Fiction

  • Toronto, Mon Amour

    I grew up in Seattle, and am used to hearing out-of-towners who visit the downtown library raving about our breathtaking city (and libraries). Well now I know how they feel. I just returned from my third visit to Toronto, where I was speaking at a library conference, and have been boring everyone silly with effusions… Continue reading

  • Staff Favorites: Three ‘book group’ books

    A Death in the Family by James Agee Other writers describe this book as a near-perfect work of art. The prose is poetic and musical, and the characterizations are so true to life that you feel you are part of the family, insular and innocent in a small Tennessee town in 1915. With incredible insight… Continue reading

  • Oh Sweet, Sweet, Vacation!

    In general, I would say the life of a Master’s of Library and Information Science (MLIS) student, is pretty great. We get to learn all about an institution as hallowed as the library and we get to spend our class-time with other compulsively organized and readerly people. My only complaint would be a catch-22 that… Continue reading

  • Inaugural Buzz

    Transitions of power have always had the capacity to fascinate us, and today’s inauguration is no exception.  Washington D.C. is expecting an influx of 4 to 5 million people trying to get close to the action, and many more of us (including in the Central Library’s own Microsoft Auditorium) will be watching the ceremony on… Continue reading

  • A la sombra del ángel de Kathryn Skidmore Blair

    Our library serves people speaking many languages. Here is one of them. Antonia Rivas Mercado nació en los albores de 1900 en el seno de una acomodada familia mejicana. Desde muy tierna edad sufrió el rechazo de su madre por su color oscuro. A los 12 años su madre abandona la familia para correr a… Continue reading

  • Salem Witch Trials

    As a girl growing up in Massachusetts, I was obsessed for awhile with reading anything and everything about the Salem Witch Trials.  Though my reading interests have broadened since then, I am still fascinated by the maelstrom of social, political and psychological events that led to witchcraft accusations and mass hysteria.  Recently I have been… Continue reading

  • Tiny people, big adventures

    Sometimes, especially at night when the world is dark and quiet, I hear strange noises in my house. Rhythmic little taps that fade to nothing. The squeak of a cupboard opening in an empty room. A faint sound like distant voices coming from up near the eaves, where no human ought to be. My first… Continue reading

  • Mean, Rainy Streets

    Weary of the weather? And its only January? Try this: turn up your trenchcoat collar against the wind, snap down your fedora to the rain, put some moody jazz on your iPod, and pretend you’re the star of your own film noir. Seattle is a great setting for hardboiled crime. Here are some Northwest crime titles to get… Continue reading

  • A few of our Fiction staff’s favorites from 2008

    The time between December 26 and January 1 is always pretty meager when it comes to news. I try to avoid TV news, radio shows and newspapers that fill their time and pages with their “look back at the year” and “top ten this” and “top ten that” features. Yet I absolutely canNOT resist any… Continue reading

  • The Women

    “Anger and resentment can stop you in your tracks. That’s what I know now. It needs nothing to burn but the air and the life that it swallows and smothers. It’s real, though – the fury, even when it isn’t. It can change you… turn you… mold you and shape you into something you’re not.… Continue reading

  • From the Page to the Screen: Revolutionary Road

    Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is a novel that has been lauded by critics and adored by other writers, but it has not garnered the same attention it deserves from readers. Sure, readers keep discovering Yates, but he doesn’t get the same kind of name recognition as other American writers like John Updike and John Cheever.… Continue reading

  • Staff Favorites: Dogs and strays.

    Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck If this book doesn’t make you want to take a road trip, I don’t know what will. The first paragraph so completely captures the urge to travel that I feel profoundly moved every time I read it. At age 58, Steinbeck sets out to rediscover… Continue reading

  • Loving in Limbo

    In the movie Wristcutters: A Love Story we find Zia, played by Patrick Fuget, who is severely depressed after his girlfriend breaks up with him and decides to commit suicide by slitting his wrists. Too bad the pearly gates are not his afterlife, but rather a rundown desert limbo with fellow suicide committers. When Zia finds… Continue reading

  • Historical Fiction

    OK, I admit it, I know more about history from reading novels than from reading nonfiction.  But what’s wrong with that?  If you read novelists who are sticklers about historical accuracy, you can enjoy a good story, immerse yourself in a different time, and learn something in the process. Unlike some readers who never want to… Continue reading

  • The Secret Lives of Authors: Literary gossip

    What does it mean to know a lot about writers’ personal lives? That I am a literary snoop?  Why is it that I can remember that Jean Korelitz Hanff is married to poet Paul Muldoon, that the mother of  YA author Margo Rabb died at a young age of cancer, that Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman… Continue reading

  • Some books we’re thankful for.

    Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Capote’s first published novel displays thoroughly his skills at poetic description. This is a story of illusions from the inner self of Joel, a sensitive young man, as he copes with the strange household that becomes his home. Coming from New Orleans, he passes through Biloxi and with… Continue reading

  • Book review: The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu

    By day, Maxine Kiss is a super-powered demon hunter with inhuman strength and intricately tattooed, armor-plated skin. By night, the tattoos peel away and become a pack of deadly demons standing between Maxine and the creatures from across the Veil. When the veil drops, it’s up to Maxine and her demon “boys” to round up… Continue reading

  • See the world from a different point of view: Read a book by an animal

    Woof! Woof! Miaow! Miaow! Books with talking dogs and cats are as numerous as feathers on a hen. Witness Sight Hound by Pam Houston or Caroline Alexander’s Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat. Our canine and feline companions are forever sticking their little wet noses into criminal investigations, as well.… Continue reading