A former dotcom boomtown, home to companies like starbucks, amazon, microsoft and many start-ups, and also a leading city of the anti-globalization movement, seattle is full of entrepreneurship, rain and contradictions. It seems to be a difficult city to understand, but books can help.
Last week, our reader id4993378 confessed: “As a transplant from the east coast, I don’t fit in well in this strange city. but where did you go bernadette? Hit so many cool buttons that make you laugh out loud that you shouldn’t miss out. The image of goats munching on blackberries on a queen anne slope, only for the hill to slide off into someone else’s garden, is just delightful! Maria Semple’s novel sounds like a simple Seattle book, but the city has its surprises, as our readers have shown. If you’re looking for the best travel companions for a visit, or just to find out more about the city, here’s a reading list of our readers’ suggestions, and check out Ryan Boudinot’s introduction to the literature of the Northwest city. peaceful last week.
You are reading: Books set in seattle
1. snow falling on cedars by david guterson (1994)
gorillapie praised the city’s “thinking man from san fran” vibe, which he felt is “also not as sad as the rest of the country seems to think”:
I finally got to Seattle for the first time last fall and, as I had long suspected, I loved the place. kind of city I could happily move to tomorrow. however, you surely wanted to include david guterson in this list. I found the stories of Japanese-American civilians from the WWII period really moving (go to Bainbridge Island if you can) and Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautiful book.
mikedow also recommended this bestselling novel about the murder of a fisherman on a fictional island north of town.
seattle in quotes from the book:
To deny that this dark side of life existed would be like pretending that the cold of winter is somehow just a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher “reality” of long, warm, pleasant summers. but it turned out that summer was no more real than the snow that melts in winter.
2. wings of wax by jonathan raban (2003)
This novel follows the lives of two immigrants who end up in Seattle to pursue their different American dreams at the turn of the millennium: a Hungarian-born English intellectual and a Chinese man who entered the country illegally. shared selfless party:
waxwings captures the contemporary tech boomtown feel of the place in a desperate way that where did you go bernadette? you can only catch the name of the droplet in
also recommended by joelunchpail and dancer123, who said:
waxwings contains more descriptive material about seattle than [his] passage to juneau. to some extent, they cover the same marital issues, but there are also subplots about the tech industry and immigration. And even though all of these topics are crammed into a single book, there is considerable narrative tension, bordering on turning the page.
in quotes from the book:
See Also: DC Smith Investigation – Book Series In Order
Visitors to London and New York might think his affection for this city is posturing, but Tom was happy in Seattle, whose ambiguities suited him perfectly. he wasn’t that big, but he wasn’t that small either. While gratifyingly remote – the Pacific Northwest was something like America’s own Outer Hebrides – it was also central to the greater world in ways that made London, at least, seem provincial, to borrow Scott-Rice’s tiresome word for it. Seattle.
unlike most american cities tom knew, here was a “here”, where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and every street led to the water, where the oldest buildings chased a candid crush by the architecture of ancient Rome, and unruly greenery – brambles, vines, salales – rose defiantly from every crevice and patch of wasteland, as if to strangle the vain Roman ambitions of the city fathers.
A crack in the rushing clouds revealed the young, hazy, hazy moon against the wide blackness of the bay. At this hour, the streets of Seattle belonged to the poor, who trudged along one or two, hunched against the weather.
3. i long for this world by michael byers (2003)
long for this world was byers first novel, in which he told the story of a geneticist caught in an ethical dilemma. alexa sand, a seattle native, praised the work of this author and academic:
as a seattle native (who once enjoyed a stroll in the san juan islands with tom robbins), i want to add a name to the list of seattle literary luminaries. Michael Byers, now based in Ann Arbor, is a writer deeply rooted in Seattle, where he grew up, a product of Seattle and Capitol Hill public schools before the tech boom. Él’s luminous novel Long For This World captures something essential about the city and its transformation by the technological explosion of the 1990s. / hemingway. I may be biased (having grown up with it), but I think it’s one of the hidden gems of contemporary American fiction and a jewel in Seattle’s mossy literary crown.
in quotes from the book:
six hours to fly to seattle, and that was it, she had to remind herself, the same country – ronald reagan was the president of that lake and that little circular set of fields and that exchange of butterflies and all these clouds and all the mountains too.
4. true as the sun by jim lynch (2012)
this political novel set in the city of washington in the early 1960s, when it hosted the world’s fair, and in 2001, just after the technological boom, tells the story of roger morgan, who has the vision of putting seattle on the map, and keeping it there: according to his review in the independent, “lynch captures the make-and-fix mentality of [the fair’s] participants, and what a seismic shift that summer created for the region. He is also particularly adept at depicting the precarious times in which Roger flourished. things were steaming up in cuba and the world was heating up towards a cold war”. banriona reader said:
jim lynch’s highest tide is set in olympia [a city 60 miles from seattle] and it’s fantastic; I think it did better in the UK than it did in the US, but who cares. […] only the cover of truth like the sun should put it on the list.
in quotes from the book:
I miss the laid-back Seattle of yesteryear too […] but we can’t keep this place with curls and a brown buster suit much longer.
“let the fair begin!” kennedy commands. The space needle’s chime rings 538 bells, and two thousand “see you in Seattle” balloons rise into the clear sky. then the freak show really begins.
See Also: List of Timeless Books by Victor Hugo – Must Read — Bookish Santa
The capital of the new world economy! and the locals swallowed all this national rankings and nonsense, even during this current dot-com hangover. ‘Just look!’ they told him, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of the men she had met who had been told too many times how handsome they were.
5. short nights of shadowhunters by timothy egan (2011)
This is a biography of Seattle-based photographer Edward S Curtis, photographer of the American West and some of the most famous images of Native American peoples. Mr. Covering the American West for the New York Times, Egan portrays Curtis as a fearless visionary who sacrificed his family and his personal life for his great idea. “An excellent read and a real addition to the Seattle discussion,” he said amester17.
in quotes from the book:
I’m beginning to believe that nothing is as uncertain as the facts.
By 1900, tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once owned. entire languages had already disappeared – more than a loss of words, a loss of a way of looking at the world.
6. chuck palahniuk’s invisible monsters (1999)
Going back to the world’s fair, but from a slightly different perspective, palahniuk’s novel tells the story of a model who suffers an accident that leaves her disfigured, causing her to adopt different identities. lewisdenson said:
In Invisible Monsters, the main characters travel to Seattle where they witness the 1962 World’s Fair and all the disappointments that lie ahead. they launch postcards from the space needle with messages to the future. it’s heartbreaking and beautiful.
in quotes from the book:
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being cut off completely.
You can only keep a smile so long, after that it’s just teeth.
7. charles burns black hole (2005)
“I think the quintessential seattle graphic novel has to be charles burns’ black hole, which captures a certain awkward/sexy/weird vibe very well,” says guybrarian. and if you want more seattle graphic novels, mysticmutt and djmc recommended “hate comics by peter bagge, compiled in buddy does seattle, followed by buddy does jersey. bagge lived in seattle just as the grunge scene was emerging and the hate turned him into something like generation x robert crumb.”
additional notes
- for the true account of the founding of the city: bill speidel’s sons of profits – recommended by the disinterested party
- for required reading for all newcomers: the egg and me by betty macdonald – recommended by disinterested party
- for a novel about a british couple moving to the pacific northwest, “so ideal for the guardian” according to banriona, try jill dawson’s trick of the light.
- for a book with “everything from a splinter group living in the downtown seattle library, the threat of climate change, a sinister logging company, and total surreality,” try shya scanlon’s guild of saint cooper, recommended by frances chiem.
- For murder mysteries set in a feminist collective in 1980s Seattle, try Barbara Wilson’s books, as recommended by Banriona.
Is your favorite missing? add it in the comments. next: portland.
See Also: Top 10 books about castaways | Books | The Guardian