Seattle Staff Faves 2025: Nonfiction
Each year we ask our staff across the library system for their favorite books published in the current year. Enjoy this variety of nonfiction staff favorites, with annotations by staff members or as noted. (created November 2025)
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David Lynch's American Dreamscape
How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch's American Dreamscape broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch's work engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Fishwife Cookbook
Any meal that features tinned fish is a good one in my book! and these recipes are so simple and so delicious. a great gift for any seafood lovers on your Xmas list! - Abby
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Things Become Other Things
Photographer Mod delivers a gorgeous account of his 300-mile walk around Japan’s Kii peninsula in 2021. Punctuated with stunning black and white photographs of the villages and landscapes Mod encountered, this tender exploration of fragile ecosystems and vanishing ways of life will encourage readers to look more closely at their own surroundings. It’s a nourishing trek. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Lorne
New Yorker editor Morrison provides an entertaining account of Lorne Michaels's nearly half-century reign over Saturday Night Live. It's an engrossing look at the man behind the curtain. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Holler
Tells the story of climate activists resisting the Mountain Valley Pipeline - Anna
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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Blessings and Disasters
New Yorker staff writer Okeowo offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of her home state. Probing and sumptuously written, this makes for an entrancingly ground-level and empathetic view of Alabama’s past and present. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Age of Diagnosis
An epidemic of overdiagnosis is causing patients to pathologize normal differences and overtaxing the medical system, according to this thought-provoking treatise. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Mood Machine
An eye-opening and thought-provoking examination of the world's largest streaming service and how it has shaped contemporary music creation and consumption - and not for the better. - Abby
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Black in Blues
National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. An innovative cultural history. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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A Fearless Eye
A captivating volume that transports us onto the San Francisco streets of the 1970s through the black-and-white images of a previously unknown master of 20th-century photography, Barbara Ramos. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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