Keith Mosman of Powell’s Books in Portland shares his summer reading recommendations
SUMMER READS 2021
Keith Mosman has worked in bookstores, off and on, for 20 years. He grew up east of Seattle, and his first bookstore job was at a Borders in Redmond, Washington. He’s been with Powell’s Books since 2012 in a variety of roles at multiple locations. For the past few years, he was a new book buyer for history, politics and social science before recently joining the marketing department. As a bookseller, he’s blurbed, bought, sold, unpacked, repacked, shipped and shelved countless books. He’s also read a few.
Here are Mosman’s picks for the Street Roots Summer Reads edition.
NONFICTION
Yellow Bird
by Sierra Crane Murdoch (2020)
Winner of the Oregon Book Award for creative nonfiction. Yellow Bird follows an indominable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with a murder on a reservation at the height of the fracking boom in the Dakotas.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us
by Mariame Kaba (2021)
The first of many important books this year about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, this one is by the esteemed organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.
Our Final Warning
by Mark Lynas (2021)
Charts the expected (and terrifying) consequences of rising global temperatures.
Let the Record Show
by Sarah Schulman (2021)
The much-needed, inclusive history of ACTUP’s activism during the height of the AIDS crisis. Shulman explains how the group succeeded, and what lessons contemporary activists should draw.
FICTION
The Prettiest Star
by Carter Sickels (2020)
Written by a former Portland resident, this novel follows a young man who returns to his rural home from NYC, dying from AIDS at the beginning of the crisis.
The Great Offshore Grounds
by Vanessa Veselka (2020)
Winner of the Oregon Book Award for fiction. This sweeping novel follows two half-sisters’ divergent paths that take them across America and out into the ocean.
The Removed
by Brandon Hobson (2021)
This novel shifts between multiple perspectives to tell the story of a Cherokee family coming to terms with the police shooting of their eldest son, decades later.
The Prophets
by Robert Jones Jr. (2021)
The beauty and richness of the language contrasts the difficulty of the subject matter in this novel about the romantic relationship between two young enslaved men on a Southern plantation.
Crooked Hallelujah
by Kelli Jo Ford (2020)
One of my favorites of 2020, this perfect collection of interrelated short stories features three generations of Cherokee women.
Stone Fruit
by Lee Lai (2021)
An exquisite graphic novel about difficulties in an LGBTQ+ relationship.
Floaters
by Martín Espada (2021)
A masterful collection of poems by a celebrated poet whose prior day job was working as a tenant lawyer in the Boston Latinx community.
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