New Books That We Love!: Book reports from the front lines at Third Place Books

In this inaugural blog post, the first in what we hope will be a steady stream of new and exciting book recommendations from your friendly neighborhood booksellers, I would like to recommend picking up Glaciers by Portland author Alexis Smith. A small book of quiet, building pressure, I believe it contains a duality that one tends to find in older literature. It is at once a clarifying lens applied to the era in which it was written as well as carrying a universal weight of theme that would ring true across any decade in the last hundred years or more.

Glaciers is one of those books that you sit down to thumb through and emerge an hour later having read the whole thing and fully prepared to have another go. As a dressmaking bookseller in Seattle, this swift and entrancing story of a vintage dress-hunting librarian in Portland got its hooks into me and dragged me under before I knew what was happening. However, before you write this recommendation off as a case of writer/reader kismet and of no bearing to you, let me tell you this:

Smith's sense of time and place is precise. Her prose is transportive. She does amazing, delicious, emotive things within a very small space, ultimately plotting only one day in the modern life of her protagonist, in less than 200 pages, but letting you into a whole world by that very narrow door. She is a talent to follow in the coming years, whatever her subject matter.

When I take my next trip away from the cities of the Pacific Northwest, I'll very likely bring this book with me. If I get homesick, all I'll need do is open its pages and I'll be home.

As it happens, Alexis will be coming to our store on Tuesday, April 17th at 7:00pm. No fewer than 6 of us bookstore insiders intend to be there with on vintagey bells on, such is our enthusiasm for this book. Please do join us!