This is the month the whole Peninsula fills up at once. Ferry crowds, campers, low-tide walkers looking for negative tides — and the regulars threading between them, because the books don't stop coming just because the sun is out.

This issue has some of each. Our July shelf takes on the American healthcare system: not cheerful, exactly, but useful. The second installment of A Field Guide to Field Guides gets you ready for the coast. Olympic Angels has made Port Book and News a pickup spot for Wards of the State, the first selection in their community read on foster care. Take a copy, read it, pass it on, and mark August 8 for Claudia Rowe's talk in Sequim. Lands and Letters is back too, reading In Trees in September — and its author, Robert Moor, is coming down from B.C. that month for a conversation at the Dungeness River Nature Center.

Details below. Bring your tide tables.

Reading the American Healthcare System

Every one of us becomes a patient eventually, or cares for someone who is. Sooner or later there's a bill that seems like a joke, an insurance runaround that never ends, or a diagnosis you are afraid to google. The books in our July shelves up front don't agree with each other — but together they help explain why the system feels so hard to navigate, and what you can do inside it.

Two to start. Elisabeth Rosenthal's An American Sickness walks through the system one piece at a time — hospitals, doctors, drug companies, the bill itself — and closes with practical steps for patients. She's an ER physician turned New York Times reporter, and it's a highly readable place to begin. Beside it, Marty Makary's The Price We Pay, a Johns Hopkins surgeon's road trip through American medical pricing, where he portions out both blame and hope. One chapter follows an Amish community that rides a six-day train to Mexico for affordable surgery.

Then a handful of newer books, each from a different angle. Ricardo Nuila's The People's Hospital tells the story of Houston's Ben Taub through five uninsured patients — the most literary of the group. Uché Blackstock's Legacy traces how the history of racism in medicine still shapes Black health today. Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav's We've Got You Covered makes the economists' case that the system was never designed, just patched together. And Marshall Allen's Never Pay the First Bill is exactly what it sounds like — a reporter's field guide to fighting your own medical bills.

After the billing and the policy, it's easy to forget what the system is actually for: a sick person and the disease itself. Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, the Pulitzer-winning “biography of cancer,” is the corrective — a reminder that underneath the billing codes is a real illness with a long human history. Sana Goldberg's How to Be a Patient is the most practical book here: what one person actually does at the point of care.

Olympic Angels, the local nonprofit that organizes community support around kids and families in foster care here on the Peninsula, is starting something worth being part of: Pages of Perspective, a community-wide read built to get people talking about foster care. Port Book and News is one of the pickup spots.

The first book is Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care by Claudia Rowe, a Seattle journalist and a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Rowe follows young people who grew up inside the system, people like Maryanne, in and out of foster homes since fourth grade, on trial for murder at eighteen, her defense arguing the system itself shared the blame.

Here's how it works: stop in, pick up a free copy at the counter while they last, read it, and pass it to someone else. Then on Saturday, August 8, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. at the Elks Ballroom in Sequim, Olympic Angels hosts Rowe for an author talk and a community panel with local voices who know foster care firsthand.

The novel of the month is Cool Machine (July 21): Colson Whitehead closes the trilogy he began with Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, with Ray Carney navigating 1980s Harlem. Publishers Weekly calls it “the greatest New York novel in years.” We'll have it on the front table.

Also this month: Fredrik Backman's My Friends, last year's Goodreads Choice fiction winner, arrives in paperback, an easy read at the easy price. For the picture-book crowd, new ones from Jon Klassen (The House with Nobody in It, July 14) and Oliver Jeffers (A Day Off School, July 7).

And a natural companion to the coastal guide above: Wild Seattle by Roddy Scheer (Timber Press, July 7), part nature guide and part trip planner for the hidden wild corners of the Emerald City for when you're on that side of the water.

Staff Picks

Our naturalist book club with the North Olympic Land Trust returns Thursday, September 10 at 5:30, at the Land Trust office. We're reading In Trees by Robert Moor — the writer behind On Trails — on how trees shape the world and the people who pay attention to them. It came out in April, and its author lives just across the water in B.C.  Copies are at the store; mention the book club at the counter. A quick RSVP helps us plan chairs and cookies.

On Thursday, September 17, Moor makes the trip down himself: a conversation with the incomparable Lynda Mapes at the Dungeness River Nature Center. Read the book with the club on the 10th, then hear the author in person a week later.

This year we turn forty. Four decades of a bookstore in Port Angeles is mostly made of small things — the joke we told you that got the biggest groan, the shelf you always check first, your birthday shopping spree. We'd like to gather some of those before the anniversary.

We would love to hear what Port Book and News means to you. Tell us about a book you found. The first time you walked in. Someone on staff who got you exactly right. A reading, a holiday memory, a whiteboard you'll never forget. It can be two sentences or two pages — we'll read all of them.

Share it at https://portbooknews.com/40, email info@portbooknews.com, or pick up a card at the front counter and drop it in the box.

The Emperor of All Maladies — Siddhartha Mukherjee

“In that haunted last night, hanging on to her life by no more than a tenuous thread, summoning all her strength and dignity as she wheeled herself to the privacy of her bathroom, it was as if she had encapsulated the essence of a four-thousand-year-old war.”

That war (against one of humankind's most vexing diseases) is the one our July shelf tries to map. We are all just one sickness away from complete vulnerability. Let's look out for one another, and come by to say hello!