M. Coy Books on Pine is closing, and, because we spent hours and hours there as a teenager without buying anything, we're feeling a bit jerk-ish for not having patronized the place more in adulthood. Founder Michael Coy (yeah, he founded Bailey/Coy, too) sure knows how to make us feel like a tool. He tells the P-I: "We're going to miss interaction with our customers, but we will not miss waking up in the middle......

Seattlest is obviously rather excited about the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows tomorrow night. So excited, in fact, that we thought we'd go to the Google to find out what sorts of happenings are going to, well, happen tomorrow in celebration of the big release. We knew about an event at the University Bookstore and figured something similar would be going down at Elliot Bay Books and maybe one or two local......

The book: Pauls Toutonghi's novel Red Weather. The deal: Shop Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, or Santoro's Books in Greenwood, and ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount. Or if you live in some other neighborhood, head on over to your local bookstore, or Amazon. The critics: Seattlest James vs. Seattlest Matt. (Last week's go-round.) James: Toutonghi gave himself a difficult task: write a novel centering around a character who is, in some ways,......

We're pretty sure we stumbled across Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place at Bailey/Coy Books. It's been years since we first read it, and since then "You like mysteries? Have you read The Blue Place?" has been a regular part of our conversations. Aud Torvingen, Griffith's heroine, is a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners native Norwegian ex-cop who lives in the US. She's also a lesbian, which is both key to the plot (and her character) yet not really......

THIS MONTH we've been talking about Seattle author Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. We went over the big plow-up of the prairie, the hard-scrabble living, and Egan's decision to tell the story novelistically, rather than textbookily. NEXT MONTH we're reading Seattle native Pauls Toutonghi's novel Red Weather. To join in, visit Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, or Santoro's Books in Greenwood, and ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount. That's right, a......

Off to the right there is our dad's family. It's 1934, Kansas. They've been beaten by the dust storms. They're all packed up and headed to Arkansas, where they'll last two weeks. They'll stop on the White River, contract malaria from mosquitoes, and trek back to Kansas. They'll only survive because our grandfather will get $1 a day from the government for grading the dust dunes left after storms into elevated roads. If nothing......

Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time......

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now. Seattlest Seth: I noticed the foreshadowing of the ending in the narrative, but it still came as rather a shock--which I'd imagine was intended. My immediate take on it was the same as Shacochis'--it's a well-taken reminder that, however high we perceive the stakes to be of our personal dramas,......

Jonathan Raban's Surveillance is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill. Last week, we brought up the issue of plot. Literary reviewers contend that Raban "isn't interested" in it. Amazon reviewers just call it "rambling and pointless" (caution: spoilers at that link). Raban himself, on......

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on......

The first rule of Seattlest Book Club is you have to read the book. The second rule of Seattlest Book Club is you have to read the book. It's a well-known fact that Seattlest idolizes Oprah. (Our editor-in-chief is from Chicago. What do you expect?) So we figure she's got a book club, we need a book club. Especially since we're America's most literate city. The deal is pretty simple. For March, we're going to......

Behind perhaps only Andrew Sullivan (or Michael Musto if you live life through VH1) Dan Savage is our country's most prominent gay. From time to time in Seattle we may think of him merely as "that dude from The Stranger" but the guy is syndicated in a hell of lot of papers around the country, writes a decent book, and generally makes a lot of sense when he appears on television to discuss serious subjects.......