Every June, we set out our Pride display. The books on those shelves have one thing in common: each was written as if its reader were already here. For a long time that was rare — queer writers struggled to publish, and queer readers struggled to find books that reflected their lives. Bookstores remained one of the few places someone could go looking and find themselves on a page. That's still part of why we exist. This year the display leads with Tillie Walden's graphic retelling of the remarkable lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake.
We spent the spring rebuilding our Science & Nature section, and this month we're handing you the first of our own field guides to the field guides — starting with birds, as nesting season fills the yards.
For your calendar: on the 23rd, novelist Erica Bauermeister brings The School of Essential Ingredients to Field Hall for a dinner of readings paired with themed courses and local wine — seating is limited.
Longer light, plenty to do, and no shortage of books: here's to June.
In 1807, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake set up house together in Weybridge, Vermont. They stayed forty-four years — ran a tailoring business, anchored a corner of the town, and were buried at last under a single stone. Tillie Walden (On a Sunbeam, Spinning) draws their life out of the historical record into something quiet and enormous.
A.J. West (The Betrayal of Thomas True) turns to nonfiction for the first time with a history of the shops that did the quiet infrastructure work of a movement — the places where someone found the book that told them they weren't alone, and found each other while they were at it.
Two generations past the little mermaid: Arielle traded the sea for a human life and is gone, her daughter ruled as the Bear Queen, and now the granddaughter — Yemaya, clever and furious — is ousted by a coup. With nowhere on land to turn, she goes back to the water, and to the sea witch Ursla, who has plans of her own. A sapphic Little Mermaid retelling with teeth.
Also on the shelf: Milo Todd's The Lilac People (new in paperback), Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous (Autumn K. England); Laverne Cox's Transcendent; Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States, revised and expanded; Lev A.C. Rosen's The Disaster Gay Detective Agency; and Samantha Allen's Puck. The full Pride list — recent releases, the backlist we reach for all year, and titles for younger readers — is in the window and at portbooknews.com/pride.
Take a hike! (With a book, that is.) June is Audiobook Month, so this month's picks are both on audio. Through Libro.fm, audiobooks support the store directly — same as a hardcover off the front table. On June 13, Libro.fm hosts a global audiobook walk: pick a book, pick a route, and listen your way through it. It shares the date with the Solstice festival; make a day of both.
Book one of the Yashim series, set in the Ottoman Empire of 1836. Yashim is a brilliant intelligence agent and, as a eunuch, the only man the Sultan trusts to investigate murders in the harem. It's a blend of thriller, travelogue, and history — Goodwin brings Istanbul to life, and his descriptions of Yashim's cooking are delicious. Winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
—Helena
Mac Barnett — children's author, current National Ambassador for Young People's Literature — has written his first book for grown-ups, and it was the best thing I read all month. Or heard: I had it on audio from Libro.fm, narrated by Barnett himself, which is a great way to take a book about telling stories aloud. Make Believe is part origin story and part argument: that artists who refuse to pander create the best children's books because children are sharper and braver readers than adults often assume. He's very funny — there's a stretch on how Goodnight Moon became the best-selling picture book in America decades after it first flopped that I've already retold to three people. Hearing him tell it convinced me that some books really ought to arrive through headphones.
—Steven
Reading the world is mostly learning what to notice. That's what a field guide is for. We've wanted to make our own for a while, and this month we're starting: A Field Guide to Field Guides, plain-spoken buying guides to the science and nature section we just spent the spring rebuilding — more room for discovery, hundreds of titles back in stock, and a dedicated shelf for hard science, engineering, and math.
These guides can help you find which books earn a place in your pack, which to keep on the shelf at home, and the one to start with. We're beginning with birds.
The big southbound shorebird push won't reach Dungeness Spit until late July, so June is the month to get equipped before it does — and to start noticing the birds already in the yard. "Which guide should I buy?" is the question we field most; here's where we'd point you.
On the coast: carry Mac's NW Coast Water Birds (Craig MacGowan) — laminated, effectively indestructible, our single best-selling bird reference — and keep Birds of the Puget Sound Region (Paulson, Morse, Aversa & Opperman) at home, the definitive local guide.
Getting started: the Pacific Coast Bird Finder (Roger Lederer) is a compact pocket guide to the common coastal species; pair it with Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles, the book that's brought more new people to the bird shelf in the past five years than anything else.
If you can only pick one: the Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America — comprehensive, portable, the standard every other guide is measured against.
Moore's book opens with a loss close to home: the near-total extermination of elk in the eastern United States. The herds in the Hoh escaped that fate — they're Roosevelt elk, named for Theodore Roosevelt in 1897 and still here in part because of the monument he drew around the Olympics in 1909. From there Moore (a James Beard finalist for Pawpaw) follows three comebacks — elk in Appalachia, bison in Illinois, the red wolf in the Southeast — and the people arguing over what restoration even means. The East lost its elk and is buying them back.
From Robert Macfarlane (Underland, Is a River Alive?) and illustrator Jackie Morris, who collaborated on The Lost Words, comes a field guide unlike any other: lyric essays on forty-nine birds, several written from the bird's own point of view (the moorhen's arrives as a dating profile). The aim isn't just to identify birds but to identify with them. It's the kind of book you give as a gift and then buy again for yourself.
Looking ahead: this fall, Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Crow Planet, Rooted) brings seventy-odd Northwest birds into her company. Pre-order it now.
New Patchett — for a lot of readers, that's the recommendation. Daphne Fuller, fifty-three, is trailed through the Met by Eddie Triplett — her stepfather for about a year when she was nine. A quiet novel of reconciliation: one brief year, and what it turns out to have meant forty years later. A June Indie Next pick.
(New in paperback) Walter sends a burned-out journalist out of his off-grid hideout to rescue his kidnapped grandkids. Jess Walter at his funniest in years.
A foot-bound bride, a trafficked peasant girl, and a physician's wife converge in 1870 Los Angeles, the year before the "Night of Horrors" — one of the deadliest mass lynchings in U.S. history. Karen previewed this one last month; she was right.
A dead newborn and missing teenagers in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, surfacing again thirty years on — the sort of literary suspense that rewards patience.
The School of Essential Ingredients: An Evening with Erica Bauermeister — Tue, June 23, 6 PM, Field Hall. The Port Townsend resident and NYT-bestselling novelist reads from her debut, each passage paired with a themed course and a Marrowstone Vineyards pour — a dinner built around a book. Seating is limited, get tickets now.
Summertide Solstice Art Festival — Sat, June 13, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center. New Poetry in the Park signs go up, with live readings from the Poetry in the Park finalists and a reading from Clallam County Poet Laureate Nellie Bridge.
Wine & Words: Mary Lou Sanelli — Thu, June 18, 6–8 PM, PA Fine Arts Center. Sanelli — author of fourteen books across nonfiction, fiction, memoir, poetry, and children's writing — shares from her newest, In So Many Words, nominated for both the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the Washington State Book Award.
Lands & Letters. Our naturalist book club with the North Olympic Land Trust held its first conversation in May and we were thrilled so many enthusiastic folks want to read more together. Signups are still open, and we're planning the next gathering now — more soon. Read deeper into the places you live; come find us.
Up the road in Port Townsend, Centrum's Port Townsend Writers Conference returns July 12 at Fort Worden — a week of readings, workshops, and craft talks, with some of our favorite writers on the faculty this year. We're the booksellers for it, so you'll find their books on our shelves. Registration is still open at centrum.org.
“…to blur the boundaries of ourselves, and to be changed for a moment or forever. May we always be unfinished.” — Mac Barnett, Make Believe
Barnett means it about children's books. We'll borrow it for bookselling too: Pride in the front window, a rebuilt nature section, forty years of trying to learn what to notice. May we always be unfinished.