Please join us as we learn about our Sister Cities cultural identity and history through books from their countries, while we snack on delicious treats inspired by international cuisine.
JOIN OUR BOOK CLUB!
We will meet again on the following dates at 6:30 pm at King’s Books
218 St. Helen’s Avenue in downtown Tacoma.
- Monday December 16, 2019
- Monday January 20, 2020
- Monday February 17, 2020
- Monday March 16, 2020
- Monday June 15, 2020
Check our Book Club News section below for more details on each meeting and book.
Photo of building circa 1919
King’s Books is a community-oriented bookstore with 4500 square feet and approximately 100,000 books. We have an array of events weekly, from book clubs to author events, community gatherings to our annual letterpress festival. We opened on April 1, 2000 and have become the largest used and new independent bookstore in the Tacoma area. King’s Books is a proud member of the Stadium Historic District Business Association, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA), and the American Booksellers Association (ABA).
King’s Books is owned by sweet pea Flaherty, who took over the bookstore from John Schoppert and Pat McDermott in 2010. sweet pea has been a bookseller since 2000, starting at McDermott Books and A Room of One’s Own Feminist Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. sweet pea moved to Tacoma to work at King’s Books in 2003.
King’s Books is graced by the presence of dapper shop cat Herbert, who joined the staff in 2015. You can often hear him talking around meal time. He is preceded by bookstore cats Harriet (at bookstore 2001-2008), Miko (at bookstore 2003-2014), and Atticus (at bookstore 2009-2018).
Check their website and order your books or come visit!
CURRENTLY READING
Happy Dreams
by Jia PingwaInsurrecto
Description:
From one of China’s foremost authors, Jia Pingwa’s Happy Dreams is a powerful depiction of life in industrializing contemporary China, in all its humor and pathos, as seen through the eyes of Happy Liu, a charming and clever rural laborer who leaves his home for the gritty, harsh streets of Xi’an in search of better life.
After a disastrous end to a relationship, Hawa “Happy” Liu embarks on a quest to find the recipient of his donated kidney and a life that lives up to his self-given moniker. Traveling from his rural home in Freshwind to the city of Xi’an, Happy brings only an eternally positive attitude, his devoted best friend Wufu, and a pair of high-heeled women’s shoes he hopes to fill with the love of his life.
In Xi’an, Happy and Wufu find jobs as trash pickers sorting through the city’s filth, but Happy refuses to be deterred by inauspicious beginnings. In his eyes, dusty birds become phoenixes, the streets become rivers, and life is what you make of it. When he meets the beautiful Yichun, he imagines she is the one to fill the shoes and his Cinderella-esque dream. But when the harsh city conditions and the crush of societal inequalities take the life of his friend and shake Happy to his soul, he’ll need more than just his unrelenting optimism to hold on to the belief that something better is possible.
Author: Jia Pingwa, a prominent and celebrated writer and essayist, was born in 1952 into a farming family in Danfeng County, Shaanxi Province. He began to write while studying in the Chinese department of Northwest University in Xi’an. Jia Pingwa first achieved fame in the 1970s and 1980s with his award-winning short stories and novellas, the majority of which are set in Jia’s rural homeland in Shangzhou Prefecture. After Jia graduated in 1976, he worked as an editor at the Shaanxi People’s Publishing House. Since then he has become a full-time writer.
MEET HUNTER WHITE, OUR BOOK CLUB LEADER
Hunter White moved to Tacoma in the fall of 2018 to pursue his interests in international business and trade with East Asian markets. Although originally a New England native (Connecticut, Vermont and Maine), he has worked and lived in several cities overseas including Taipei, Beijing, and Kunming.
Given his interests in various nations and cultures around the globe, he figured the Tacoma Sister Cities would be the ideal place to find like-minded folks in The City of Destiny.
This hunch turned out to be correct; soon after joining, Hunter was fortunate to receive the opportunity to begin organizing the Tacoma Sister Cities Book Club along with help from several key community members.
When not reading Book Club selections or indulging in trashy true crime novels, Hunter stays busy by serving as the chairman for the Tacoma-Taichung Sister City Committee. Outside of work and community involvement, Hunter stays active by playing competitive squash, harvesting wild shellfish, and tending to his vegetable garden.
