BOOKNOTES, the newsletter of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

Fiction & Poetry

Song Yet Sung
by James McBride (Riverhead)

On the coast of 1850s Maryland, the escape of the "Dreamer," a female slave who has mysterious visions of the future, has repercussions throughout the region as she is pursued or given refuge.

Based on actual events, this tremendously engrossing novel features conflicted slave catchers and plantation owners, ruthless slave stealers, and the population of slaves themselves, who employ a secret code of visual clues in order to aid their fleeing brethren.

Part gripping, old-Western tale, part complex morality play, and completely heart-wrenching in its authenticity, this book enlightens as it enthralls, deserving recognition as a classic of American historical fiction. -E. Dorfman

Beautiful Children
by Charles Bock (Random House)

It doesn't take long for things to go awry in Las Vegas. One night is all Charles Bock needs to provide the main attraction of this prodigious debut novel. Readers are brought up to speed in the lives of a diverse handful of Vegas locals just in time to be in their heads for this single unassuming night. When the sun rises, no one (including the reader) will be the same. It takes real skill to create one believable narrative voice. Bock has seen fit to give us a handful, and we shall be forever indebted to him for it. -J. Zaidi

Day
by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)

Kennedy's last novel, Paradise, was one of the best novels of the new millennium, and for an encore, she briefly abandoned writing to take on a career as a stand-up comedian. With Day, Kennedy combines the artfulness of Paradise with the dark humor of her stage comedy. Alfie Day, a WWII veteran with a death wish, is an extra in a World War II movie. The combination of the ridiculously artificial and the ridiculously all-too-real makes Day possibly the funniest novel about the inhumanity of war since Catch-22. -P. Constant

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
by Marie Howe (Norton)

I tend, when reading lyrics as graceful and melodious as Marie Howe's, to respond in the manner of the James Taylor song (to paraphrase): It doesn't matter what the words mean—I just like them for the way they sound. As always with the finest poetry, the incantations composing Howe's third published volume can be read, and loved, on this thoroughly musical basis with perfect satisfaction. After all, the words spin their best mystical webs of inference and association at the sublogical, subaural level—that's what poetry does.

But if you must ask "What are they 'about'— what 'meaning' can I splay on the page?" (must you?), I'll answer, more than a library of philosophical dissertations could hope to explore: the separation and intersection of the sacred and the secular—in life, time, love, death; in the ecstatic and the quotidian. For starters... -P. Aaron

A Golden Age
by Tahmima Anam (HarperCollins)

In this remarkably assured debut, Anam tells the story of a family caught up in the upheaval of Bangladesh's 1971 rebellion for independence from Pakistan. She manages to do so with an eye to larger historical contexts, yet without ever losing the very human thread of how a widowed mother struggles to keep her family going, out of the maw of violence—even as turmoil and travail unavoidably come their way. That this is done in such concise, but never too controlled, form makes this poetic, beautiful book—the first of a projected trilogy—one of the must-reads of the new year. -R. Simonson

The Rain Before It Falls
by Jonathan Coe (Knopf)

Jonathan Coe's newest novel relates the story of four generations of women of the same family spanning World War II until the present. Much of the story is told through a series of cassette recordings left behind by the recently deceased Aunt Rosamond. Ros leaves the tapes for her cousin Beatrix's granddaughter Imogen. The book is a revealing portrait of the inextricable link between family members over a sixty-year period and the ways in which patterns repeat themselves through the generations. Coe is among the best of contemporary writers. -G. Berry

The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff (Voice)

After a failed attempt to run over the jealous wife of her archaeology professor/lover with a bush plane in the Alaska wilds, Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, bedraggled and heartbroken. She arrives in time to witness the removal from Lake Glimmerglass of the body of an enormous creature whose existence had long been speculated by many generations of town denizens. And that is only the beginning of this grand twist on the family saga. Lauren Groff 's first novel is a wonderfully crafted, unforgettable, fantastic surprise of a book. -J. Darrah

What I Was
by Meg Rosoff (Viking)

This is the story of an old man's retrospective of 1962, the pivotal year in which he found an escape from the misery of an English boarding school. His release comes in the form of a hut on the beach, and the boy who lives inside it. In the few days he can steal away from his wretched existence at the school, he falls in love with life by the sparkling seaside and envies the simple life of his beautiful friend. But when the outside world catches up with them, the ensuing scandal surprises even the schoolboy. -M. Hickner

Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution
by Jerome Charyn (Norton)

Sure to set fire to the genre of historical fiction, this bawdy and adventuresome tale of the American Revolution carries us deep inside the newly postcolonial Manhattan. Born and raised in a brothel, John Stocking is torn between his feelings of loyalty to the British crown and his undeniable admiration for the godlike American general, Washington. As each side alternately tries to use him against the other, our hero narrowly escapes several gruesome deaths, seeks to uncover the mystery of his parentage, relentlessly protects the people whom he loves, and witnesses the birth of a new country. -C. Sabatini

Now You See Him
by Eli Gottlieb (Morrow)

When charismatic author Rob Castor kills his girlfriend (an up-and-coming writer herself) and then himself, his hometown friends are thrown into upheaval. His childhood best friend Nick Framingham is especially affected. Nick's life as a stable family man begins to crumble from the wear of his seemingly overdone sorrow and the reappearance of Belinda Castor, his ex-girlfriend and Rob's sister. As he descends even further, a hidden scandal from the family's murky past resurfaces to cast a shadow on an already-dark affair. This, compounded with Framingham's own well-kept secret, leads to a truly shocking conclusion. -P. Yearby

The Soul Thief
by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)

Charles Baxter, author of the National Book Award— nominated The Feast of Love, returns with a mesmerizing look at the boundaries of self in a riveting tale that gives new meaning to the term "identity theft."

Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in upstate New York, is drawn unwittingly into the mercurial world of Jerome Coolberg, a self-proclaimed "boy genius." Nathaniel's life reels out of control as Coolberg slowly and methodically appropriates Nathaniel's past and present. But whose story is the real one? As unsettling as a room full of mirrors, this is a novel that will keep you guessing. -L. Paus

Behind My Eyes
by Li-Young Lee (Norton)

Here's the best way to read Li-Young Lee's poems: Place a chair beside a grandfather clock, a mantel clock, or any timepiece possessed of a pendulum; arrest the pendulum's motion; then read—slowly, timelessly. If you don't have access to an appropriate chronometer (and who, alas, does these days?)—let the image serve.

Lee has redefined the lyric poem as meditation whose language transports out of the measure of time, through and beyond the known dimensions, co-illuminating realms physical, emotional, spiritual, and incantatory. Memory is the strike-flint. Duality is a straight line. A straight line is a spiral. Dream. -P. Aaron

My Revolutions
by Hari Kunzru (Dutton)

Chris Carver's past is riddled with urban guerrillas, political violence, and drugs, but that was almost thirty years ago. Now he has a new identity (Mike Frame); a lovely, ambitious wife; and a stepdaughter he has raised as his own. As his fiftieth birthday approaches, so does the collapse of this cozy set-up.

This novel of the British '70s libertarian communist terrorist group, the Angry Brigade, captures the radical politics and stark philosophy of those involved. Kunzru allows his characters a humanity others may easily have glossed over with cynicism or romanticism. -P. Yearby

The Somnambulist
by Jonathan Barnes (Morrow)

Prepare to be astounded by the great Edward Moon—conjurer extraordinaire, master of deception and illusion, and genius of criminal detection. Moon and his associate, the Somnambulist, travel the English countryside solving mysteries too baffling for the flatfeet of Scotland Yard. Now the pair has stumbled upon a nefarious plot that could completely unhinge English society.

This romp, in the pulp tradition of the Victorian Penny Dreadful, features a protagonist with a penchant for bearded women, a seemingly invincible giant with an unquenchable thirst for milk, and homicidal incarnations of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Prepare to be astounded indeed. -J. Zaidi

Lush Life
by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Richard Price's newest—set in the restively gentrifying world of present-day Lower East Side Manhattan—is developed around the murder of a young white male bartender. Structurally, Lush life is a police procedural, with virtually the entire rhythm of the novel developed through brilliant and scorching dialogue, heavy on the argot. From project dwellers to the urbanized elite, Price displays his intimate understanding of myriad societal elements with pitch-perfect sequences and interactions that play out like a movie. This is a riveting snapshot of the tension simmering just under the surface in the melting pot that is America. -J. Reiner

A Person of Interest
by Susan Choi (Viking)

An aging mathematics professor must face his isolation and regrets when he becomes a suspect in a bombing at his Midwestern college in Susan Choi's gripping novel. Seen as "the Asian" by colleagues and strangers alike, the professor gradually realizes that his own misconceptions about himself and about others have driven him to make a series of missteps. Still mesmerized by the past, he realizes he might not survive his next move.

Choi's rich prose, vivid storytelling, and redemption of a difficult character make this intelligent novel suspenseful through the last page. –K.M. Allman

Courting Shadows
by Jem Poster (Overlook)

The year is 1881: Young architect John Stannard is sent from London to a rural part of England to make repairs on the village church. Tearing down walls, burning the pews, and unearthing the dead, Stannard pays no heed to the voices of protest that surround him. While not at work he devotes himself to emotionally tormenting a beautiful young local girl by the name of Ann Rosewell. Jem Poster presents a scathing look at the battleground between the sacred and profane. Thought provoking, coolly elegant, and rich in detail, this novel is sure to be a success. -J. Ditzel

The View from the Seventh Layer
by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon)

This collection of short stories definitely has an element of the fantastical, while still remaining firmly grounded in reality. Brockmeier grabbed me with the first story, "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets," about a mute man who makes gifts of parakeets; also the story "The Lives of the Philosophers," in which a graduate student struggles with both Aquinas and Nietzsche lapsing into silence at end of their lives and his own reaction to his girlfriend being pregnant. The common theme running through these stories is the subjective response of individuals to the world around them. -G. Berry

Nonfiction

Riding Toward Everywhere
by William T. Vollmann (Ecco)

"All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still..."

In this memoir, National Book Award winner Vollmann takes to the rails, seeking the thrill and freedom traditionally associated with railroads. Vollmann has a keen eye and curious mind, and is a more than capable storyteller, but where he really shines and where this book stands out is not in the events of the narrative, but rather in his reflection of these events.

Part travel memoir, part activist pamphlet, but mostly the story of a man clickety-clacking along toward everywhere. -P. Egan

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
by David Shields (Knopf)

Did you know that your strength and coordination peak at age nineteen? Or that starting at age thirty you lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height per year?

David Shields gives us an engaging and compulsively readable meditation on mortality, from birth through adolescence, from youth to middle age to old age. Fascinating biological details are interspersed with speculations on the life journey from a compendium of writers and philosophers. Delightful anecdotal tidbits about Shields's own life as well as that of his ninety-seven-year-old father accompany this riveting look at our brief and wondrous lifespan. -L. Paus

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
by Jennifer 8. Lee (Twelve)

Three years of investigative travel to six continents, twenty-three countries, and forty-two U.S. states inform Jennifer 8. Lee's exposé of the underbelly of the Chinese restaurant industry. We see the growing phenomenon of fortune cookie versus Powerball, get the history of the Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989, understand why 90 percent of Chinese immigrants work in Chinese restaurants and the perilous stories of how they got here, learn who is really behind General Tso's Chicken, and discover the greatest Chinese restaurant on earth! Lee's savvy humor and excellent historical reportage make this book as addictive as Chinese food itself. -T. Radebaugh

Dog Man: An Uncommon Life On a Faraway Mountain
by Martha Sherrill (Penguin)

When Morie Sawataishi bought his first Akita dog in 1944, Japan was at war, most indigenous dogs were killed for their fur, and only a dozen Akitas had survived. He hid this unnamed dog until World War II ended and then, with a network of dog lovers, gradually rebuilt and reshaped this breed, which thrives today worldwide.

This is the story of courage, endurance, and single-mindedness both human and canine. Largely set in Japan's snowy rural north, Dog Man is also a fascinating portrait of family life in an unconventional postwar Japanese family. -K.M. Allman

Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story
by Frederik Peeters (Houghton Mifflin)

With Blue Pills, Swiss comics artist Frederik Peeters has made the latest contribution to the brave, young world of graphic memoirs. It is the story of the love between Fred and Cati and Cati's young son and the trials this love endures in the face of HIV. It is also the story of doubt and fear, which ultimately impose a greater threat to love than the virus itself. When Fred's concern is at its greatest, a surprise visit from an extinct mammal reminds him what it means to live. Blue Pills will not soon be forgotten. -C. Schwennsen

Rock On: An Office Power Ballad
by Dan Kennedy (Algonquin)

Dan Kennedy lands a job at Atlantic records expecting to have arrived into some kind of rock-and-roll mythology. Never mind that the job is in marketing; he fully expects that he will soon be walking among the Stones and Zeppelin. However, he seems to have forgotten that this is the 2000s and what he gets is a complex set of asinine office politics. Rock On is an exclusive backstage tour of the record industry hilariously recounted by a McSweeney's writer and avid music fan, and it stands as a polemic on the regrettable meeting of commerce and art. -C. Sabatini

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan (Penguin)

In this book, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma turns his attention from the environmental consequences of industrial agriculture to the more personal subject of the health benefits and detriments of a Western diet. His manifesto is simple: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Yet Pollan finds himself in the odd position of having to define exactly what he means by "Eat food." Pollan encourages us to think of foods in terms of the whole organism, with innumerable nutrient interactions, rather than something manufactured from individual, isolated nutrients. -M. Hickner

Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie
edited by the Corrie family (Norton)

At the age of twenty-three Rachel Corrie, an activist and artist from Olympia, traveled to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. In an organized nonviolent attempt to stop the destruction of Palestinian homes, Rachel was killed, and her letters were published internationally in a story called "Rachel's War" in The Guardian. This collection of her writings is valuable both for its account of the lives of Palestinians and for Rachel's revelations as she became committed to activism. In poetry and art she found her own resources for bravery, and her transformation of restlessness into courageous action is inspiring and tangible. -T. Radebaugh

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan
by Terese Svoboda (Graywolf)

Here is a strangely gripping story about a Midwestern farmer turned soldier, military justice, and family secrets. As her uncle—an Adonis even in old age—descends into depression, Svoboda transcribes tapes he's recorded, recounting the time he spent guarding a military prison in postwar Japan, while reports on Abu Ghraib play in the background. The narrative shifts between Svoboda, who recounts her fruitless search for truth, and her uncle, who tells of executions in chillingly simple detail. Svoboda expresses a quiet, almost patient, outrage here, which makes the object of her anger all the more loud. -M. Woolbright

The Geography of Bliss: One Grumps Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner (Twelve)

Are god, cash, and chocolate all equals in Shangri-la? National Public Radio correspondent and self-proclaimed grump Eric Weiner is on a quest to find the most joyous place on earth. His journey begins in the Netherlands, where he meets with the world's premier professor of Happiness Studies, Ruut Veenhoven, for a crash course in the science of contentment and Moroccan hash. He then travels to Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, the U.K., India, and finally to the United States (ranked twenty-third in overall happiness) in this fun, informative collection of essays about the many different pathways to bliss. -J. Darrah

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York
by Chandler Burr (Henry Holt)

Here Chandler Burr, perfume critic for The New York Times, presents an intoxicating immersion into the couture world of perfumery. Burr follows the creation of two very different scents: one for a high-fashion house looking to add spark to its lackluster palate, and one aiming to marry the star power of Sarah Jessica Parker with her desire for quality to produce a bestseller. The combination of impeccable writing and rich, titillating characters (one perfumer confesses his personal perfect scent: the underside of his mistress) makes for an engaging read that reveals the jealously veiled secrets of a fascinating industry. -E. Ehrlich

The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy
by Robert Leleux (St. Martin's)

His flamboyant mother's frequent nail appointments, shopping trips, plastic surgeries, and determined search for a wealthy spouse dominated Robert's teenage years in eastern Texas. As the only child of this irrepressible, acerbic-tongued woman, abandoned by her husband, and as an extroverted gay man endowed with his mother's good looks and sharp wit, the author seemed destined to write about their shared pursuit of emotional and financial stability. Eventually, a loving partner, college, and supportive in-laws enabled a healthy separation from his overbearing mother, and now, with both fond and wicked humor, he recounts their madcap years together. -E. Dorfman

Welcome To Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life
by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang (Bloomsbury)

Did you know that in one day your brain uses the amount of energy of two bananas? Or did you know that a habit of heavy drinking can cause brain shrinkage, and domestication of animals causes their brains to shrink? Did you know that we do not really use only 10 percent of our brains? Or that you can calm a dog down by yawning, and playing Mozart to babies does not affect their intelligence? Welcome to Your Brain addresses and explains many myths surrounding the brain and offers fun, and even useful, little-known facts to help you help your brain. -B. Reynolds

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes To the Streets
by Sudhir Venkatesh (Penguin)

Sudhir Venkatesh recklessly ventured into a Chicago housing project looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey as part of his graduate studies. Instead he found himself in a wildly unlikely friendship with a local gang leader, and was granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of his gang and the projects they operate in.

While Venkatesh's methods had a powerful impact in his field, and the inner workings and hierarchy of the gang make for fascinating reading, what ultimately matters are the people he befriends and the lives we learn about through him. -P. Egan

Children's

A Kitten Tale
by Eric Rohmann (Knopf)

It's springtime when we meet four kittens who have never seen snow. Three of them are scared—and with good reason! The three fearful kittens worry that the snow will pile up to their whiskers and make them freezing cold. How will they play outside?

The fourth kitten, brave and curious, is excited for the snow. When the snow falls, the three kittens hide. But the fourth kitten's optimism and playfulness urges them out from their hiding spot and helps them see the wonder of winter. Rohmann's sweet, cheerful illustrations invite us to do the same. -E. Staudt

Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who Pop-Up!
by David A. Carter (Robin Corey)

Everyone loves Dr. Seuss. Everyone loves pop-up books. David Carter has combined these two universal passions into a delightful new pop-up version of one of the most enduring children's stories of our time. Horton Hears a Who is of course the classic tale of the beloved elephant who discovers and struggles to protect the microscopic world of the Whos, contained in a tiny speck of dust that he saves on a small piece of clover. With Seuss's complete original text, Carter reimagines the art into a brilliant and colorful new work that jumps right out to entertain. -D. Hsieh

All Aboard!: A Traveling Alphabet
by Bill Mayer (Margaret K. McElderry)

All Aboard! captures the grand mystery of the transportation era right around World War II. Your child will be awed by the bright, bold images drawn from the classic travel posters of the 1920s. To make learning the alphabet just a little more fun, the letters are hidden within the beautiful pictures of a Ford trimotor airplane, a steam locomotive, a zephyr, an ocean liner, and more! -J. Stark

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum
by Kate Bernheimer
illus. by Nicoletta Ceccoli (Schwartz & Wade)

In this enchanting new picture book we are taken on a fairytale adventure into the exquisitely illustrated world of a girl who lives inside a castle that is on display in a museum. Can you see her?

Children journey from far and wide to visit the lovely, lonely girl in the museum. Her dreams are filled with these children...and if you leave your photo in the book, she will dream about you too. This is a haunting and memorable tale that is sure to captivate young readers. -D. Hsieh