Books

The story reads like something out of an adventure movie: a charismatic, self-mythologizing millionaire living out his dotage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, buries a bronze chest full of gold nuggets, gemstones and other valuables in a secret location. In 2010, the millionaire – whose very name, Forrest Fenn, evokes the great outdoors – self-publishes a memoir that includes a poem containing nine clues to the treasure’s location in the Rocky Mountains. For a decade, treasure hunters scale peaks and search canyons in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. At least five men die in their quests. Then, in June 2020, Fenn announces that the chest has been found in Wyoming; he dies soon after at age 90, his legacy secure.

Kristin Hannah has Spokane County readers firmly under her thumb.

Reading rates are declining – a recent study showed that the number of Americans who read for pleasure had almost halved in the last two decades, while average reading scores for students are plummeting, thanks in large part to the number of digital distractions competing for our limited attention. These seven podcasts will help you indulge, develop or rekindle a love of reading, offering critical analysis and recommendations alongside tips and tricks on how to break through reader’s block.

With the holiday travel season ramping up, a good book is a must-have for airport delays or to give as the perfect gift.

The entire staff was there at our first Christmas Eve office party, including our Basque contingency Santiago Saizarbitoria and his wife Maria and even Double-Tough had ventured up from our distant substation in Powder Junction to sit on the bench by the stairs of our converted Carnegie Library and covertly feed Dog cookies.

Colfax’s Travis Baldree, author of the bestselling “Legends and Lattes” series, discussed his third book at the Montvale Event Center on Monday night, “Brigands and Breadknives.”

Can you eat the aloe from your aloe plant? Local artist Kate Reed found the answer in a book in the library, while looking for a reference photo of the plant. On her Instagram account, @partykrill, you can watch her paint an overhead view of a sprawling aloe plant, with two white gym shoes peeking through the interstices of the leaves, based on a picture she found in her daughter’s school library.

The term “scientific fiction,” a subtle adjustment to science fiction, is often used to describe weighty literary novels about cutting-edge technologies and big ideas, and it’s an apt way to describe Aja Gabel’s riveting second novel, “Lightbreakers.” Its trafficking in theoretical and experimental physics comes in service of a moving story about art, time, loss and the possibility of love.

“Brigands & Breadknives” is fantasy author Travis Baldree’s third book in the “Legends & Latte” series, this time starring Fern, the potty-mouthed bookseller originally introduced in “Bookshops & Bonedust.” Baldree will take the Northwest Passages stage Monday at the Montvale Event Center, where he will discuss this latest publication.

Travis Baldree brings what is called cozy fantasy into a trilogy with “Brigands & Breadknives,” providing a story that reads like an animated feature.

LOS ANGELES – It’s a rare gray Saturday in Los Angeles; raindrops collect along a window overlooking a row of trees at Le Parc at Melrose.

Last week, a group of well-read women gathered at Erika Burden’s home. They dined on a rigatoni and ricotta casserole, served with homemade bread, and they talked books – specifically, “The Catcher in the Rye.”

The Book “Nascent” – a young adult dystopian science fiction novel set in the near future – came to Spokane author Bitty Balducci in a dream.

Poetry isn’t just for the romantics, the literary types or the melancholic. Poetry can be for everyone. American poet Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.”

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, who will be a writing mentor for Whitworth University’s new, low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, said that, despite trying to write about other things, her work always returns to isolation. Her latest short story collection, “Outer Stars,” is no exception. The collection won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in short fiction, and will be released by University of North Texas Press on Saturday.

It’s November. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s cozy. It’s time to write. At least that’s the case for those taking part in the annual National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo.

How did Margaret Atwood get to be so powerful?

“I am not the sort of person to throw a lavish party, but this is no ordinary party and the thing that makes it necessary is no ordinary loneliness,” Sonora Jha wrote in the opening of her latest book, “Intemperance.” “After nine years of revolutionary solitude (except for a couple of brief dalliances), I find myself a woman in her mid-fifties, caught in the shudder of the planet’s mid-2020s, now seeking communion with a man, despite everything we know.”

It’s about time a novel tackled the challenges that intersect aging and desire. Old people having sex has long been a taboo subject in a culture that masquerades aging as an undesirable fate. We need concealer and anti-wrinkles cream to hide the battle scars of a well-lived life.