I’ve never been to Washington, but I sure do want to go now. When I read the state, I  immersed myself in a Seattle bakery, on a sailboat on Puget Sound, and in the humor of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I love fresh bread, being on boats on salt water, and laughing, so this was a pretty fantastic mix of books for me.

Novel: Bread Alone
Author: Judith Ryan Hendricks, worked in a Seattle bakery
Setting: Seattle, WA

I first read Bread Alone several years ago when I was really into baking bread. I was excited to get to Washington on my reading project so I could read it again. Filled with scenes of coffee on wet days in Seattle, wood for stoves, and the comforting smells of fresh bread baking, it sucked me in immediately and me want to give up everything and become a baker.

Outside, the rain hasn’t stopped so much as paused, and the air is cold and scoured clean.

Bread Alone is a novel about a woman, Wynter, who is going through an unexpected divorce and who finds her way back to herself through baking bread. It’s a comforting book, and this probably won’t be the last time I read it, especially since it has recipes. It’d be a great book for fall or winter.

Just rocky, conifer-covered mountains thrusting up from the cold, blue Pacific. Air so clean it sears your throat with a sweet ocean smell.

Novel: Before the Wind
Author: Jim Lynch, born Seattle, lives in Olympia
Setting: Puget Sound, Washington

As a novice sailor, I was excited to finally find a novel about modern, local sailing (vs. round-the-world adventures). The main character of Before the Wind comes from a family of sailboat racers, and he lives on his boat in a marina on Puget Sound. The marina scene itself is entertaining, filled with the types of characters you’d expect who live on boats, and the types of boats you’d expect them to live on if you’ve ever spent time in small marinas on the coast.

What I really appreciated about this book was that the author doesn’t shy away from using the language of sailing, which is one of the reasons I wanted to read it. It puts the reader inside the mind of a sailor, what they think about, what they notice, what they fear, and who they read to learn more:

The line [from Joshua Slocum] our father made us memorize was: “To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.”

But this book isn’t just about sailing — it’s also a great story about a dysfunctional family who raced sailboats together when the kids were kids, the sister who had a magic about her on a boat, and their attempt to reunite as a family to sail one last race.

Book: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Author: Sherman Alexie, born Spokane, WA
Setting: 1970s Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA

Set primarily on an Indian Reservation in Spokane, Washington, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a book of short stories that are both hilarious and dispiriting, and are fiction based on on Alexie’s childhood and teenage years on the Reservation.

This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.

Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.

There is deep love and respect and a code of living among the tribe, but the primary tone of the stories is one of sadness, loss, and a broken people. Funny and modern, the stories are wonderfully written, enough so that I wanted to keep reading despite how sad it made me feel.

“Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,” she said. “And that hurts because I don’t know how much of a future we have.”

Alcoholism is rampant in these stories, and mixed with that is a weaving of the mundane and what Alexie called Reservation Magic when someone asked if he’d describe this book as including elements of Magical Realism. This magic is woven throughout other Native American books I’ve read as well, as if the people of the tribes walk between the worlds.

Novel: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Author: Maria Semple, lives in Seattle
Setting: Seattle, WA (and Antarctica)

What a refreshing, funny, and smart read! Based in Seattle after an catastrophe in LA, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is the story of a genius architect, Bernadette Fox, her unassuming (also genius) husband who works at Microsoft, and their daughter Bee who goes to school at an elite private school overseen by overachieving, overbearing, helicopter parents. Bernadette is an eccentric recluse, which the busybody power-moms from the school cannot stand about her.

What I loved about this book, aside from the fact that it made me laugh, is that it shows what can happen when a creative genius is not creating: they destroy instead. Since the book sometimes uses narration from Bee, and sometimes correspondences between characters as chapters (emails and letters, for example), it’s also a really well-done demonstration of perspective, and how one person can be seen so differently by so many people, and how dangerous that can be.