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Strong Sense of Place | Travel Through Books

Seattle: City of Superlatives

Strong Sense of Place | Travel Through Books

Melissa & Dave

Books, Arts

5.0559 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hello! Please take our end-of-the-season survey at http://strongsenseofplace.com/survey! We'd love to hear from you. 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. Sign up for our free Substack to connect with us and other lovely readers who are curious about the world. Transcript of Seattle: City of Superlatives Do you enjoy our show? Do you want access to awesome bonus content? Please support our work on Patreon! Strong Sense of Place is an audience-funded endeavor, and we need your support to continue making this show. Get all the info you need right here. Thank you! Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio. Some effects are provided by soundly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

At Accardo, you'll save 25% on your first shop and get free delivery, which means if you were to buy a four cheese pizza, you'd basically be getting one of the cheeses for free.

0:10.2

Save and splurge at Accardo, the online supermarket. Geographical and other restrictions. Minimum spend, 60 pounds and charges apply.

0:16.6

New customers only, maximum saving 20 pounds terms at Accardo.com. Hello, welcome to strong sense of place.

0:23.4

In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other

0:28.5

place on Earth.

0:29.3

Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

0:33.0

I'm Melissa Jolwan.

0:34.2

I'm David Humphreys.

0:35.6

We're going around the world, one great read at a time.

0:39.0

Thanks for joining us. Welcome to a strong sense of place. Today we get curious about Seattle.

1:09.5

Welcome to the end of season six.

1:12.3

We made it.

1:13.1

Yeah.

1:13.9

Do you remember when we started in France, like six months ago?

1:17.7

Feels like it's been a while.

1:20.3

It's been a minute.

1:21.1

We worked our way all the way around the world and out into outer space.

1:26.0

And we are now in the charming and delightful city of Seattle.

1:29.5

Good place to land. Yeah. So it's all the last episode. Thank you so much for listening.

1:34.5

If you have a few minutes, we have some questions for you. We want to know your opinion.

1:39.6

We've got a survey up at strong sense of place.com slash survey or you could just follow the link in your show

1:46.3

notes. We want to hear your thoughts about the season and what we do next. Or you could just come by

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