Seattle: City of Superlatives

Strong Sense of Place

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Seattle is a mashup of water and mountains — it just might be the ultimate outdoor playground. If you want to go hiking, camping, boating, biking, or meander in a beautiful garden, Seattle is a fantastic place to do all of that.

It can also claim a vast realm of ‘firsts’ in music, architecture, politics, and literature. (Not to mention Bigfoot sightings, if that’s your thing.) There’s grunge music, Elvis appearances, the Seattle Seahawks’ 12th Man, an inordinate number of sunglasses, and more library cards than anywhere else in the United States.

The city also hosted two World’s Fairs: the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in 1909 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush (you do not want to miss the Two Truths and a Lie story about that one!) — and the Century 21 Exposition in 1962. That one tried to predict what life in America would be like in the year 2000 and beyond — which gave us the Space Needle, the Alweg Monorail, and a car shaped like a rocket.

In this episode, we learn the stories of a few remarkable Seattle women, celebrate Seattle’s superlatives, and share a bookish itinerary for the ‘Most Literate City in the Country.’ Then we recommend seven great books that took us there on the page, including an unusual ghost story, a memoir about living in 1950s Seattle, a thriller set in the world of journalism, three graphic novels that will make you want to take a walk, and a modern fable set in the San Juan islands.

• I Wish I Was Like You by S.P. Miskowski
• This Boy’s Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff
• Deadline Man: A Novel by Jon Talton
• Seattle Walk Report: An Illustrated Walking Tour through 23 Seattle Neighborhoods by Susanna Ryan
• Secret Seattle: An Illustrated Guide to the City’s Offbeat and Overlooked History by Susanna Ryan
• Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide by Taha Ebrahimi
• Bear by Julia Phillips

For more on the books we recommend, plus the other cool stuff we talk about, visit show notes.

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Transcript of Seattle: City of Superlatives

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