Port Book & News — November Newsletter

Cookbooks and Kate

Kate McDermott wrote to tell us that November 1 was National Buy a Cookbook Day. We missed it, but it's never too late to go back for seconds, and pie isn't the only way to feed a crowd. Give Books has plenty of joyful excuses to share a meal with the people you love. Alexis Nikole Nelson, the Black Forager, pairs foraging know-how with vegan recipes in Happy Snacking, Don't Die!. Kristen Morita's Mochitsuki takes its name from the New Year's tradition of pounding rice for mochi together, and it has sixty recipes, sweet and savory. Rachel and Spencer Greening's Gyetk gathers sixty recipes built on traditional Ts'msyen foods of the Northwest Coast. And Maegan Brown's Celebration Boards lays out fifty food boards for whatever you're celebrating. Still hungry? Shelf Awareness sends a whole cookbooks issue for us on November 10. Sign up here: portbooknews.email/shelf; we'll pass your address to them and use it for nothing else.

Every November someone gets put in charge of the pie. McDermott, who lives right here in Port Angeles, wrote the books for it. Art of the Pie ($35) is the foundation. Pie Camp ($35) is the skills book, for making any pie you want. Home Cooking with Kate McDermott ($29.95) covers the rest of the table. We are the place for signed copies (while they last). Kate's Substack keeps the recipes coming: katemcdermott.substack.com.

If you stopped by our table at Port Angeles Book Fest, you had the opportunity to try the pie baked by the best-selling local author in the store's history. Be sure and check out the chapter about Kate and her 'Happy Hands' serving tongs in Bee Wilson's delightful The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects.

A Field Guide to Field Guides: Salmon & Rivers

Riding in the wake of the coho up the Elwha, this month the guide goes to the river. At the river: the laminated Mac's card for your pack, and Susan McDougall's Circled Life, one essay for each of the seven salmonids of our strait. On the Elwha: Lynda V. Mapes's Elwha: A River Reborn. If you can only pick one: David R. Montgomery's King of Fish, a geomorphologist's reading of the thousand-year run and how land use takes it apart. The full guide, with shelves on treaty rights, the dam wars and river fiction, is at the counter, or scan the code.

Salmon & Rivers: scan for the full guide

November at a Glance

Fri, Nov 6 · Holiday hours: Fri & Sat, 9 a.m.–8 p.m.

Fri, Nov 13, 5:30 p.m. · Karen Polinsky at the River Center

Sat, Nov 14 · Novemberfest: open till 8, sale tent

Thu, Nov 26 · Thanksgiving · Closed

Staff Pick

No One Loves an Angry Woman by Gemma Hartley

This is the story of a woman's rage while growing up in a religious world made for men by men. Hartley talks about her experience with rape as a teenager and having to hide it from her family and everyone she knew, so she wouldn't drown in the shame she grew up with as a woman. "What were you wearing?" "Were you drinking?" Most women have heard these at one point or another in their lives, said to them or to a family member or friend.

She goes on to discuss womanhood, the patriarchy, and how much harm the world has done to women almost since the dawn of time. The first sin, according to most, was a woman eating, after all. Hartley makes you wonder about every part of girlhood and religion. Please give it a read.

—Belle

On Our Shelves This Month

Stations — Louise Kennedy (Nov 3). The follow-up to Trespasses: two outsider teenagers from 1980s Ireland, a squat in Pimlico, and a love that shapes the decades after.

Tiger's Mouth — Lucy Tan (Nov 17). Two Jacks at a summer tech internship, one faking his credentials and one the founder's heir. Tan is a Seattle novelist and a bookseller.

The Man Who Read Books — Rachid Benzine, trans. Sam Taylor (Nov 10). During a ceasefire in Gaza, an old bookseller tells his life through the books that carried him.

Peregrine Hill — Nina de Gramont (Nov 10). A Gilded Age widow marries her daughter off to a tycoon, who turns out to be a blackmailer.

Numb Were the Beadsman's Fingers — Alan Bradley (Nov 3). The last Flavia de Luce.

The Taken Ones — J. A. Jance (Nov 10). A new J. P. Beaumont from a Seattle writer.

The Killing of a Chestnut Tree — Oliver K. Langmead. A detective story about the felling of an ancient tree.

The Heart of Winter — Jonathan Evison (paperback). Seventy years married on a Bainbridge farm, and then her sudden illness.

Every Last Fish — Rose George (paperback). Fish as food and as animals, from industrial fleets to farms, and how to buy seafood.

Helena's Holiday Picks

Two of my favorite holiday books; both make me tear up every time.

The Carpenter's Gift by David Rubel

New York, 1931: a poor boy and his father bring Christmas trees into the city to sell, the men building Rockefeller Center give them a place to set up, and the boy gives them the very first Rockefeller Christmas Tree. Each kindness generates another.

—Helena

Oskar and the Eight Blessings by Tanya Simon

Christmas Eve, 1938, the seventh day of Hanukkah. Oskar, a refugee from Germany, arrives alone in New York with only a picture and the address of an aunt he has never met, and meets eight small acts of kindness on his walk across the city. "Even in bad times, people can be good."

—Helena

Read the Give Books Catalog with Us

Give Books, the annual holiday catalog which has a lot of the best new books for your holiday shopping, has 86 titles. These are four we'd put in your hands ourselves.

A Glacier's Guide to Dying — Michelle Porter. A young man climbs the ice to find his father, and the glacier talks back. Fiction for the nature shelf.

Lost in Curiosity — Roberta Kwok. A Seattle-area science writer on the wrong turns and dead ends behind discovery.

The Complete Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin. Portland's great fantasist, boxed in two Library of America volumes.

Mountainous — Julia Kuo. Glaciers, volcanoes and mountains that make their own weather, with Tahoma in the search-and-find.

Famous Last Words

"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

— Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

Cather ends her prairie novel with two old friends, twenty years on, and what they still hold in common. It's as good a description as any of a Thanksgiving table.