A one-time dotcom boom town, home to companies like Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft and plenty of start-ups — and also a leading city of the anti-globalisation movement, Seattle is packed with entrepreneurial spirit, rain and contradictions. It seems to be a hard city to figure out – but books can help out.

Last week, our reader ID4993378 confessed: “As an east coast transplant, I don’t fit in well in this odd city. But Where’d You Go Bernadette? hits so many great, laugh-out-loud buttons that it should not be missed. The picture of goats chomping through the blackberries on a Queen Anne slope, only to have the hill slide into someone else’s yard, is just delicious!” Maria Semple’s novel seems a straightforward Seattle book – but the city holds its surprises, as our readers proved. If you’re after the best travel companions for a visit, or just to know more about the city, here is a reading list from our readers’ suggestions – and do check Ryan Boudinot’s introduction to the Pacific Northwest city’s literature from last week.

1. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (1994)

GorillaPie praised the “Thinking man’s San Fran” vibe to the city, which he found to be “not nearly as dreary as the rest of the country seems to think, either”:

Finally made it to Seattle for the first time last autumn and, as I had long suspected, absolutely loved the place. Kind of town I could happily move to tomorrow. Surely you meant to include David Guterson in this list, though? I found the stories of Japanese-American civilians from the second world war period really moving (go to Bainbridge Island if you can) and Snow Falling On Cedars is a beautiful book.

This bestselling novel about the murder of a fisherman on a fictional island north of the city was also recommended by mikedow.

Seattle in quotes from the book:

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher “reality” of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

2. Waxwings by Jonathan Raban (2003)

This novel follows the lives of two immigrants who end up in Seattle to follow their different American dreams at the turn of the millenium: a Hungarian-born English intellectual and a Chinese man who entered the country illegally. disinterestedparty shared:

Waxwings captures the contemporary tech boomtown feel of the place in a desperate way that Where’d You Go Bernadette? can only name-droppingly grasp at

Also recommended by JoeLunchpail and dancer123, who said:

Waxwings contains more descriptive material about Seattle than does [his] Passage to Juneau. To a certain extent they cover the same marital problems but there are also subplots about the tech industry and immigration. And in spite of all these themes crowding into one book, there is a considerable narrative tension – bordering on a page-turner.

In quotes from the book:

Visitors from London and New York might think his affection for this city is a pose, but Tom was happy in Seattle, whose ambiguities suited him perfectly. It wasn’t all that big, but it wasn’t all that little, either. Though gratifyingly remote – the Pacific Northwest was something like America’s own Outer Hebrides – it was also central to the big world in ways that made London, at least, seem provincial, to borrow Scott-Rice’s tiresome word for Seattle.

Unlike most American cities that Tom knew, there was a ‘here’ here, where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water, where the older buildings pursued a guileless infatuation with the architecture of Ancient Rome, and ungovernable greenery – bramble, vine, salal – rose up defiantly from every crevice and scrap of waste ground, as if to strangle the city fathers’ vain Roman ambitions.

A rift in the speeding clouds revealed the young moon, hazy and tarnished above the wide blackness of the bay. At this hour, the streets of Seattle belonged to the poor, who trudged in ones and twos, hunched against the weather.

3. Long for this World by Michael Byers (2003)

Long for this World was Byers’s first novel, in which he told the story of a geneticist immersed in an ethical dilemma. Seattle native Alexa Sand praised the work of this author and academic:

As a Seattle native (who once thumbed a ride in the San Juan Islands with Tom Robbins), I want to add a name to the list of Seattle literary luminaries. Michael Byers, now based in Ann Arbor, is a writer deeply rooted in Seattle, where he was raised, a product of Seattle public schools and pre-tech-boom Capitol Hill. His luminous novel Long for this World captures something essential about the city and its transformation by the tech explosion of the 1990s. His earlier collection of short stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. I may be biased (having grown up with him), but I think he is one of the hidden gems of contemporary American fiction, and a jewel in Seattle’s mossy literary crown.

In quotes from the book:

Six hours to fly to Seattle, and it was all, she had to keep reminding herself, the same country – Ronald Reagan was the president of that lake and that little circular set of fields and that butterfly highway exchange and all these clouds and all the mountains too.

4. Truth Like the Sun by Jim Lynch (2012)

This political novel set in the Washingtonian city in the early 1960s, when it hosted the World’s Fair – and in 2001, right after the tech boom, tells the story of Roger Morgan, who has the vision to put Seattle on the map, and to keep it there: according to its review in the Independent, “Lynch captures the make do and mend mentality of the participants [of the fair], and what a seismic shift that summer created for the region. He is also particularly skilled at describing the precarious times in which Roger flourished. Things were smoking over in Cuba and the world was warming up to a Cold War.” Reader banriona said:

Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide is set in Olympia [a town 60 miles from Seattle] and is fantastic; I believe it did better in the UK than in the US but who cares. […] The cover art alone of Truth Like the Sun should put it onto the list.

In quotes from the book:

I too miss the quiet Seattle of yesteryear […] but we can’t keep this place in curls and a Buster Brown suit much longer.

‘Let the fair begin!’ Kennedy commands. The Space Needle carillon clangs 538 bells, and two thousand ‘See you in Seattle’ balloons rise into the clearing sky. Then the freak show really begins.

The capital of the new world economy! And the locals swallowed all these national rankings and blather, even during this current dotcom hangover. ‘Just look!’ they told her, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of men she’d known who’d been told too many times how handsome they were.

5. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan (2011)

This is a biography of Seattle-based photographer Edward S Curtis, photographer of the American west and some of the most famous images of Native American peoples. Mr. Egan covered the American west for the New York Times, and he portrays Curtis as an intrepid visionary who sacrificed his family and personal life for his big idea. “An excellent read and a real addition to the Seattle discussion”, said amester17.

In quotes from the book:

I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.

By 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 per cent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared – more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

6. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (1999)

Going back to the World Fair, but from a slightly different perspective, Palahniuk’s novel tells the story of a model who suffers an accident that leaves her disfigured, which will make her adopt different identities. lewisdenson said:

In Invisible Monsters, the main characters travel to Seattle where they contemplate the 1962 World’s Fair and all the disappointments the future had to offer. They throw postcards from the Space Needle with messages to the future. It is heartbreaking and beautiful.

In quotes from the book:

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

7. Black Hole by Charles Burns (2005)

“I think the quintessential Seattle graphic novel has to be Charles Burns’s Black Hole, which captures a certain NW awkward/sexy/weird vibe really well,” says Guybrarian. And if you want more Seattle graphic novels, MysticMutt and DJMC recommended “Hate comics by Peter Bagge, compiled in Buddy Does Seattle, followed by Buddy Does Jersey. Bagge lived in Seattle just as the Grunge scene was emerging and Hate made him something like the Generation X Robert Crumb.”

Extra notes

• For the true go-to account of the city’s founding: Bill Speidel’s Sons of the Profits – recommended by disinterestedparty
• For required reading for all new arrivals: Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I –recommended by disinterestedparty
  

• For a novel about a British couple who move to the Pacific Northwest, “so ideal for the Guardian” according to banriona, try Jill Dawson’s Trick of the Light.
• For a book with “everything from a dissident group living in the downtown Seattle library, the threat of climate change, a sinister timber company and total surreality”, try The Guild of Saint Cooper by Shya Scanlon, recommended by Frances Chiem.
• For murder mysteries set in a feminist collective in 80s Seattle, try Barbara Wilson’s books, as recommended by banriona.

Is your favourite missing? Do add it in the comments. Next up: Portland.