The Long Haul

Summer might feel like it's slipping away already (it does to me!), but we still have a month and a half left till Labor Day, which is plenty of time if you're doing Summer Book Bingo with the Seattle Public LIbrary and Seattle Arts & Lectures. We've mentioned our bingo recommendations for grown-ups here before, but we just got a new shipment of the Book Bingo cards for kids, which led us to put together a new display at the front counter. Need a book "set in outer space" or "so funny I laughed out loud," or in which "the main character doesn't look like me"? We're your source!

And speaking of bingo, just in time for this newsletter we heard that our friends and neighbors over at the Greenwood Public Library are hosting a Summer Book Bingo Party. Want to have a drink with your fellow readers, with library staff and "special guests" to help you find books to fill out your squares? Head over to the Naked City Brewery at 8564 Greenwood N on Wednesday, July 25 from 5 to 8 pm! Fair warning: it's the evening of the Greenwood Seafair parade, but I assume pirates are welcome (no kids, though: it's a brewery, after all).

And meanwhile, I'm not sure why we don't do it more often (for the labor-saving value alone!), but two of my favorite books from 2017, The Long Haul and Arbitrary Stupid Goal, have recently come out in paperback, so I've resurrected my old reviews for them below: two idiosyncratic, thoroughly enjoyable memoirs of one-of-a-kind lives that, for all their entertainment value, also carry quite a bit of worthy philosophy about a life well lived. I encourage you to give them a try in paperback if I couldn't convince you do so in hardcover.
Thanks—Tom, Laura, Kim, Liz, Haley, Lauren, and Molly