True Books

Beard came to writing late, and this collection of autobiographical essays was the only book she published until her late fifties, but clearly she was paying attention all along. She's drawn by a rest... (Tom)

For all its natural beauty, we know Seattle is man-made too: the famous Denny Regrade, the downtown landfill that the Big Quake will liquefy. I knew the broad story of our manufactured geography but n... (Tom)

I think Utopia Parkway must have been one of the first biographies I read for pleasure. (That is, after all the sports bios of my youth.) Lightly written and deeply appreciative, Solomon's 1997 book m... (Tom)

Nowhere is the truism "everything old is new again" truer than in pop music, where all the upheavals of the digital era have brought us back to the hit-factory days of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Buildin... (Tom)

Unpublished until 1995, these diaries of a German Jew who survived the Nazi years have become one of the most essential records of the era. Klemperer, a scholar of language and literature, was ultimat... (Tom)

This is one of the most beautiful books of the year, and to me one of the most joyous. Paz traveled the world photographing record collectors with their vinyl, and the result is a gorgeously and thoug... (Tom)

Many admirers of Stegner will argue that his finest book is not one of his most acclaimed novels, Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety, but this book, a biography of the great expedition leader that... (Tom)

The title alone has an aspirational allure (at least for book hoarders like me), but the book inside is even better: it's a beautiful, subtle, and knowledgeable portrait of a singular man, Chimen Abra... (Tom)

Thank goodness for strange, little books. This one, almost 25 years old already (!), may not be for everyone, but if you have the smallest bit of fascination with how one writer thinks about another,... (Tom)

The Goncourt brothers were snobs, egotists, misogynists, reactionaries, and not, as it turned out, the immortal novelists they desperately hoped they would be, but their words (and those they recorded... (Tom)

I love the 33 1/3 series of little books, each on a single record album (we have a sizable stack of them in the store), but this one is easily my favorite, even though I had never heard the record it'... (Tom)

To say any book is "the book" on a complex condition like autism is absurd, and for someone like me, with no personal or professional expertise on the subject, to say it is more so. But NeuroTribes su... (Tom)

It's still hard for me to believe Marilynne Robinson has become so famous the president quotes her as his "friend." For nearly twenty years after her great debut novel, Housekeeping, she nearly disapp... (Tom)

I've never surfed, and I'm not about to start now. But Finnegan's memoir of fifty years of surfing (while building an acclaimed career as a journalist) is a thrilling immersion in both the wonder and... (Tom)

This might be the funniest—or the truest—book in the store. Fourier, you may recall, was the French utopian socialist from your economics classes who influenced Marx and predicted the seas would somed... (Tom)

Midway on their life's journey together, Sonya Lea's husband Richard became another person. After an experimental (and successful) surgery to remove a rare cancer, he found himself nearly without memo... (Tom)

When we first conceived of Phinney by Post, Touching the Rock was the first book I thought of for it. (And now that it's finally been reprinted I can include it.) I've always found it deeply inspirati... (Tom)

One of the most appealing things about Ta-Nehisi Coates as a writer is his humility: his openness to change, to self-education, to acknowledgment of his constantly reforming knuckleheadedness. But as... (Tom)

Suddenly it seems I'm on a roll (or a jag) of reading (or wanting to read) books by men about their uncommon professions (airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's Do No... (Tom)

The Indian Rebellion of 1857, in which an uprising of the British Empire's Hindu and Muslim soldiers swept across much of central India, was one of the central moments of the 19th century, changing ev... (Tom)

Louis C.K. aside, most travelers these days seem to have forgotten the romance of flight. But not Mark Vanhoenacker. A commercial 747 pilot (who chose his previous career, management consulting, mainl... (Tom)

Consider my breath taken. I'm not much of a follower of fashion (you may have seen how I dress), and we haven't featured many art and fashion books in the store (for one thing, I'm not sure how to dis... (Tom)

Twenty-eight years after her first memoir, Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City picks up right where Gornick left off. Not so much in story—it's even less chronological than the first book—t... (Tom)

Phinney One of our first Old Book of the Week picks returns this month as our fifth Phinney by Post selection. Ursula Nordstrom made history as the editor of such kid's-book geniuses as Maurice Sendak... (Tom)

The surprises in Oliver Sacks's autobiography begin with the cover: if your image of Dr. Sacks is rumpled, white-coated, and white-bearded, prepare to expand it to include the dashing, leather-clad mo... (Tom)

I can't believe I haven't officially recommended Pulphead yet: it's one of my favorite books in recent years, and among the glitteriest in what is clearly becoming a golden age for essay collections.... (Tom)

With all their magic wonderlands and scary dystopias, I sometimes despair that my kids will ever be interested in actual History. So I'm a little obsessed with Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, a series... (Liz)

Some of you may know Joe Park: he's a neighbor, a friend, and a thrillingly talented painter, whose work is in the collections of the Seattle and Tacoma art museums. The thumbnail to the left doesn't... (Tom)

Does your heart, like mine, quicken at the thought of entire chapters on the hyphen, the objective case, and the best pencil for marking proof? Oh, you'll get all the grammar porn you could hope for h... (Tom)

As good a novelist as Colm Toíbín is, he's also a perceptive and impossibly well-read critic, and his new little book in Princeton's Writers on Writers series is a wonderful window onto a writer he's... (Tom)

After her popular illustrated compendium, Farm Anatomy, Julia Rothman has expanded her curiosity to take in the entire natural world. In over 200 colorful pages, she shares facts on everything from th... (Tom)

Are you one of those whose hearts the word "infrastructure" sets a-fluttering? Who find the anonymous, unglamorous work that keeps our world running at least as compelling as more traditional derring-... (Tom)

Is Kent Russell timid? It's hard to say, but he seems terrified he might be. The progeny of brawlers, soldiers, and a charismatically unemployable dad, Russell is drawn to the sorts of men whose fists... (Tom)

This giant item was the holy book of my adolescence, which says a lot about both my adolescence and this book. James has a (justifiable) reputation as the oddball Kansas stathead who transformed and/o... (Tom)

Our second "True" selection for the Phinney by Post book subscription service (subscribe here!) might be more precisely categorized as "Strange but True." J.S.G. Boggs is an artist both fine and con,... (Tom)

You may have already heard about this book. You're going to hear a lot more, especially around here. It's a story of grief, of nature and friendship and loneliness, but it's really the story of an enc... (Tom)

McCarthy's memoir has long been celebrated (for good reason) for its tartly intelligent portrait of a smart young girl's loss of faith, and of the miserable years she spent with her cruel great uncle... (Tom)

No thumbnail image can do justice to the elegant intricacies of Enchanted Forest (or its "inky quest" predecessor, Secret Garden, which we've belatedly brought into the store as well). A coloring book... (Tom)

No thumbnail image can do justice to the elegant intricacies of Enchanted Forest (or its "inky quest" predecessor, Secret Garden, which we've belatedly brought into the store as well). A coloring book... (Tom)

Judge me if you will, but if I had to choose between reading these classic author interviews and the actual books those authors wrote, I might just reach for the interviews. They are full of insight,... (Tom)

I may be the only person in Seattle who hasn't read The Boys in the Boat (I will, I promise! I know it's great!), but even I know that the British-born boatbuilder George Yeoman Pocock is the philosop... (Tom)

Oh, Soppy doesn't even begin to describe it. If you are the kind of person for whom Sad Shop's "I like you and naps" card is the sweetest valentine, then you will swoon for Soppy, Rice's comic-book ce... (Tom)

I know it's early yet, but this is the best book I've read in 2015, and it might remain so. For over a decade Leovy has reported on murder in L.A., especially on the killing of black men (and boys) by... (Tom)

Before there was a Little House on the Prairie, or any other of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, there was Pioneer Girl, an autobiography she wrote in her early sixties but never published, although she... (Tom)

Geoff Manaugh's BLDG BLOG is unlike any other blog you'll read, and his BLDG BLOG Book is unlike any other item on our shelves. He's equally, insatiably curious about the actual environments we build... (Tom)

This was the cover in our nonfiction section that—sorry—turned the most heads during the holidays, but the book inside is more than just a macabre history. A head separated from its body carries a dee... (Tom)

For those thinking of Dr. King this week, because of Selma or his birthday, you might turn, if you haven't done so already, to Taylor Branch's three-volume biography of King, which doubles as a histor... (Tom)

The first selection for our Phinney by Post subscription service is a book I hadn't opened until a couple of months ago, but after reading just the first two pages I was pretty sure I had found Book #... (Tom)

My goodness. This week, when a customer's special order of two copies of Naifeh and Smith's recent biography of the doomed painter arrived, I was almost overcome by a physical desire to abandon the r...

Okay, I don't cook much from cookbooks—in fact, I don't cook much at all—so take this with a grain of sea salt, but in a season of gorgeous and appetizing cookbooks, Prune is the one (along with, of c... (Tom)