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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
Felicity has commented on (33) products
Habibi
by
Craig Thompson
Felicity
, April 28, 2012
Beautifully drawn and designed, gorgeously interwoven with Quran stories and Arabic calligraphy. The story is brutal in places, but ultimately, I thought, redemptive and beautiful. Unlike many stories I read or hear, it interrogates the brutality to women it depicts and tries to balance female self-sacrifice and understand it. The themes are beautifully woven into the narrative and the art both -- and there is really no difference between art and story, here. I think it will reward rereading.
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Crack in the Edge of the World America & the Great California Earthquake of 1906
by
Simon Winchester
Felicity
, September 07, 2010
I've read and enjoyed several of Simon Winchester's books, and this is my favorite thus far. This story abounds in historical interest, geological drama, and the bizarre coincidences that delight both Winchester and his readers. The early chapters paint the broad backdrop of the 1906 earthquake -- both a cultural portrait of 19th century San Francisco and a geological profile of Western North America. Basic earth science is mixed with the history of scientific discovery and Winchester's travelogue of seismologically notable America. It never fails to engage and intrigue. Of course the earthquake itself is fascinating, and Winchester weaves a compelling story out of past destruction, present danger, and the mythos of frontier America.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Felicity
, September 05, 2010
I liked Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, so I picked up her second, more ambitious book. It's set before and during the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967-1970. I don't call this book more ambitious than Purple Hibiscus just because it tackles a war within living memory. It has multiple points of view, and executes a few small chronological jumps. Each of the point-of-view characters, who differ in age, race, gender and class, traces a believable and human arc. This is no small feat, and Adichie pulls it off handily. She does a beautiful job of showing us large events through individual lives. Adichie tells a complex and disturbing story with a large, vivid cast, and draws it to an ending that feels true. A remarkable book.
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Use of Weapons: Culture 3
by
Iain M Banks
Felicity
, December 02, 2009
Use of Weapons is a challenging book, both in its structure and its subject matter. It's about war: the necessity of it, the uses of it, the sorts of people it requires and creates. It is sometimes exciting, sometimes brutal, and in the end emotional, memorable, haunting.
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by
Michael Chabon
Felicity
, July 19, 2009
At first this alternate-history mystery thriller just seemed fun -- the hard-boiled language, the mordant humor. But beyond its wit, its well-paced series of frying pans and fires, its over-the-top descriptions and lovingly detailed worldbuilding, this is a powerful novel. It touches on universal themes while describing a world as specific as the tuna salad in a Sitka lunchroom. It's a book with characters you care about. Landsman is a familiar archetype, the loose cannon cop down on his luck, but he's vivid and vulnerable, likable. Bina manages to be both somebody's dream girl and a real, vital, smart woman. Even the dead have voices and a grip on your heart. I'm a contrarian reviewer, predisposed to be dubious about bestsellers, but I found this novel to be imaginative, distinctive and compelling.
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Mystery & Manners Occasional Prose
by
Flannery OConnor
Felicity
, July 18, 2009
This is an excellent book about fiction, why (in one practitioner's opinion) to write it, read it, and value it. Flannery O'Connor has a matter-of-fact approach to big topics like the philosophy of art, and suffers neither fools nor mediocrity. This collection of her lectures and essays is so pithy that I was often moved to jot down quotes for later use. Some of these follow my review. O'Connor has much to say that is wise and useful, and nothing that pulls its punches. The book is one of those rare and fabulous writing craft books that made me laugh out loud. The last part of the volume, which concerns being a Catholic writer, writing the Catholic novel, et cetera, is of less use to a non-Catholic or non-Christian writer. However, some of the sections in the first part of the work where the author discusses how her religion supplies the Mystery for her art are useful to any writer interested in the sources of creativity. Quotes: "Fiction begins where human knowledge begins -- with the senses -- and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium." "Art is a word that immediately scares people off, as being a little too grand. But all I mean by art is writing something that is valuable in itself and that works in itself." "It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks." (example of the clerk from Mme. Bovary) "There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
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I Sailed With Magellan
by
Stuart Dybek
Felicity
, July 16, 2009
This is a book of short stories linked so tightly that they seem to add up to a novel. It's a great form for stories about growing up: episodic, shifting in tone, building up to a greater whole. The main character, Perry, grows up in Chicago in the 50's and 60's, so the book is a portrait of that place and time, as well. I liked that Perry's story includes his brother's, the way real people's growing does intertwine and contrast with the growth of those around them. I liked the elements of the unreal or quasi-mythic in the neighborhood, in the stories of the men who drink at Zip's. I liked the way the young people are explicitly interested in understanding their lives as stories and writing their own identities.
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The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Revised Edition
by
Marie-Louise Von Franz
Felicity
, July 12, 2009
Von Franz was apparently Jung's chief disciple, and her work on fairy tales and folklore was central to her continuation of his work. This volume is, mostly, more centered on the act of interpreting than on the big Jungian worldview, and thus is interesting even if you don't entirely buy into Jungianism. It discusses the importance of tale-telling and fairy tales and demonstrates Jungian folklore analysis by dissecting individual tales in depth. I enjoyed the way von Franz uses multiple versions of a story to triangulate a strong interpretation. The stories she uses are often evocative and little known. Many of the symbols she discusses, and the diagramming of fairy tales by number and gender of characters are very useful and fruitful. The last sections of the book were less intriguing, especially the section where she talks about the female fairy tale heroine, which dripped gender essentialism and was more full than usual of Jungian metaphysical certainties. Most of the book, however, was thought-provoking and even inspiring. Recommended for fabulists and other fairy tale enthusiasts.
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Desolation Island Aubrey 05
by
Patrick OBrian
Felicity
, July 11, 2009
This is my favorite Patrick O'Brian book so far, despite stiff competition. It's a classic 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' adventure, beautifully written. From the sharp practices of landsmen on rich sailors to a vicious storm in the Bay of Biscay, and on and on into more and more pressing perils until you are perched over the book, rigid with tension as the ship flees an implacable enemy over cataclysmically high seas. Epic, unforgettable book.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by
Zora Neale Hurston
Felicity
, July 09, 2009
I found this a quick read, once I'd had a few pages to soak into the dialect. I enjoyed the frame, which placed the narrative firmly in a storytelling tradition, and gave enough clues about Janie's eventful life that the reader could quickly realize it was the life, not the events themselves, that mattered. The dialogue throughout the book is spritely, marked by inventive habits of wordplay, and the narrative itself is often beautiful, evocative, and skeweringly apt. I love the recurring images that pervade it, like bright threads glinting throughout the fabric. It's short, and much of its character work is expertly begun early and tied off neatly at the end, although there are some episodes that I still found enigmatic. It raises knotty issues of colorism, beauty, self-esteem and self-definition, and succeeds as a bildungsroman all these years and bildungsromans later.
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Burning Down The House Essays On Fiction
by
Charles Baxter
Felicity
, July 08, 2009
These nine essays center on problems with contemporary literary fiction. Really, I promise that's not as dry or negative as it sounds. The book challenges writers to recognize and break rules and habits engrained in writing culture, and by so doing tell great stories. It is often funny, beautiful, and thought-provoking. Also, it's painfully quotable. I used around twenty Book Darts. I suppose I can't say that and then give no sample quotes. Here goes: "All moralizing implies some knowledge of the future." "As a result, many young writers, and perhaps experienced ones as well, may be reluctant to have conflicts or plots in any form in their stories because they fear that such elements will be branded as melodramatic, vulgar and cheap." "There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, 'Mistakes were made,' you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel."
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Little Black Book Of Stories
by
A S Byatt
Felicity
, July 07, 2009
A good story makes me want to read the next one; a great one makes me close the book, almost involuntarily. I want to read the next one, but not yet, not yet. There were several such stories in this little volume of five. Byatt, here, is inventive and unexpected. She brings characters rapidly to life and into their strange fates, and captures moments of vivid humanity. The stories are dark yet luminous.
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Black Swan Green
by
David Mitchell
Felicity
, July 07, 2009
I have a hard time saying why this book is so charming. Perhaps it's Jason's naked honesty as a narrator, the way he lays bare his own insecurity. Perhaps it's the way he anthropomorphizes his own impulses and problems, or how the initially de rigeur contempt/resentment relationship with his older sister rapidly becomes something more respectful and interesting. Perhaps it's that he writes poetry under the name of Eliot Bolivar. Seriously. At any rate, Black Swan Green manages to make a memorable voice and an individual story out of what seems like very ordinary material: young boy struggles with identity and social acceptance in small English town in the 80s. The plot does have its predictable moments, but also its surprises. I enjoyed the book, read it quickly, and liked Jason much more than the average teen protagonist.
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Tales Of Magic 07 Seven Day Magic
by
Edward Eager
Felicity
, July 02, 2009
I loved Edward Eager books as a child, and they're still fun. Seven Day Magic is charming because it's about the magic of books and a bookish sort of magic. Eager certainly is, as Bellow said of writers, "a reader moved to emulation," and this one drips with his love of books. It's sweet, good fun. This book contains both subtle, incidental magic like that in Magic or Not? and magic of the sort the character Fredericka likes in her reading: "magic adventure[s], with wizards and witches and magic things in it" that are "for certain" magic, "not just a coincidence". Since there are both Frederickas and gentler Susans among the readers of the world, it's a good mix. Well worth the trip to the library for any magic-loving child.
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Lord of Light
by
Roger Zelazny
Felicity
, July 01, 2009
Zelazny drops you right into the middle of this story, but if you refuse to be intimidated by the unknown names and tech/magic confusion, you'll be richly repaid. The book's nested layers of reality, paradigm and belief are challenging and beautifully baroque. It's smart, wildly imaginative, and daring. I loved Zelazny before I read this, but now I love him even more.
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Death Comes as Epiphany
by
Sharan Newman
Felicity
, June 30, 2009
An engrossing plot, charming heroine and intriguing historical details. The main characters were well-drawn and likeable, and the use of Heloise and Abelard did not seem ponderous or contrived (as use of historical personages in fiction sometimes does.) I liked the thorough depiction of the culture, especially the way people's belief in the supernatural was pervasive and convincing. My only quibble was with the occasional forays into the perspective of secondary characters. I felt it added little to the story while sacrificing some of the mystery.
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Uncommon Reader
by
Alan Bennett
Felicity
, May 26, 2009
A delightful quick read. The Queen's discoveries about reading are pithy and apt, and the story of her rebellious affair with books is charming and very, very funny.
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The Jump-Off Creek
by
Molly Gloss
Felicity
, May 25, 2009
This novel creates a vivid, wholly convincing sense of its characters' isolation. The prose is honed and beautiful, the story taut with the genuine tensions of survival and human need.
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Wild Blue The Men & Boys Who Flew the B 24s Over Germany 1944 45
by
Stephen E Ambrose
Felicity
, April 12, 2009
A well-focused little history. It gives a good overview of the B-24's significance and its contributions to the war in Europe, as well as a moving glimpse into the lives and stories of specific men and crews. The book centers on George McGovern, whose experiences as a bomber pilot were remarkable for a reader yet not unusual among his fellows. It's a fairly quick read, not at all overloaded with aviation jargon, and full of interesting anecdotes and events that I was forced to immediately relate to my unwary friends and family.
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Truth & Beauty
by
Ann Patchett
Felicity
, January 21, 2009
Ann Patchett writes here with honesty and grace. It's not easy to convey a vivid sense of a person or a friendship, but she does so. She has a delicate enough touch for difficult, emotional material, so that the reader feels touched but not manipulated or overwhelmed. Through her careful prose, Ann Patchett seems to love the young women she and Lucy were together, and to love and forgive the women they became.
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Penelopiad The Myth of Penelope & Odysseus
by
Margaret Atwood
Felicity
, November 19, 2008
I lent this book to my grandmother. She sat down at the table to read, and soon I heard a mordant chuckle. As she finished Chapter 1, she crowed across the room, "I LIKE this book!" For the rest of the afternoon, while I ran errands, my nephew spoke his first words and the family spread the news by telephone, Grandma sat there emitting wicked ripples of laughter, and turned the last page by suppertime. One sitting. That's a recommendation.
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Consider Phlebas: Culture 1
by
Iain M Banks
Felicity
, October 23, 2008
Gripping, well written, with intriguing characters. The story jumps from frying pan to fire to space battle to colossal cruise ship about to crash - definitely engaging, but occasionally almost too much peril. I enjoyed the complex moral fabric of the universe, and the author's willingness to make sorrow a part of the book and world. My first Iain M. Banks: I will be reading more.
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Waltzing The Cat
by
Pam Houston
Felicity
, October 10, 2008
I'm sure there are many books about a female narrator's tragicomic inability to find lasting relationships and worthwhile connections with men that I would hate. But Lucy's lovelorn life unfolds all over the world, in story-chapters set everywhere from the heart of a hurricane to the Amazon Basin, and threaten her with drowning, angry mama carnivores and crashing into cliffs. They aren't at all mundane. It doesn't hurt that Houston has a talent for sketching characters so unbelievable they must be real, an effortless yet individual voice, or that she usually seems to spot schmaltziness coming a mile off and then sidestep it wickedly at the last minute. It entertains.
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Blind Assassin
by
Margaret Atwood
Felicity
, September 26, 2008
I love this book. It moves between dry humor, brutal truthfulness and passion, and brings the keenness of Atwood's eye to them all. She describes both the elusive and the everyday with a transforming grace. You start reading for the mystery and continue for the human, achingly honest narrator. A masterpiece.
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Crazy Love Stories
by
Leslie What
Felicity
, August 23, 2008
A "slim volume," Kate Wilhelm calls this in the introduction, but you could have fooled me. Its 195 pages are packed with stories that range from touching to unsettling, haunting to quirky; seventeen stories that keep you not only entertained, but thinking. What's narratives drive ahead, make you continue to read and guess. They are disturbing, funny, and very very brave.
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Tent
by
Margaret Atwood
Felicity
, May 16, 2008
This is a collection of microfictions, prose poems, and other oddities. In it Atwood ventriloquizes mythical beings, tells the other sides of stories, spins vast symbolic tales of ruin, and even seems to directly address the reader. Basically, it's 155 pages of really good random stuff by Margaret Atwood. As if Atwood had a blog. And be honest. If Atwood had a blog, wouldn't you read it?
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Stygo
by
Laurie Hendrie
Felicity
, May 05, 2008
Any novel in the form of short stories about the life of a small American town probably invites comparison to _Winesburg, Ohio_. In _Stygo_'s case, the comparison is not all that apt: Stygo is not a sleepy town full of quiet desperation, but a desperate town. No main character emerges from the novel or leaves at the end (in fact, the only young man we know to have struck out from town is a spree-killer.) It's its own book. What I enjoyed most about the book was the way it spiraled outward, each story bringing the reader farther into the margins of town, farther from the apparent heart of the community. By the time the chapters come back to the center, back to the bar and Willa Moon, it's clear that neither a place nor a person is the center of this community, but rather an unanswered need, a void.
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At The Jim Bridger
by
Ron Carlson
Felicity
, January 27, 2008
Carlson has a gift for the eccentric and evocative. His stories vary pleasantly, but many seem to inhabit the contradictions of human lives, the cozy opposites in which we live and are puzzled. He excels at being touching without being sentimental, funny without being glib.
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Local Girls
by
Alice Hoffman
Felicity
, January 16, 2008
A quick and moving read. The main character's charming voice draws you into the first-person stories of adolescence at the beginning. Once you're hooked, the story expands into the third-person and draws more deeply on the heroine's family and friends. I finished it in practically one sitting (airport, airplane...that's around one sitting, right?)
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Becoming the Villainess
by
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Felicity
, December 29, 2007
This is smart, accessible poetry that swoops from the funny to the chillingly beautiful. The poet doesn't respect the boundaries between reality and folklore, comic books and Ancient Greece, the modern and the primeval. All of it is one mass of experience to question, celebrate, and overcome. Splendid. Note: For some reason this book is classified everywhere as feminist theory. It's a book of poems, I promise.
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Sky Fisherman
by
Craig Lesley
Felicity
, December 23, 2007
Craig Lesley seems to have a habit of inscribing this book "I hope this honors the rural, small-town West." I think it does. It's a story that starts small, in the details of a working-class life lived close to the bone, and opens up into the camaraderie, suspicions, and humor of a rich small-town life. The characters in the town and on the neighboring reservation are engaging and real. The plot draws you on from the young narrator's concerns to town mysteries, and is ultimately driven by the cataclysms that can either shatter or cement a community.
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Six Walks In The Fictional Woods
by
Umberto Eco
Felicity
, September 14, 2007
Nominally a book about reading, this collection of six lectures by Umberto Eco also yields insight into writing. These lecture-essays are philosophical and thought-provoking, but also made me guffaw in public more times than I'd like to admit. Eco uses literary examples from Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert, but also from Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie. In these pages, he considers the way fiction manipulates us, the way we use fiction, and even the ways we expect or force our world to conform to narrative. Fascinating and delightful.
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Anils Ghost
by
Michael Ondaatje
Felicity
, June 16, 2007
A lyrical, time-jumping book, quiet somehow in its precision, its private emotions. The larger strokes -- the way isolated people manage to work together and the way violence intrudes on their solitude -- are all the more effective for being struck across a fabric of such beautiful and hushed detail.
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