Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, January 10, 2024 9:35 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham.
A reading goal of mine for 2024 (call it a resolution, if you must) is to read more genre fiction. My reading tends to fall into four buckets: literary fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and poetry. But genre is so interesting and popular these days, and I am a bookseller, so I aim to have a more well-rounded sense of what books are selling. A reading goal of mine for 2024...
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Best Books
by Keith Mosman, December 4, 2023 8:40 AM
It’s the end of another year spent looking forward to long walks, tedious chores, and sleepless nights, because those are great times to listen to audiobooks. Every second spent in silence was a waste! I’ll do better next year, I promise!
Why am I always ignoring friends and family to listen to another chapter or two? Because of the books on this list (and many others, too. Possibly too many). A well-narrated book is a thing of joy, and here are some of the best that 2023 had to offer...
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Best Books
by Keith Mosman, November 13, 2023 8:45 AM
There’s a primal power to combining words with pictures and bookstores in 2023 saw that power being used to beautiful effect. This year we’re highlighting graphic works that run the gamut of genres and age groups.
Below are books about coming of age and books about grief; books about navigating difficult situations and books about giving in to the absurd; works of horror and works of quiet beauty. And then there’s Monica, which does all of that at once...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, September 13, 2023 10:20 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki.
I think most of us have had a trip that was felt like a milestone of adultness, a demonstration (to ourselves, if no one else) that you’re now someone who can afford and handle the logistics of becoming a tourist. Like the characters in Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s Roaming, my personal first adult trip was also to New York City, though I was a few years ahead of them. The highlight of my trip was seeing the all-too-short Broadway run of Lisa Kron’s Well...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, July 25, 2023 9:40 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro.
They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, but even I — a poor student of mathematics — can see the flaw in that algebra. Time may allow some tragedies to become grist of comedic mills — I am old enough to understand references to Johnny Carson asking a groaning audience “too soon?” or the truism that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” — but most tragedies’ reverberations never change in a way that makes them susceptible to attempts at humor, even when it isn’t still too soon...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, June 15, 2023 8:52 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Open Throat by Henry Hoke.
My favorite (favourite?) book of 2022 was Shelia Heti’s Pure Colour. It is an extremely weird book about family, reality, and perception. I think my favorite thing about that book was that it was so self-assured in its weirdness that I never questioned it or felt nervous on its behalf. To love a book, I need it to both understand its project and then to convince me that it has achieved...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, May 25, 2023 10:51 AM
This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Guest by Emma Cline.
I read most of The Guest while on a much-delayed train ride between Portland and Seattle. The tracks lead passengers past incredible vistas of the Columbia River as well as right next to houses with residents who must be inured to the sensation of trains rattling their windows throughout the day and night. There is something about staring out from the window of a train that makes one feel anonymous, both distant and like one is trespassing ...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, April 5, 2023 9:32 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung.
When the topic of aging and my end-of-life plan comes up (why do my friends keep bringing me up?), I usually resort to dark humored jokes involving Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, or some other movie that I’m not actually old enough to remember. This is because I, an elder Millennial, am deeply unsure about what the state of the world will be when I reach a point in my life when my age or other circumstances require me to stop working and/or face a health crisis...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, March 8, 2023 9:19 AM
This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Saving Time by Jenny Odell.
In her new book, Saving Time, Jenny Odell questions the origins and consequences of nearly every aspect of our various timekeeping systems and the ways we use them to dehumanize ourselves and each other.
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Keith Mosman, February 23, 2023 9:09 AM
This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.
The Sun Walks Down is a novel about getting lost, except it isn’t.
A work of literature that is both elegant and addictive is a very rare thing, but Fiona McFarlane’s new novel achieves that fine balance with aplomb...
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