MORE BOOKS
PAGE 8 • GO! MAGAZINE
THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021 • THE BULLETIN
national bestsellers
Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended
Saturday, June 5, compiled from data from independent
and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and
independent distributors nationwide.
HARDCOVER FICTION
1. Golden Girl. Elin Hilderbrand. Little, Brown
2. Malibu Rising. Taylor Jenkins Reid. Ballantine
3. The Last Thing He Told Me. Laura Dave. Simon &
Schuster
4. Sooley. John Grisham. Doubleday
5. Legacy. Nora Roberts. St. Martin’s
6. The Midnight Library. Matt Haig. Viking
7. Project Hail Mary. Andy Weir. Ballantine
Continued from previous page
first met her, had a bit of a lisp. She called
my wife ‘Miss Kim,’ and me ‘Mr. Wick.’ So
Mr. Wick made it into the book.”
When asked if he often gets up and writes
in the middle of the night, he laughed and
said, “I am a bit of a strange character.”
As if to back that claim, Potvin, who’s
Canadian, brought up his atypical career
path, in which he began as a traffic en-
gineer in Saudi Arabia — where two of
his three kids, Becky, Doug and Michaela
were born.
Upon his return to Canada, however, he
8. The Other Black Girl. Zakiya Dalila Harris. Atria
9. The Four Winds. Kristin Hannah. St. Martin’s
10. 21st Birthday. Patterson/Paetro. Little, Brown
HARDCOVER NONFICTION
1. Killing the Mob. O’Reilly/Dugard. St. Martin’s
2. How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith. Little, Brown
3. What Happened to You? Perry/Winfrey. Flatiron/Oprah
4. After the Fall. Ben Rhodes. Random House
5. Greenlights. Matthew McConaughey. Crown
6. The Anthropocene Reviewed (signed ed.). John Green.
Dutton
7. The Premonition. Michael Lewis. Norton
8. The Hill We Climb. Amanda Gorman. Viking
found it difficult to continue as an engi-
neer, as all his professional contacts were
overseas.
“In engineering, your history matters. I
had five years of experience in Saudi Ara-
bia, but nobody cares about that in Can-
ada because it’s ‘Who do you know?’” Pot-
vin said.
So he decided a new career was in order,
perhaps one involving medicine, like so
many other family members.
“My twin brother was an M.D., my little
brother was a pharmacist, my wife was a
nurse, and I said, ‘OK, what medicine needs
9. The Bomber Mafia. Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown
10. Zero Fail. Carol Leonnig. Random House
MASS MARKET
1. Daddy’s Girls. Danielle Steel. Dell
2. Shadow Storm. Christine Feehan. Berkley
3. The Sentinel. Child/Child. Dell
4. Cajun Justice. Patterson/Axum. Grand Central
5. Red River Vengeance. William W. Johnstone. Pinnacle
6. Savage Sunday. William W. Johnstone. Pinnacle
7. Wicked Lies. Jackson/Bush. Zebra
8. The Unforgiven. Heather Graham. Mira
9. Someday Soon. Debbie Macomber. Avon
the most math?’ They said, ‘Oh, probably
optometry,’” he said, laughing.
Rather than go into practice seeing pa-
tients, he ended up in research at Bausch
and Lomb, and later at Alcon, doing med-
ical affairs, work that involves translating
science so that doctors and patients find it
comprehensible.
“That’s not your typical career path,” he
said. “I tend to be a little bit varied in my
work.”
The types of books he writes are varied
also. Along with “Empty,” Potvin has also
written and self-published two collections of
cryptic crossword puzzles after he broke his
neck in a horrific bike accident.
“I just flipped over the front of a bike at
low speed,” he said. “An animal ran in front
of my wife’s bike, and I hit both brakes. The
front one caught first.”
He’s fully mobile now, but at the time of
his accident, he was stuck in a neck halo for
90 days.
“I was doing those puzzles, but they don’t
take long if you’re good at them, so my wife
said, ‘Why don’t you just make some?’”
He ended up writing two books of them,
“Cryptic Crosswords 4U” and “Cryptic
Crosswords 4U 2.” They, like “Empty,” are
available at Amazon.com.
Along with penning crossword books,
Potvin’s time bedridden also led him to the
conclusion that he preferred data to meet-
ings, after which he decided to become a re-
search consultant.
Today, his past professions and interests
are wedded together via the consulting busi-
ness Science in Vision, which provides sci-
entific support for the eye care community.
Potvin explained the “strange niche” of his
work via a hypothetical scenario in which
an eye surgeon might use a company’s lenses
in cataract surgeries.
“I can work with a surgeon and prepare
a proposal to a company and say, ‘We’re
going to put 30 of these lenses in people’s
eyes, measure them and write a paper about
how they did,’” Potvin said. “So I can do the
math, I can do the writing, and I can under-
stand the ophthalmology part.”
10. Fearless. Fern Michaels. Zebra
TRADE PAPERBACK
1. Freed. E.L. James. Bloom
2. One Last Stop. Casey McQuiston. Griffin
3. Chainsaw Man, Vol. 5. Tatsuki Fujimoto. Viz
4. My Hero Academia, Vol. 28. Kohei Horikoshi. Viz
5. Jujutsu Kaisen, Vol. 10. Gege Akutami. Viz
6. Where the Crawdads Sing. Delia Owens. Putnam
7. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba, Vol. 22. Koyoharu
Gotouge. Viz
8. People We Meet on Vacation. Emily Henry. Berkley
9. The Silent Patient. Alex Michaelides. Celadon
10. The Book of Lost Names. Kristin Harmel. Gallery
Submitted photo
Page 8 of the children’s book “Empty,” in which
a young girl comes to terms with her neighbor’s
death, by Bend author Richard Potvin.
Potvin is at work on another book, about
Alzheimer’s, and has an envelope of old sci-
ence fiction stories, and rejection letters,
that he plans to dig into after he downsizes
to part-time consulting work later this sum-
mer.
Interestingly, writing “Empty” that night
in 2018 was triggered neither by a dream
nor a specific person he was grieving.
At least that’s what Potvin believed at the
time. After his initial interview with this re-
porter, Potvin sent a follow-up email with
the subject line, “New twist.”
“You made me think a bit harder about
my motivations regarding the story,” Potvin
wrote. “I wrote it in the first week of August,
2018. The first week of August is always
a time where I am more in tune with our
mortality.
“My twin brother passed away in an acci-
dent on August 6, 2003, two days after our
45th birthday. So, August 2018 would have
been the 15th anniversary of that event.
“It is quite possible that this is what woke
me up that night.”
David Jasper: 541-383-0349,
djasper@bendbulletin.com