As I’ve gotten to know the staff of our September Bookstore of the Month a little better, I realized that Seattle Mystery Bookshop’s greatest strength is in its recommendations. The staff is impossibly well-versed in the genre. So I thought I’d ask them for some recommendations for our readers, particularly those of you out there who would never normally consider giving a mystery a try. Thanks so much to Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner JB Dickey and his staff (Fran, Adele, and Amber) for agreeing to do this. If any of these titles interests you, please stop by Seattle Mystery Bookshop to check them out, and tell them the Seattle Review of Books sent you. If you’re not in Seattle, feel free to order directly from their website; all the books are linked for your convenience.

In your opinion, what's the best single mystery for someone who thinks they hate mysteries?

JB: Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye – as much a novel about friendship as a mystery, and there are set-pieces of Chandler’s literature that are not to be missed.

Fran: Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger. It’s a coming-of-age story, it’s a building thunderstorm, it’s brilliant. And it doesn’t read like a mystery, but there’s a mystery at the heart of it.

Amber: There are so many! For those with an urban fantasy bent, The Rook by Daniel O’Malley is a great place to start. The story centers on a woman who has her personality/memories stolen; she needs to find out who did this to her as well as who is a traitor to the crown. This book has a strong heroine who never falls into the trap of relying on a romantic relationship to save the day! If you are looking for a classic I would highly suggest Endless Night by Agatha Christie. It moves along really well, is one of the author’s favorites, and is an absolute classic! Not quite as well-known as And Then There Were None, Murder Of Roger Ackroyd or Murder On The Orient Express – it’s a good one to start with because you run into less spoilers in pop culture as to whodunit!

What the best mystery series for someone who think they hates mystery series?

JB: Craig Johnson’s Longmire series – literate, funny, moving books about the people and landscape with echoes of everything American. Easy to read them and love them and to not think of them as "mysteries." You have to read them in order because there are hints of things to come and references to past books in each.

Fran: Thomas Perry’s Jane Whitefield series is great. Jane is a Seneca woman who helps people with legitimate reasons to disappear. Her rules are stringent and she will die before revealing her secrets. I was initially skeptical about a man writing from a woman’s perspective, but I have to say that Mr. Perry has created a truly unique, intriguing and captivating series. Start with Vanishing Act. But too, I have to agree with JB about the Longmire series!

Adele: Louise Penny’s Gamache series. At the start of the series, Gamache is Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec who is always investigating happenings in Three Pines, a lovely village in southern Quebec where we all want to live despite the fact that people are always dying there. Louise has developed characters that you care about and cannot wait until the next book to see what happens. The series didn’t really catch me until the second book but they must be read in order (the first may not be skipped) due to the development of the main characters. When I first came to work at the bookshop, I ended up reading a lot of authors so that I could answer the question of “now that I am caught up with the Louise Penny series, what am I going to read until the next book?” Still Life is the first in the series. And let me echo JB and Fran about Craig Johnson!

Amber :This one is tricky…most of the reluctant readers I run into are kids. So the series I always suggest to them are for middle graders and up – Jasper Fforde’s The Last Dragonslayer, which features Jennifer Strange, the acting manager for Kazaam (an employment agency for wizards) who finds herself embroiled in a plot to kill the last dragon in England. This whole series has a great sense of humor and never takes itself too seriously — there are a bunch of single kids’ titles which are great, but Jasper Fforde’s series is one of my all time favorites!

What’s the best mystery you've read lately?

JB: Don Winslow’s The Cartel, A David Lean saga of the horrific drug war along the US/Mexican border – timely and timeless lyrically told.

Fran: I just finished the science-fiction thriller Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein. Holy cow! Solid science (which could be overwhelming or boring but isn’t,) people to care about, clever humor, and non-stop action. Quite possibly the best of 2015, in my opinion.

Adele: Paul Cleave’s Trust No One. A mystery writer is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and his career is ending. His twelve books contain stories of brutal murders committed by very awful men. As his mental balance breaks down, he starts confessing to horrible crimes. Did he commit them or has his writing world collapsed into his reality? I have never wanted to skip to the end of a book so badly. I didn’t and held out to the shocking end. This and The Cartel are the two of the best but JB got to the Winslow first!

Amber: Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot. Set in modern London, it is about Constable Peter Grant who discovers a witness to a brutal murder. The only thing is this witness is a ghost and when he lets this slip to Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale, his entire career takes a left-hand turn. Each book has its own crime, plus an overarching storyline which builds in tension with each book. It is one of the few police procedurals based on magic, which I find absolutely fantastic.

This wasn’t a part of the SRoB haul, but we did take delivery of 550 books from the printers this weekend. For those of you who don’t work in publishing, here’s what 550 books packed on a pallet look like:

You may have noticed a new style of sponsorship on the site today: event sponsorship. Our inaugural partner for this is the Seattle Antiquarian Bookfair, an annual rare books and ephemera festival now in its twenty-eighth year. Read more about the fair, and mark it in your calendars: October 10th & 11th — and thanks to them for sponsoring the site.

We’ve been asked a few times — how are the sponsorships going? We think they’re going great. We originally released a block of inventory through January at a discounted rate of $100 a week. Of that, we’ve only got 8 weeks left. If you’re thinking about sponsoring, now would be the time to reserve your week.

With all the hullaballoo over online advertising lately, we’re proud to offer a product that is relevant, real, and we think, good content. We’re proud of our partners so far, and hope you’ve been enjoying them. Remember to take a look each week. It’s part of our campaign to make internet advertising 100% less terrible.

Over the last two days, we’ve seen a lot of outrage on local social media over the Seattle Public Library’s rebranding. You can see what SPL is considering through their survey, where they’re “seeking public comment on a proposed new name and logo design.” The name change would be to “Seattle Public Libraries,” and the logo design would involve either a few patterns that are apparently loosely based on the windows of the downtown branch of the Library or a series of connected dots.

Some are upset that the Seattle Public Library is considering their brand at all, or that they’re spending a third of a million dollars on the rebranding program. Frankly, it would be hypocritical of me to agree with those people about the folly of branding, since the Seattle Review of Books co-founder Martin McClellan and I put a lot of thought and consideration into the appearance of the site on which I’m publishing these words. However noxious and/or smarmy the surrounding marketing language may be, branding is an essential part of an organization.

And the argument that the Seattle Public Library should spend the rebranding money on materials instead is a specious one, too. Nobody would think twice if a private business with a $65 million annual budget spent a third of a million dollars on a branding campaign. Brands are how the public relates to organizations, and vice versa. The Seattle Public Library interacts with people through their brand, they advocate for themselves through their brand, and they raise awareness of their services through their brand. I understand that it’s unpleasant to think of a civic treasure like the library as a business that has to continually promote awareness of their products and services, but this is important stuff.

With all that said, people absolutely are correct to be upset about this rebranding campaign; they’re just focusing their energies on the wrong part of the argument.

The sad truth is, library executive boards around the country for the last decade have formulated a new strategy for survival in the 21st century, and that strategy is to move away from books and librarians and toward broader community activities. Years ago, I spoke with a number of SPL librarians who were upset that leadership had devalued their expertise in favor of more unskilled library volunteers. The feeling among librarians at SPL has been that too much money and too many resources have gone to executives and administration at the library while librarians have been ignored. Librarians, too, have advocated against policy changes that they argue ignore poor library patrons in favor of more affluent groups.

The stories I linked to in the above paragraph are all years old, but this quote from new SPL city librarian Marcellus Turner in the Seattle PI indicates that the cultural shift away from books and librarians still continues today:

The Seattle Public Library is about books, but we are so much more… [a]n updated look and name will better reflect what our library system is today -- active community hubs where residents learn, grow and gather throughout their lives.

This is echoed by SPL’s proposed new brand statement from the user survey. According to the site, the “brand statement is one of the guiding principles of the organization,” and here it is:

The Library provides access to knowledge, experiences and learning for all. We preserve and create opportunities for the people of Seattle who make it such a dynamic and desirable place to live. When we’re empowered as individuals, we become STRONGER TOGETHER.

Leaving aside the highly unnecessary use of all-caps at the end, this is an incredibly generic statement and, most importantly, it doesn’t mention books or librarians. It’s symbolic of the larger cultural shift happening at SPL.

Look, I’m absolutely in favor of SPL’s many community programs, and I understand that libraries should not be just repositories for books. SPL provides tax and employment assistance, learning and outreach programs for kids, internet access for poor and homeless Seattleites, and any number of community service programs. These are wonderful, worthy programs.

But would it kill SPL leadership to publicly promote their amazing librarians as a resource every now and again? The conventional wisdom among library executives these days might be that Google has devalued librarians, but that conventional wisdom is wrong. Librarians are resources for research, they’re providers of social services, they’re community organizers, they’re translators, they’re child-care workers. A trained and educated librarian is maybe the friendliest, most cost-effective interface that the city government has with its citizens. And this library can’t even mention them in their brand statement? Here’s a message for SPL: Librarians are your brand. They’re the reason that people think warmly of SPL, not your logo or the typeface on your website. Without your librarians, SPL, you would be nothing.

So as you fill out SPL’s branding survey, I’d like to remind you that this is maybe the most direct way that you as a citizen can access the attention of SPL leadership. And what you do with this attention is important. Simply lodging a complaint about the cost or banality of a rebranding program is a missed opportunity; I’d encourage you to take the opportunity to remind SPL exactly what their brand is. Maybe suggest a new branding statement that promotes librarians and books as an integral part of the library experience, something like:

The Library provides access to knowledge, experiences, and learning for all. Our librarians preserve and create opportunities for the people of Seattle; our books and other materials inspire Seattleites to make this city such a dynamic and desirable place to live. When we’re empowered as individuals, we become a stronger community.

I want Seattle Public Library’s rebranding to succeed; I want the library to advocate for itself as simply and strongly as possible. But a library whose leadership doesn’t publicly acknowledge their greatest resources — their books and librarians — is a library that doesn’t appreciate its own brand in the first place.

It’s obvious to anyone who looks at this survey that SPL is an organization that is suffering a crisis of character. Help remind them that their organizational soul comes down to two simple words: books and people. A library without librarians and books is a community center. We have lots of community centers in Seattle, and we could always use more. But without libraries staffed with skilled librarians and stocked with books this city would wither and die.

MONDAY Your week begins at University Book Store, where Fran Wilde reads from her new fantasy novel Updraft. It’s set in a world “built in towers of living bone” and stars a main character who has the “ability to control the invisible predators that roam the skies with her voice.” That sounds entirely bonkers, and is therefore worthy of our respect.

TUESDAY Elliott Bay Book Company brings Joy Williams to town for what they acknowledge is a “rare” visit. Williams is largely regarded as a master of American fiction, and her name is often dropped in the same sentence as writers like Flannery O’Connor. If you like short stories, I’d recommend her collection Honored Guest. She debuts a new story collection, The Visiting Privilege, here tonight.

WEDNESDAY The reading series Lit Fix pops up in Belltown tonight with a great lineup: Kevin Maloney, Jeanine Walker, and short-story author (and Instant Future publisher) Matthew Simmons, as well as musician Steven Curtis. But tonight’s Lit Fix is also a big deal because it’s the last local public appearance of local writer Kelly Davio before she moves to London. Davio gave a great interview to the Seattle Review of Books about why she’s leaving town and what she’ll most miss about Seattle a week or so ago. Here’s your chance to go show your support for her.

THURSDAY You’ll want to visit Hugo House for the latest installment of Cheap Beer & Prose, where the beer is cheap ($1 per can of PBR) and the readers are guaranteed to be good. Tonight’s readers include Jean Burnet, Kevin Emerson, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, and Jay McAleer.

FRIDAY Philip Howard, a professor at the University of Washington reads at Town Hall from his book Pax Technica, which reimagines the internet as something simultaneously open and secure, neither of which is strictly true today.

SATURDAY Head to Neighbours Nighclub for Banned! Books in Drag, in which David Schmader hosts a bunch of drag queens who will “give performances inspired by their favorite works of literature” to raise awareness for banned literature. This is the only literary event this week where you’ll find performer names like Sparkle Leigh, Isabella St. Extynn St. James, LaSaveona Hunt, Atasha Manila, Aleksa Manila, Charlie Menace, DonaTella Howe, Sylvia O'Stayformore and Kitty Kitty Bang Bang.

SUNDAY Hugo House hosts a passel of poets in a baseball-themed World Series of Poetry. Two teams composed from the poets Ed Skoog, Kary Wayson, Oliver de la Paz, Arlene Kim, Dean Rader, and Sarah Galvin will “take turns batting at topics pitched to them by the audience.” Sounds like a lot of fun! This event is hosted by John Roderick, a musician who tried to be a politician a few months ago. He's a good host of literary events.

I created a fake business and bought it an amazing online reputation

Kashmir Hill’s fascinating look at the business of sock-puppeting business reputation. She starts a fake Karaoke truck, and manages to establish online credibility without too much effort.

Mark my words: reputation online is the battleground of the future. Trust is the key component.

For $5, I could get 200 Facebook fans, or 6,000 Twitter followers, or I could get @SMExpertsBiz to tweet about the truck to the account’s 26,000 Twitter fans. A Lincoln could get me a Facebook review, a Google review, an Amazon review, or, less easily, a Yelp review.

Nom de Vie: Literary social media in the age of Ferrante

The delightful Alexander Chee looks at Ferrante’s deal with her publishers, and what it means for the modern author, exposed and available at all times through social media.

The postcards I once made for my first novel back in 2001 have been joined by blogging and social media—which have a much bigger footprint online than a postcard or in some cases an ad—and come with a relatively low financial cost, if you already have a laptop or a smartphone. Thus the seemingly essential role social media and the Internet play in the marketing of books now. Most of us who write and publish fiction in 2015 are participants in a process that extends from before publication to well after, and includes creating a kind of electronic diorama of our writing process and lives, extending across several platforms, all of it available at a glance to any interested consumer. Your feed as native advertising, an open answer to the questions so often asked at readings: “How much of this is autobiographical?” or “What is your process?” or “Where do you write?”

How many books should you write in a year

As John Scalzi points out, it may matter how you define what a book is:

Also, you know. What a “novel” or “book” is, is a very fungible thing. The term “novel” encompasses a book like The Goldfinch, which is almost 300,000 words, and Redshirts, which was 55,000 words, not counting the codas. The more-or-less official lower length of a novel is 40,000 words; at the other extreme, Alan Moore’s novel Jerusalem, slated for publication next year, is a million words long. I don’t recommend trying to write four Jerusalems in a year. But on the other hand, four 40,000 word stories? That’s entirely doable for a very large number of writers.

Today in 1968: Margaret Atwood schools her interviewer on the meaning of "poetry”

It’s absolutely delightful to hear a young Margaret Atwood here, and never mind the idiotic terms with which the writer cast the interview. She’s nuanced and brilliant, and responding to stupid questions that intend to be heady, but instead are broad. Interviewers! Ask very specific questions and you will get good answers. “What is poetry”, on the other hand, is a horrible question. It’s insulting. You don’t ask accountants “What is accounting”. It’s a question designed only to make you look deep, and trust me, people are tuning in for her, not you. That Atwood offers such an interesting, engaged answer is testament to the fact that her genius started very young.

The tetchy writer who posted this wants to cast her as an barely understandable McLuhan figure. Ignore the write-up and skip right to the audio. Her own words from her mouth are more than enough.

Every day, friend of the SRoB Rahawa Haile tweets a short story. She gave us permission to collect them every week. She’s archiving the entire project on Storify

Short Story of the Day #255 Lisa Donovan's "Our Book of Failures" Conjunctions (2015) http://t.co/HEmEq6IkEX pic.twitter.com/wirBZDbWHi

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 13, 2015

Short Story of the Day #256 Sarah Pinsker's "And We Were Left Darkling" Lightspeed (2015) http://t.co/8Okv6JlQy7 pic.twitter.com/CXfQ7wFiNp

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 13, 2015

Short Story of the Day #257 Nao-cola Yamazaki's "A False Genealogy" Catapult (2015) https://t.co/zVpLd9OIuQ pic.twitter.com/Hy4oLyoNWy

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 14, 2015

Short Story of the Day #258 These past two weeks have been difficult for more reasons than I can say. But. pic.twitter.com/v9VyFxsoas

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 16, 2015

Short Story of the Day #259 Courtney Maum's "The Bashful Yeti Tree Sculpture, Guarder of the Pond" Hobart (2012) pic.twitter.com/UA4YualaU9

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 17, 2015

Short Story of the Day #260 Gina Ochsner's "Song of the Selkie" Fantastic Women (Tin House, 2011) <3 @HousingWorksBks pic.twitter.com/6IwlaMT6LR

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 18, 2015

Short Story of the Day #261 Jessica Alexander's "Bring Me Something" Alice Blue Review (2014) http://t.co/mFDsJhr2Ev pic.twitter.com/deEd1BQhOd

— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) September 19, 2015

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

My mother just came out as Wiccan at 62. Dead serious. What the fuck am I supposed to do about this? Is there any book in the world that can help me unfuck this pile of candles and Stevie Nicks lace?

Verlaine, Wallingford

Dear Verlaine,

I understand your horror. Just last weekend my own dear mother let it slip that she’s interested in butt play. While I’m fully supportive of her curiosity in the abstract, there are some things daughters are better off not knowing. Those things include butt play and the belief that mortals can control the wind.

I have a few suggestions for you, all of them outstanding. First, buy this book: When Someone You Love is Wiccan. Reading it is optional. Crack the spine in a few places and put it next to your toilet where your mother is sure to see it, just as I nailed a butt plug to an old swing in my mother’s front yard to express my support of her alternative lifestyle.

Then, when your mother next brings up witchcraft, gently steer the conversation towards Satanism. It could be that your mother is lonely. Maybe she’s frustrated by the current state of American politics, repulsed by organized religion, and therefore susceptible to the conviction that chanting beneath the light of a waning gibbous will ward away chin hairs and parking tickets.

But is she aware of the fantastic work the Satanic Temple has spearheaded lately? They’ve countered anti-abortion Planned Parenthoods demonstrations in cities like Detroit, drafted a “religious exemption” letter to combat anti-abortion laws in states that attempt to dissuade women from ending a pregnancy, and lobbied to erect statues of the goat-headed deity Baphomet in states like Arkansas that allow for monuments of the Ten Commandments to be placed on Capitol grounds.

As you can see, the Satanic Temple is an incredibly active organization – perfect for a perhaps lonely older woman looking to join a new community. Plus, Satanists love candles!

Ask your mother to mull it over, while also acknowledging that religion and butt play are two very personal choices that mothers must make for themselves. If, in the end, she decides that she would rather believe that a clutch of candles and a prayer can influence the tides, bless her heart and buy her a fire extinguisher.

xoxo,

Cienna