BOOKPATHS

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009)

A Chinese American boy’s friendship and first love with a Japanese American girl during the fear, evacuation, and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is at the center of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  Alternating between the 1940s and 1986, Jamie Ford captures time and place, especially Chinatown, Japantown, and the city’s jazz scene during the war years.  This gentle love story of Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe reminds us of a shameful time in U.S. history, both at the time it occurred and during its lingering aftermath.

The old Seattle landmark [the Panama Hotel] was a place he’d visited twice in his lifetime.  First when he was only twelve years old, way back in 1942 – ‘the war years’ he liked to call them.  Even then the old bachelor hotel had stood as a gateway between Seattle’s Chinatown and Nihonmachi, Japantown.  Two outposts of old-world conflict – where Chinese and Japanese immigrants rarely spoke to one another, while their American-born children often played kick the can in the streets together.  The hotel had always been a perfect landmark.  A perfect meeting place – where he’d once met the love of his life. – from Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

Related Websites

Jamie Ford’s Website

Publisher’s Website

The Panama Hotel, Seattle, Washington

The Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle, Washington

Minidoka National Historic Site, Idaho (Internment Camp)

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Sadly, The Elliott Bay Book Co. faces hard times.

In some ways it is the familiar story of an independent bookstore getting hammered by book chains, online retailers and big-store discounters. But there are peculiar Seattle wrinkles. – from “The Plot Thickens for Legendary Bookstore, by Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

Washington, and beyond

Carolyn Kellogg talks with Sherman Alexie.

The author of the bestselling 2007 young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian. He was raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash., northwest of Spokane, and returns there regularly. But as important as his heritage is to him, it's not all there is. ‘People's ethnicity is the first floor of their house,’ he says. ‘But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.’ – from “Sherman Alexie – Serious Writer, Funny Guy,” by Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

Forks, Washington, U.S.

“Fans of the Twilight book series have turned Forks, Wash., a two-stoplight town on the western end of the Olympic Peninsula into an unlikely tourist hot spot.”

Anderson Island, Puget Sound, Washington, U.S.

Island Year, by Hazel Heckman (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1972)

While Hazel Heckman’s earlier book, Island in the Sound, “dealt primarily with the human population, past and present,” Island Year turns “to the ecological world of nature,” with month-by-month observations of the natural world of Anderson Island, the southernmost island in Puget Sound.  While most of Heckman’s entries share the island’s beauty, she also describes the encroaching development, and other threats, to her home place in the early 1970s.  Although first published over 35 years ago, Island Year remains a worthwhile guide to the island’s riches, whether as visitor or armchair traveler.

March ended on a note of gentle wind and warmth, and April began.  We turned a page on the calendar and there was the magic month, the month of bud and blossom.  Rosettes of honestie plants appeared along the east shore among fireweed and bracken.  Each year the plant spreads farther. Seeds blow and sprout.  Sprouts grow and bloom and reach fulfillment. – from “April,” Island Year, by Hazel Heckman

Publisher’s Website

Forks, Washington

Stephenie Meyer’s “teenage vampire novels” have brought thousands of tourists to the series’ setting of Forks, Washington.

“Over the course of 2,000 pages, Edward avoids, falls in love with and leaves Bella, which makes room for a werewolf named Jacob to vie for her affections. Jacob and Edward spar, Bella chooses Edward, and 17 million book sales later, the Twilight Saga is a major cultural force, inspiring such adoring fandom that this tiny town is now a tourist destination for giggling, screaming teenagers (and some women) whose love for the Twilight books is so strong that they want to live in its make-believe world. So far this year, more than 7,000 Twilighters have visited.” – from “Twilight Brings Town a New Dawn,” by Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

In the September issue of Smithsonian Magazine, author Charles Johnson explains why Seattle is "[his] kind of town."

“Former UW president William Gerberding once referred to the Northwest as ‘this little civilized corner of the world,’ and I think he was right. The ‘spirit of place’ (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence) is civility, or at least the desire to appear civil in public, which is saying a great deal. The people—and especially artists—in this region tend to be highly independent and tolerant.” – from “In Seattle, a Northwest Passage,” by Charles Johnson, Smithsonian Magazine

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Writer Jonathan Raban takes Mark Hodgkinson on a tour of Seattle.

“Since then, Seattle has become for him ‘a perch from which to look at the rest of the United States, to write about American politics’, and a setting for fiction – most recently his novel of paranoia and homeland security, Surveillance (2006). Raban knows the city inside out, has championed its successes and eloquently taken aim at its failings. He has agreed to show me around.” – from “In Seattle with Jonathan Raban,” by Mike Hodgkinson, The Guardian

Port Townsend, Washington

Jeffrey Brown interviews Michael Wiegers, publisher of the Seattle-area Copper Canyon Press.

“Copper Canyon Press, a Seattle area poetry publishing firm, started out as a small enterprise where employees bound books by hand and sold them out of their cars. Today, government and foundation grants allow the press to bring lesser-known poetry to a wider audience.” – from The NewsHour Website, NPR

Bookpath: Gray's River, Washington

Sky Time in Gray’s River:  Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, by Robert Michael Pyle (New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

In his new book, Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, Robert Michael Pyle returns to the landscape of southwestern Washington, first visited in Wintergreen, where he’s lived for thirty years.  Pyle compresses the years into twelve chapters, following the lives of the “people, birds, butterflies - and cats” of his village near the mouth of the Columbia River, while illustrating the importance and rewards of paying attention to the places we call home.

Publisher’s Website

“We came down from the hills not long before sunset into Gray’s River Valley. Three years previously, a friend named Denny Gillespie had taken Sally and me here—in the rain—to see a number of historic buildings and to look for butterflies. Remembering a nearby covered bridge from that visit, I proposed that we look for it. ‘Heck, New York is full of covered bridges,’ said David. ‘Let’s get back for dinner.’ I began to turn left on State Route 4 to return to Portland. Then I realized that I wanted to see the covered bridge, and I was in charge. I turned west instead.  After we crossed through the bridge and paused on the other side of the river, I beheld a green valley much like the ones I’d fallen in love with eight years before. Then I looked up and saw an old white farmhouse perched among huge hardwood trees. English oaks, red oaks, black walnuts, European beeches and birches, Scots pines, sugar maples, and one great Port Orford cedar all loomed over the place. FOR SALE BY OWNER said the sign by the road.“ – from Sky Time in Gray’s River:  Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, by Robert Michael Pyle