Customer Comments

Stray City is such a Portland book. Not a Portlandia book, but a true Portland book. It's set in a time when it was still cheap to live here, still small enough to run into everyone you know while out to coffee, when one could have a drink with the drummer of Dead Moon at Holman's. Stray City is set in the Portland of fluid creativity. Not only is it a true document of that era, it is richly gay, and boldly a gay-hetro love story. Both aspects lend depth and beauty to the story. In addition to the page-turner quality of the story, Johnson is a mistress of craft. The narrative is fluid, each sentence is sharp, and the descriptions will put you in the action. One of my top reads of 2018.

A favorite. One of the three best books I read this year (the other two are Lincoln in the Bardo and All the Crooked Saints). Doig is such a storyteller, and this is good story. It's nostalgic, it's a road-trip journey on "the dog bus," it's a love story between two unlikely persons--a little boy and an old man. It's rich in culture(s) and is a bit of a Western. As the journey progresses, the reader is asked to consider poverty, social hierarchy, codes of conduct, and resilience and come to terms with these realities of our melting-pot culture. While all of these elements, in the hands of a less skillful writer, can become cliche, Doig creates a world that is real in its honesty, pathos, and hope. This is true American lit and a stay-up-late page-turner of a book.

I was reminded of Ian Rankin when I came across this quote of his, “I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation’s politics, economy, psyche and history … and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.” I'd been introduced to Rankin in grad school, while studying in Edinburgh. My pleasure read (as an English teacher) is always tight detective fiction, so I grabbed a copy of Rankin's first novel, Knots and Crosses, to kick off winter break. I liked the writing style. The story is plotted in a standard, hard-boiled pattern. The language was enjoyable. I didn't fall in love with any of the characters, but I did appreciate the mix of them, though they are all a bit stereotypical. The strength in the story is how Rankin deals with one character's PTSD, both the veil of it and how Rankin sets up the release of its hold on the character. The weakness of the book is that it ends with focus on the foil character--no wrap-up information is given about the main character and his family who are the victims of the crime. I needed that resolution... Overall I don't feel I learned more about Edinburgh or Scottish culture but for a first book, this is fine writing and I look forward to reading more titles by this author to see how his writing and vision develop.

I came across this title on a bookshelf at my aunt's beach house. I'd not heard of the author, and am not a fan of gothic novels or Jane Eyre, but bored with the book I'd brought with me, I decided to give it a go. I think it was the blurb about the author that piqued my interest. I'd place the level and depth of The Thirteenth Tale somewhere between popular fiction and strong literature--it's more literature in that it literary techniques are well-used and there is an interesting theme. The characters are rich and developed, the setting is tactile, and the plot moves at a good pace--one that matches the action. The tension builds through the relationship of the storyteller and the writer who is documenting the dying woman's tale. As that story develops, the intrigue in the main plot comes from the behaviors of the twins. Other characters are drawn into the action in a way that adds complexity but not confusion. Because of this, the secret in the plot stays secret until the end. As a first novel, this shines. A different sort of book (and I read widely), and a welcome change. I plan on reading more of Diane Setterfield's work.

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas is a page-turner. The story matter is refreshing and unique--an examination of life's big philosophies and intellectualisms. It is not a dry examination, by any measure. Readers are taken through the daily life of a money-deficient PhD student, her sexual exploits and her search for a rare book. Once she finds the book, the plot shifts into travel into the minds of others as Ariel works to find her disappeared advisor/professor. As Ariel travels between her daily existence in a cold flat and time in the Troposhere, she debates with other characters, including a human-sized mouse god who is kept alive by a cult of 11 boys in Indiana, the mysteries of life, those spiritual and intellectual. This long novel is well-written and never preachy. It's a fun, thinking-person's book.

Home Safe is a quick read, yet one with more literary merit than an airport book, for sure. What drew me in was Elizabeth Berg's ability to know the effects of grief and trauma and her ability to build those behaviors into the main character, Helen. That said, Helen's strength is what pulls the story forward. This is not a sappy story of loss; instead, it is one of moving forward. Rich characters and some plot surprises help Helen along the the narrative path.

I've been a fan of Kevin Sampsell's writing since the Cafe Lena poetry open mic days, when I published a story of his in an early issue of Plazm magazine. In A Common Pornography, I found that same sharp yet intimate writing I was captured by all those years ago. While this memoir is deeply, unabashedly personal, it is also vast in it's acknowledgment of growing up in an anywhere sort of small town in the Pacific Northwest during a particular time--a time period that has informed much of the creativity found in these parts today. Sampsell's story is raw and engaging to read, a story of many things hidden and wrong, but common. At times I felt voyeuristic, but I like that.