Every year the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library hands out awards for excellence in literature. Judging from the list of winners, I guess only one person of color wrote a good book this year. Same thing happened last year.
Anyway, all the books selected this year are really good. Since there’s going to be run on them, you’re going to need to prioritize. Here are the three you should pick up now.
Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio
Loitering won this year’s award in the “biography/memoir” category. Not a perfect category fit for a book of essays (only some of which are about the author) but we’ll take it! The Stranger covered Loitering in depth when it came out last year. I’m happy to quote Mudede on why you should pick up this book before you pick up any of the other books on the list: “It’s not that he can write lots of great sentences, but that you honestly wonder if he is capable of writing a bad one.” The book is full of dark nostalgia about Seattle, the parts people don’t often talk about. There’s a lot of gloom, guts, and rogue intelligence here.
The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, translation and commentary by Red Pine a.k.a. Bill Porter
The poems contained within this volume were written by a fourteenth-century Chinese Zen master who sought hermitage upon a mountain. There’s a lot of pretty zen stuff in here, but it’s funnier than you might think. Old ladies steal his bamboo all the time, he gets excited about how thick some lichen might have grown in his absence, and he goes on about “mediocre monks” every once in a while. The commentary by Red Pine is as enlightening as the poems.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn: A Heavenly Nostrils Chronicle by Dana Simpson
I don’t often read books written for children aged 9-12, I think because I’m dead inside, but I have it on good authority that Phoebe and her Unicorn is top notch comix for the whole family. My source describes it as “Calvin and Hobbes for a new generation, but with a girl instead of a boy.” That’s good enough for me, but I was doubly sold when I found out that the unicorn’s name is Marigold Heavenly Nostrils.
