True Books

David B. Williams might seem a one-man Seattle history industry, except that this lovely book, timed to honor the centennial of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Chittenden Locks that linked the... (Tom)

Sherman Alexie's memoir—an unsparing, grief-torn, angry, and admiring portrait of his late mother that is equally unsparing toward himself—seems like one of the must-read books of the year, especially... (Tom)

I'm not sure I've ever read a book that had a stronger, more cohesive sense of family than this one. Yang's memoir of her extended family's passage from Laos, where the Hmong, a tight-knit ethnic mino... (Tom)

First of all, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is not about football. (It's just a funny cover.) It is, ostensibly, about the general store Tamara Shopsin's parents ran in Greenwich Village, which they turned in... (Tom)

Anybody who falls in love with Shopsin's from Tamara's book (see above) will, naturally, want to turn to this ten-year-old cookbook, designed by Tamara but written by Papa Shopsin himself, the foul-mo... (Tom)

Just seeing their names next to each other on the shelf, you might think that Andre Dubus III stepped easily into the writer's shoes of his father and namesake, one of the great short-story writers of... (Tom)

We live in salmon country, right? That's what we tell ourselves, and in many ways it's still true, but it's a complicated, conflicted business now, with hatcheries, dams, $56 Copper River entrees, and... (Tom)

I am learning: a comedian reading their own audiobook is a good way to go. (Eddie Izzard next?) But W. Kamau Bell is not your average comedian, and his Awkward Thoughts is not your average comedian's... (Tom)

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels (Liz)

New and Old Books of the Week Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels Russia... (Liz)

"And there she is. That horrible girl." In the middle of life, after decades of working, marrying, and mothering responsibly, Dederer suddenly felt the restless desires of a teenager welling up again,... (Tom)

When Berger died in January, I realized I had never read any of his many books, but in all the accounts of his work, including his celebrated art criticism and fiction, this lesser-known book from 196... (Tom)

It's an incredible and largely forgotten (but somehow not surprising) story: for a time, in the 1920s, the Osage Indians of Oklahoma were among the wealthiest people in the world, because they had bee... (Tom)

Sometime a book of the most stunning originality is the easiest to imitate. I Remember is simply that: a series of tiny declarations, all beginning, "I remember...." The poet and artist Joe Brainard b... (Tom)

Like the manifestos we highlighted here a few weeks ago—Timothy Snyder's "twenty lessons" about tyranny and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "fifteen suggestions" about feminism—this little book by Mexican... (Tom)

If you've ever wanted to drop everything and escape to the woods (I won't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind recently), you'll want to read The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of th... (Haley)

What a beautiful, beautiful book. And that is part of the point. Kentridge is an acclaimed South African artist, a printer and a filmmaker, but he was unknown to me before this volume. His lessons, ba... (Tom)

Tom Carew was something else, a charismatic and fearless commando who parachuted in to prepare the French Resistance for D-Day and then by age 25 was known as "Lawrence of Burma" for coaxing the antic... (Tom)

Here's the best way to say how much I like this book: when I read, I turn down the corners of pages to remind me to write down a memorable quote later. In good books I might do this a few times, in gr... (Tom)

Is Walter Murch a crank? That is, from one perspective, the question raised by this little book. But the flip side to that question is: Has Walter Murch, Oscar-winning editor of Apocalypse Now and The... (Tom)

Almost exactly two years ago, I was writing my review of Cusk's last novel, Outline, which turned out to be one of the best books I read that year. I think Transit, the second in a proposed trilogy ab... (Tom)

Long before Lewis collaborated on his National Book Award-winning comic-book memoir, March, he wrote this more traditional memoir, recounting his decades in the center of the civil rights movement, be... (Tom)

As soon as I heard the first words of Cleese's memoir, spoken in the familiar tone (a little thickened by age) of the tallest Python himself, I thought, "Oh, right. This is going to be funny." Well, o... (Tom)

Josh Mohr drank immensely, consumed every drug he could, and did unspeakable things he now does his best to speak of. And then when he got clean he had a stroke. Sirens is his first memoir after five... (Tom)

Two teenage boys (the ages of my own children, who I'm proud once drove to Anacortes by themselves!) decided to fly across the country in a tiny plane in the summer of '66. That alone is quite a tale... (Tom)

I had forgotten how much I liked The Places in Between, Rory Stewart's account of his walk across Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban. A decade later he undertook another walk, through his... (Tom)

I love seeing how things (especially movies) are made. I've listened to all three DVD commentary tracks for Scorsese's Raging Bull and wished there were more, and, to be honest, I'd rather watch Heart... (Tom)

Speaking of how things are made, we've been admiring this handsome item in the store since spring (often while playing the Hamilton soundtrack). "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" are the wo... (Tom)

Add this big, beautiful new volume to the growing shelf of books celebrating ground-breaking women (Rad Women Worldwide, Dead Feminists, Women in Science, and more), with portraits and profiles of bet... (Tom)

Bannick, a Seattle photographer and naturalist, has captured the lives of owls in all their weird majesty, through the kind of stunning moments—at home, in flight, and with prey—that take hours and mo... (Tom)

Some have argued there are only 3 real plots in literature, or 7, or 36, but Cook, a pulp writer so prolific he was known as "the man who deforested Canada," outlined 1,462 separate scenarios (for exa... (Tom)

We've each turned to different books in the past week. Some of you have said you're too distracted to read at all. I found myself ravenous for this one, which I had been hungry to read ever since it c... (Tom)

All I knew about Thomas De Quincey was opium: his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is often considered the first addiction memoir, and it made him a hero to Poe, Dostoevsky, and Borges. His life... (Tom)

As wartime capers go, it can hardly get more daring and debonair than this one: the kidnapping of a Nazi general in occupied Crete by a team of local partisans and British commandos. One of the comman... (Tom)

Those Tipsy Nissleys we served at the store last Friday were a delicious tribute to the mixological brilliance of my friend Brad, whose James Beard-winning first book Bitters became an instant necessi... (Tom)

While Lark seems to have grown out of our soggy soil, Capitol Hill's little Wandering Goose is more like a successful transplant, a pink flamingo standing out proudly in the Northwest drizzle. Earnhar... (Tom)

I have been to Currance's Big Bad Breakfast in Oxford, Miss., though, thanks to a tip from my savvy foodie friend Brad (see above), while making a pilgrimage to William Faulkner's Rowan Oak estate (an... (Tom)

You can tell even from the thumbnail cover to the left how this item, from Chicago's acclaimed Macau-inspired restaurant Fat Rice, jumps out from the usual cookbook crowd. Hidden behind the comic-book... (Tom)

There's nothing wrong with aspirational in cookbooks—we all like to dream—but for her first solo outing (after working behind the scenes for years as a private chef and cookbook co-author), Turshen em... (Tom)

I like Peternell's cookbooks because there's so much writing in them. His previous book, Twelve Recipes, was framed in a lovely and (for a neophyte like me) approachable way as a chatty, conversationa... (Tom)

I remember two things from the only meal I've had at Lark, at their old 12th Avenue location: a well-known New York editor's stories about meeting Howard Hughes, and the duck leg confit, which was one... (Tom)

I admit that I do a lot (a lot) more reading than cooking, so of course I'm drawn to a book about cookbooks. This is the sort of project (ask a bunch of chefs for their favorite cookbook) that could b... (Tom)

So many customers have raved to me about Millard's previous histories, The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic, that I had to try her new one, about one of Churchill's early imperial adventures... (Tom)

Ratliff's title refers not to the range of his own book, which is slim not encyclopedic, but to the endless world of music our Spotify-era ears have available to them. Listening is indubitably differe... (Tom)

One of the most acclaimed books in the UK last year (Mary Beard called it a "game-changer") turns out to be as good as advertised. John Aubrey, one of the first modern biographers, was nearly lost to... (Newton)

It's usually the case in books that the story takes place when people are not working: that's when life, apparently, begins. Gill's memoir flips that on its head: there is almost nothing in the book o... (Tom)

I'm still a little mad at Dwight Garner. I've loved the Pretenders almost as long as I've listened to records, but when Garner, usually my favorite New York Times reviewer, panned Hynde's memoir as "s... (Tom)

In the middle of a preposterously accomplished career that included writing hit pop songs with his brother and leading the NAACP during perhaps its most influential decade, James Weldon Johnson also w... (Tom)

I like to use audiobooks to catch up with books that everyone else has been reading, and lately I've been catching up with The Soul of an Octopus, a surprise hit from last year (and National Book Awar... (Tom)

On one side of the net, Arthur Ashe: black, liberal, artistic, free-swinging, and cool. On the other, Clark Graebner (who?): white, conservative, businesslike, stiff, and anxious. From the 1968 U.S. O... (Tom)