Posts by Robin Wood | Books & Books

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Celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

May 1, 2023

Here are some of the books we are reading and recommending for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Find many more in store, and don’t hesitate to ask for a recommendation.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, out May 16

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes “one of the funniest books of the year…. A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire” (The Washington Post).

A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

This house eats and is eaten . . .

When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She’s always lied to fit in, so if she’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised.

But the house has other plans.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

An intimate and poignant debut graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam, from Thi Bui.

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible.

But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him.

Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

A Q&A with Stephanie Clifford

March 15, 2023

by Robin Wood

Author of THE FAREWELL TOUR, our March featured staff pick

Now out in paperback!

Get out your headphones, THE FAREWELL TOUR will make you want to crank up the music. But first, we are delighted to introduce you to author Stephanie Clifford, who took time out of her busy book launch to chat with us. (Read Assistant Manager Allison’s review of THE FAREWELL TOUR.)

Stephanie Clifford, photo credit: Sarah Bode-Clark Photography.jpg — Stephanie Clifford, photo credit: Sarah Bode-Clark Photography

Q: How big a music fan were you before writing THE FAREWELL TOUR? What was the first album you bought with your own money?

A: I’ve always adored music, from opera to musicals to rock, and play piano and guitar. But I didn’t fall in love with country until high school—I grew up in Seattle, and worked one summer in Arkansas doing trail maintenance in a national forest there, where the only radio station we could get was country. Suddenly, I was hooked, and returned to Seattle at the height of the grunge era to listen to, like, Tammy Wynette—no one in Seattle understood what on earth I was doing.

First album—for some reason it wasn’t an album I first bought, but a cassette-tape single: Prince (cool), “Arms of Orion” (not very cool).

Q: What was the idea that sparked this novel?

A: Before I began writing this book, I happened to be on a literature-of-the-American-West kick, so Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. The landscapes they wrote about were arid and harsh, and I didn’t recognize them. I felt like there was this missing piece of the “Western” genre, that the Northwest, this place I had grown up in—and which, by the way, takes up a rather large geographical chunk of the West!—was completely ignored. So I began playing with the idea of writing a Western—not a shootout-and-saloons story, but one that considers the myth of the West, and how the landscape shapes its characters—that was set in the historical Northwest.

As I read more and more, I also came to feel that even for writers who were women or were sympathetic to women, like Wallace Stegner or Willa Cather, in the era I was writing about—the book starts in the 1920s—the women in these books literally didn’t get to leave their houses. They were stuck inside, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. And I thought of the fierce Northwest women I knew, who would basically skin a deer in the morning and then put on lipstick and go shopping at I. Magnin’s downtown in the afternoon, and I thought, just try keeping a Northwest woman inside her house; good luck.

That became the genesis for Lil, the main character. I wanted to get across the grit and battle scars that so many Northwest women of that era had, and also the desire to survive, and give her a life where she has to be out in the world—in this case, via singing country music—and see what happens.

Q: What was interesting to you about this particular time in history, women’s history or music history?

A: First of all, it’s just this incredibly rich time to imagine and research—Lil’s born on the cusp of the Depression, gets her start as a singer in WWII-era Tacoma, lands in Nashville in its golden era—all a gold mine for a writer. I also wanted her to have to navigate her career and art in a time that wasn’t very open to working women generally, and certainly not in the country music. She’s going to have to make real concessions in order to succeed, which is always interesting to write about.

Q: What were your top 3 songs of 2022? What would be your picks for saddest song? Happiest?

A: Because I was so deep into research for 2022, my Spotify most-played for the year looks like it’s out of 1962! Tammy Wynette, “Apartment No. 9” – Tammy makes everything sound heartbreaking; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Didn’t It Rain” – an incredible, pioneering guitar player; “He Is Fine,” Secret Sisters, a fabulous duo. Happiest – I love a musical number for a pick-me-up (my first book, Everybody Rise, has tons of musical references, and the title is from a Sondheim song) – so maybe a classic like “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Saddest, there’s a scene in the book where the characters are discussing the saddest country song, and I think Lil gets it right when she suggests Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham,” written after Harris’s musical partner, Gram Parsons, overdosed and died. Just try not to cry when you hear Emmylou sing that one.

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?

A: I just (accidentally) read back-to-back two wonderful, thoughtful books on women during times of civil war/domestic terrorism in the ’70s: V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, set in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka during the civil war there; and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The books made perfect companions and almost talked to each other.

March Staff Pick: The Farewell Tour

February 22, 2023

by Robin Wood

The Farewell Tour by Stephanie Clifford (Harper, March 7), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

Now out in paperback!

It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.

Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.

Allison enjoyed both the book and audiobook versions of this novel. She writes, “Stephanie Clifford fills out the singular story of one woman’s hard rise to country music stardom with the history of country music and the evolution of American culture. Water Lil is a character you won’t soon forget.”

“This well researched novel is also a love letter to country music and the west. If you’ve spent time with either, this novel will be hell bent on tugging at your heartstrings.”

Allison’s playlist for the book includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the song “Bo Weavil Blues” is central to the novel).

Celebrate Women’s History Month

February 21, 2023

by Robin Wood

Read about the most influential newspaper columnist you’ve never heard of in Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman by Julia Scheeres & Allison Gilbert. We had a great event with Allison Gilbert in November. Check out the replay.

Girly Drinks: A World History of Women & Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara was one of Bookseller Riona Jean’s favorite books of 2021. She highly recommends the audiobook.

She writes, “I love beer, books, and history. O’Meara presents a fantastic and inclusive history of women and alcohol, covering such topics as the scientific process, brewing as a means to financial independence, and drinking habits reflecting change in society.”

Social Media Manager Robin has knit or crocheted anything in years, but Crochet Iconic Women by Carla Mitrani has her considering digging out her yarn stash.

You may already know her work as a cartoonist from Hark! A Vagrant. Katie Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is the story of the world she encountered while looking to pay off her student loans – the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent book, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally. Before there was a “Jane Roe,” the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people working in their local communities.

Featuring a new package and an additional 60 pages of material, this revised edition of The Art of Feminism covers an even more impressive range of artworks, artists, movements, and perspectives. Since the debut of the original volume in 2018, The Art of Feminism has offered readers an in-depth examination of its subject that is still unparalleled in scope. The comprehensive survey traces the ways in which feminists—from the suffragettes and World War II–era workers through twentieth-century icons like Judy Chicago and Carrie Mae Weems to the contemporary cutting-edge figures Zanele Muholi and Andrea Bowers—have employed visual arts in transmitting their messages. With more than 350 images of art, illustration, photography, and graphic design, this stunning volume showcases the vibrancy of the feminist aesthetic over two centuries.

Middle-grade novel, A Seed in the Sun by Aida Salazar: A farm-working girl with big dreams meets activist Dolores Huerta and joins the 1965 protest for workers’ rights in this tender-hearted novel in verse, perfect for fans of Rita Williams-Garcia and Pam Muñoz Ryan.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

Find these books and many more in store. We’re always happy to help you find what you’re looking for, just ask!

10 Years of Celebrating Indie Bookstores Together!

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle, picked by bookseller Gina

Author of THE FAREWELL TOUR, our March featured staff pick

***Now out in paperback!***

The Farewell Tour by Stephanie Clifford (Harper, March 7), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

***Now out in paperback!***

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin, picked by store co-founder, George Cooper

Now out in paperback!

Now out in paperback!