Cheryl Klein
, November 02, 2009
I tore through this book in the same manner I devoured Prep--something about my apparent hunger to see an angsty female adolescence given literary weight. Landis shines her considerable literary light on moments and images: for example, the care her bisexual protagonist devotes to touching a pregnant friend's wrist rather than her stomach. It's a book of rooms (the mother character is a designer, so this is both literal and figurative); there's sturdy architecture here, but it's often masked by a beautiful set of curtains. Very occasionally I wanted some of those offstage plot points to get bigger play (what? Leah's dad died? when did that happen?), but mostly I was happy to revel in the details.
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Bad Girls Burn Slow
by
Ward, Pam
Cheryl Klein
, July 03, 2009
L.A. noir with a healthy dose of gleeful, funny pulp, this novel of scam artists trying to out-scam each other is lots of fun to read. Pam Ward seems to enjoy pushing the limits of how nasty she can make her characters, and her wicked joy is contagious. By not just blurring but totally rubbing out the line between villain and hero (not to mention black and white, male and female, even living and dead), she also reveals how a sly individual can use society's mistaken assumptions to his or her advantage.
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Beg No Pardon
by
Lynne Thompson
Cheryl Klein
, June 17, 2009
Lynne Thompson isn't just an amazing poet, she's a versatile one--there are persona poems in here, prose poems, short clever poems, long allusive poems, mysterious near-cut-ups, dense and troubling poems, funny poems about fitting into jeans. She describes the moon (she's a writer who dares to describe the moon) as "a subversive magnet," which could double as a description of a certain really brilliant poet.
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Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco
by
Marci Blackman
Cheryl Klein
, April 21, 2009
Published in 1994, this anthology of queer writing is both a fascinating artifact from a time when AIDS was necessarily a death sentence and many gay writers published under pseudonyms, and a totally ahead of its time/timeless collection (back when few people knew what "FTM" meant, there was apparently already a bit of a scene in SF). My favorite pieces included Elissa Perry's empathic story of a bus ride gone bad, Trac Vu's prose poem about gum and oral sex, and Sparrow 13 LaughingWand's truthfully raw poem (and his name).
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Telegraph Days
by
Larry McMurtry
Cheryl Klein
, December 04, 2008
The narrator of this novel is kind of like Forrest Gump in that she encounters every famous person of her time (Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody and at least a couple of other Bills). Except she's smart and not annoying, and this funny and lively book is also a Wild West portrait of the dawn of the media age. Lots of fun!
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Hunger & Thirst Food Literature
by
Nancy Cary
Cheryl Klein
, November 10, 2008
I have a story in this anthology from City Works Press, but I think I can still comment objectively on the rest of the book, right? It's a luxuriously fat collection of food (and occasionally beverage) writing that will leave you, yes, hungry--conveniently there are recipes included. But it's not all nostalgic essays about Grandma's cookies: There are fascinating pieces on everything from Amish traditions to Taco Bell, a great story about horror movies and bulimia by Sydney Brown, a poem about poi by Jamie Asaye FitzGerald and much more.
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Dahlia Season Stories & A Novella
by
Gurba, Myriam
Cheryl Klein
, October 03, 2008
Myriam Gurba's voice is fresh, funny and honest. I especially like how the protagonist's OCD and Tourette's operate at a low pulse throughout the title novella, neither totally normalizing nor fetishizing these conditions. The book celebrates weirdness without getting all, "Hey, look at my crazy punk rock life!" It's a great handbook for navigating a mundane world in which twitching on the bus and pretending to date Dracula are highly underrated.
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Echo Maker
by
Richard Powers
Cheryl Klein
, May 13, 2008
I love the work of Richard Powers because he combines reams of research (in this case on ecology and the latest neurological developments) with the most intricate of human emotions. In lesser hands, either could easily be lost. The Echo Maker is one part mystery, one part narrativized science, but the part that resonates the most with me is the quiet manifesto at its heart, about people's need for stories.
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(7 of 10 readers found this comment helpful)
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Quakeland
by
Francesca Lia Block
Cheryl Klein
, May 01, 2008
I first read Block's Weetzie Bat books when I was 12. Two decades later, I still love her sparkly prose and her magical portraits of Los Angeles. It's fun to read her new work and think about how we've evolved as reader and writer, respectively.
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History of Love
by
Nicole Krauss
Cheryl Klein
, January 22, 2008
Krauss' characters are lonely and quirky--but never too quirky--and her portrait of love, identity and visibility is so lyrical that I didn't notice how accomplished the plot was until I was almost finished.
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(4 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
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Commitment Love Sex Marriage & My Family
by
Dan Savage
Cheryl Klein
, January 22, 2008
Dan Savage's writing is like Luden's cherry-flavored cough drops--candy that does at least a little something good for you. While I suspect his gay marriage memoir preaches largely to the choir (of which I'm a member), his simple and logical argument for equal rights provides some usable talking points. But more than anything, the book is a funny and sweet portrait of what a real family looks like in the 21st century: sort of traditional, sort of queer, with lots of love and bickering.
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Drift
by
Jim Miller
Cheryl Klein
, November 06, 2007
This portrait of a dystopic Southern California at first appears to be something of an intellectual exercise as protagonist Joe Blake drifts through San Diego--riffing on its darker histories--the way the Situationists wandered Paris. But what at first feels cerebral if intriguing soon blossoms into a wistful, even romantic story of lost souls searching for hope in a deadly, white-hot (but occasionally glimmering) desert.
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(6 of 10 readers found this comment helpful)
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Apex Hides The Hurt
by
Colson Whitehead
Cheryl Klein
, October 04, 2007
As tightly written as advertising copy, Apex is a satire of, well, advertising copy--specifically, the shiny-happy names given to new products and the ways in which marketing obliterates history and struggle. Whitehead is a sharp cultural observer and adept storyteller--who also happens to be very funny.
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(6 of 9 readers found this comment helpful)
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Lunar Park
by
Bret Easton Ellis
Cheryl Klein
, September 04, 2007
I haven't read any of Bret Easton Ellis' books, but somehow reading a (very) fictionalized account of his life as a best-selling author, ace drug addict, and crappy husband and father was thoroughly compelling. He merges postmodernism and sincerity--and character driven lit fic and horror--without looking like he's trying too hard.
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(10 of 20 readers found this comment helpful)
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Flash House
by
Aimee Liu
Cheryl Klein
, September 04, 2007
This novel is an impressive feat of research (on China and India in the late '40s and early '50s), an adventure and a character-driven drama with much relevance to the U.S.' current political involvements. I highly recommend it.
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(4 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
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