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.
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.
We will meet again on the following dates at 6:30 pm at King’s Books,
218 St. Helen’s Avenue in downtown Tacoma.
2021
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 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!
Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts
by Jessica J. Lee
Description:
A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.
Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.
Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre-shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
About the author:
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Author Award. She received a doctorate in environmental history and aesthetics in 2016, and her first book, Turning: A Year in the Water, was published in 2017. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She lives in Berlin.
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.