Around the Sound: Amusing Thoughts and Tales from Washington's Puget Sound

Around Puget Sound there's a whole loop of small towns nobody writes ballads about. It turns out they're the funniest places on the map.

Josh Kilen takes you on one slow lap around the water, through the towns most people only ever see through a windshield doing sixty on their way to somewhere they consider more important. He stops in every one, digs up the local history nobody asked for, and finds the comedy hiding in all of it.

You'll meet a town that got its name by a clerical error and then spent eleven years fighting the government to fix it. A prairie town that somehow hosts both a 35,000-year-old channeled warrior spirit and, a few fields over, a camp of church men eating sticks of butter for the glory of God. A laundromat attendant who says almost nothing, sweeps a stranger's dropped underwear off the floor without judgment, and still leaves you feeling honored to have been there. And a narrator who, on an ordinary morning, genuinely wonders whether his neighbor is keeping bodies in the garbage bag.

Seattle isn't on the itinerary, it has books enough already, and it would never notice one more. This one is for the small places, and for anyone who grew up in a town no one can find on a map, drove past a hundred of them without stopping, or just wants to laugh at Pacific Northwest history that refuses to behave. Think Bill Bryson, if Bryson had grown up in Tacoma and never quite forgiven it.

You'll spend most of it chuckling to yourself, and, if the author gets his wish, probably in the bathroom. Josh Kilen grew up around the Sound and has spent years writing these places down, because somebody ought to.

So settle into your favorite chair, or throne, and take a trip around the Sound.