True Books

I was first drawn to this under-the-radar book by its cover, with its fascinatingly odd photo of Sergius Pankejeff, the patient Freud called the "Wolf Man," as a child, and by its premise: short portr... (Tom)

There's a reason that Act One, a massive bestseller when it came out in 1959, is still beloved by theater kids everywhere as the great Broadway memoir. Hart himself was as stage-struck as they come, a... (Tom)

I could not stop reading Jami Attenberg’s new memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You, and that is exactly how I like to read books. I read this one, in its entirety, on Boxing Day. I loved Jami’s hone... (Nancy)

Josiah Wedgwood might be remembered best now as a venerable fine-china tradename and, perhaps, as Charles Darwin's grandfather, but in his tirelessly eventful life he put himself at the center of a ra... (Tom)

I should say first that Dazed and Confused is one of those movies that went straight into my bloodstream when I first saw it and has never left, a miracle of ensemble acting and pitch-perfect attentio... (Tom)

Admirers of Tamara Shopsin (see above) are likely aware that Jason Fulford is her husband and collaborator, a photographer and fellow designer who shares her sideways view of things, a viewpoint in fu... (Tom)

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at... (Tom)

I am often in the process of reading multiple books at once. The trick to this, I think, is to pick books that are different enough from each other: light vs. heavy, fiction vs. nonfiction, long vs. s... (Anika)

I've often flattered myself that my love for the music of Thompson and his formative band, Fairport Convention, is some obscure passion, but it's clear at any show you go to that his fans are legion,... (Tom)

I didn't need much convincing to read a book about those chubby, flat-tailed rodents: their industrious ingenuity has always made them among the most appealing of animals. But what Goldfarb does in hi... (Tom)

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an A... (Tom)

You open a Michael Lewis book knowing it will be full of Michael Lewis characters—brainy, contrarian visionaries—and here they include a California public health official, a Zuckerberg-funded biochemi... (Tom)

No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradi... (Tom)

Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson's estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its whi... (Tom)

I had always wanted to choose a book of poetry for Phinney by Post, and I knew, when we did, it would be one in which the poems truly made a book, something Dove leaves no doubt about at the beginning... (Tom)

When it comes to books about Seattle and its surroundings, there's one must-read writer as far as I'm concerned, and that's David B. Williams. I've long been telling recent arrivals and lifetime resid... (James)

by Roy Andries de Groot by Roy Andries de Groot The "Auberge" of the title is a small inn and restaurant, tucked away in a valley in the Alps and largely undiscovered, until de Groot's 1973 book, whic... (Tom)

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult he... (Tom)

In the funniest of his often droll footnotes, Bailey notes that, after he finished his Zuckerman trilogy, Roth had to have his typewriter repaired because the "I" had worn off. Through 31 books, inclu... (Tom)

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghana... (Tom)

Shorto is an acclaimed historian (you can usually find his modern classic, Amsterdam, on our Cities shelf), but he was reluctant to tell his own family history, specifically that of his namesake grand... (Tom)

When Bill Barich decided, "with the same hapless illogic that governed all my actions then," to spend the spring of 1978 at a second-rate racetrack in Northern California, he might have been looking f... (Tom)

George Saunders is one of the best short-story writers around—he blew out the doors of the genre back in the '90s and has not rested since—and if you've seen him speak or read his interviews you'll kn... (Tom)

Having read The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James's still-classic 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, earlier this year, I was curious what a modern version could add to the story. Even more than James... (Tom)

I delighted in this book of twenty-three author interviews conducted by world-famous librarian Nancy Pearl and her co-author Jeff Schwager, the perfect duo for this literary project. I found listening... (Anika)

Too often in our discussions about diversity, we leave disability out of the conversation. In this memoir-in-essays, Rebekah Taussig brings her fresh and incisive voice to the table, sharing her story... (Anika)

Who knew that the finest chronicler of the modern conservative movement would be a writer from the left? Or that his four massive volumes of history, taking us from Goldwater's landslide defeat to Rea... (Tom)

During the trial of Brock Turner, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, “the unconscious intoxicated woman” Turner attacked on Stanford’s campus. Now, in this stunning and unapologetic memoir, Miller... (Anika)

This delightfully illustrated graphic memoir is an emotional and straightforward account of self-discovery and acceptance. Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, explores coming to terms with eir genderq... (Anika)

This short, unconventional memoir is an account of Sarah Manguso’s meticulously kept diary: eight hundred thousand words written over twenty-five years. I am fascinated by people who keep daily record... (Anika)

All of Ernaux's work blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but The Years blurs it further, into history. The book covers a lifetime—hers, from 1941 to the present—but it is the history of a "we"... (Tom)

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and... (Tom)

You may know Erica C. Barnett from her dogged local reporting in the Stranger or PubliCola or on her current blog, The C Is for Crank, or her appearances on KUOW, but what you may not have known was t... (Tom)

The Black Jacobins (Tom)

"Solitude" is a seductive word in our chaotic times, but Johnson doesn't just mean a quiet week in the woods to rejuvenate us for the rat race. His solitude is a lifelong vocation, a choice made by th... (Tom)

The Living Mountain It's hard to imagine that a book this powerful sat unread in its author's drawer for thirty years. Written in the '40s and finally brought out a few years before Shepherd's death,... (Tom)

Striking a balance in my reading these days is a challenge, like so much else. I want reading with feeling, but not too much; reading with truth, but not too much; reading with poignancy, but certainl... (Kim)

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re (Reader)

I'm one of the few members of our staff who is not from the Midwest, but the region's allegedly bland mysteries are a draw to me as well. The mystery starts with the region itself (does South Dakota c... (Tom)

When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-de... (Haley)

Schizophrenia is among the most ruthless of diseases, suddenly erupting in a life, often in adolescence, and turning it inside out in ways few treatments have been able to solve. That's what happened... (Tom)

Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi... (Tom)

If you're looking for a book that has something useful to say about the current situation that isn't too, you know, on point, look no further. In previous books (The Big Short, Flash Boys, etc.) Lewis... (James)

House Lessons: Renovating a Life Erica Bauermeister's memoir-in-essays is a treasure for anyone who, like me, can't resist the intrigue of an open-house sign. House Lessons beckons you inside a trash-... (Anika)

Rebecca Solnit is one of the best sociopolitical writers we have (she's the coiner of the term "mansplaining") but I like to imagine a better world in which she doesn't feel obligated to take on tyran... (James)

A 42-year-old writer looks at his young sons, considers the recent death of his 84-year-old father, and tries to make sense of it all in the only natural way: by undertaking a round-the-world quest to... (James)

It doesn't seem a stretch to wonder if Wes Anderson makes films (especially The Grand Budapest Hotel) as an excuse to create exquisite fictitious letterhead, and when he wanted someone equally meticul... (Tom)

Matar wrote this book in between books. The one he had just finished, The Return (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017), was a memoir of his attempt to discover the fate of his father, who was disappear... (Tom)

It's a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener's memoir, sharp-tongu... (Tom)

One of my favorite books on creativity is this book-length dialogue between a novelist and a film editor, who got to know each other when Murch, best known for his work on The Godfather and Apocalypse... (Tom)