Summer reading!

When I was a kid, I spent untold summer hours reading. It's been a long time since I've had that sort of luxury, but I've read a lot this summer. It's time for a book report.

What I'm reading now

My Seattle Public Library Summer Book Bingo card

This week, I went to the book launch for Seattle Walk Report: An Illustrated Walking Tour through 23 Seattle Neighborhoods. I showed up about 15 minutes before it started and found one of the last seats in a jam-packed Central Library auditorium--and then I was lucky enough to buy the last copy from a box of books brought in after the first batch had sold out!

The book's creator, Susanna Ryan, was "unmasked" at the event to her fans who'd previously known her only through her charming but anonymous Instagram posts. It felt like the best kind of meeting between the screens where we live so much of our lives and the three-dimensional "IRL" world. Susanna and her posts, and now her book, showcase the sort of quirky details that make a curious life worth living, online and on the streets.

I liked how she spoke about falling in love with walking. (Her longest trek was a 31-mile hike around the northern shores of Lake Washington!) Also notable: her pragmatism about social media. Yes, Instagram is owned by the morally suspect Facebook, but she wouldn't have a book in the world without it.

I didn't have a chance to get my book signed because the line was loooooong. But I'd love to hang out with Susanna someday and discuss our mutual love for libraries and aimless walks. (As she posted on her Instagram today, "I might also just start hanging out in Cal Anderson all the time, sitting by a tree and signing books for anyone who wants to swing by. I want to sign your book if it's the last thing I do!") Meanwhile, I was able to sidle up to Susanna's editor to introduce myself and my own nerdy passion project, Where to Read in the Rain. Ya never know ...

I'm also currently reading The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea, the saga of a Mexican-American family that is  ringing very relevant in our times. I'd previously read Urrea's Into the Beautiful North, and I look forward to checking out more of his work.

What else I've read this summer

More or less working backward over the past few months, I've enjoyed ... 

Why We Sleep. Matthew Walker makes the case for why we need eight hours every night and what we miss when we fall short. This book has made me think deeply about a subject most of us take for granted.

The Book of Delights. I love the premise of Ross Gay's book: pay attention. (That's akin to what Seattle Walk Reports does, too.) Gay makes it clear that not all is delightful in our world, but that there are plenty of surprising joys to behold.

The Baltimore Book of the Dead. I spotted this book by Marion Winik while looking for something else at my local library. It's a collection of anonymous mini-obits, mostly of people Winik knew, with lots of connective tissue between them.

The Overstory. One of the best novels I've read in a long time (and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in that category for 2019), Richard Powers' epic is about resilience and resistance amid impending ecological doom, with a vast cadre of fully realized characters and plot twists galore. It's the most thought-provoking fiction I've read this year.

The Good Rain. I had wanted to read Timothy Egan's 1990 ode to the Northwest for a long time. I've been thinking and writing a lot lately about why I'm drawn to this region, and this book helped me realize that for all of our growth and human ingenuity, the Northwest is first of all a land of incredible and often daunting natural beauty. I'd love to see an updated edition with Egan's thoughts on how the region has evolved--and how its character has stayed constant--these past 30 years.

Lake City. Thomas Kohnstamm's novel is set largely in the Fred Meyer superstore of its gritty titular Seattle neighborhood, where I moved a dozen years after the book's just-past-9/11 setting (and where I still spend a lot of time--I was just there today). With memorable characters, Kohnstamm writes of a class divide that has only deepened in Seattle since the turn of the century.

Next up?

These books are on my to-read list for the rest of summer and into fall ... 

M Train by Patti Smith (and her next book, Year of the Monkey, due out this fall)

The Unsettlers by Mark Sundeen 

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Educated by Tara Westover

Becoming by Michelle Obama

The Harry Potter books. We all need more magic in our lives, which is why I'm re-reading the whole series this year; I'm currently on Goblet of Fire, though I happily keep getting interrupted by library books I've had on hold.