Dear readers,
That gets me a date I guess, but I don’t like leaving home without a physical book. It makes me very anxious to be stuck without reading material — what if I’m stuck in an elevator or the bus hits traffic or my friend is late? And while devices are a good backup, e-books just don’t offer the same sense of security. Even my smallest wallets have to be big enough to hold a paperback.
Because I live in an apartment building with a lively bookshop in the lobby, when I’m between readings, I often leave it to chance (or whatever neighbors are cleaning out their shelves) and pick something up on the way out the door. That might mean James Patterson some days. to others, Kierkegaard. It adds real depth to my reading life! Here are some recent hits.
—Sadie
I’ve wanted to read “I Hotel” ever since Paul Yamazaki, the legendary buyer of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, recommended it in an interview. So you can imagine my excitement when it appeared on a radiator in the lobby last January: It was fate — or maybe that nice woman with the sweet terrier mix who lives at 4.
Combining literary fiction, playwriting and graphic arts, ‘I Hotel’ consists of a series of interconnected novels set over 10 years in and around a real Chinatown hotel. Yamashita’s subject is the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a time of intense artistic and political flourishing. As San Francisco teems with change, the hotel resists gentrification, even as it hosts an ever-expanding roster of characters and activists. There’s the philosophical postcard collector quoting Mao and Gertrude Stein, and the reporter for an alternative weekly covering the controversy over whether to declare Chinese New Year a holiday in local schools. We meet a Filipino American farm union worker and a Japanese American organizer working to transform a sweatshop. There are cameos from the Oakland Black Panthers and Berkeley anti-war protesters. Indians of all Tribes occupy Alcatraz. the war is raging; There is a pig cooking competition. there are ghosts. It is electrified.
Many other vague words really apply here — ambitious, sweeping, virtuosic, kaleidoscopic. This is definitely San Francisco’s Great Novel. I’m angry about all the years I’ve wasted without reading it, and I’m glad that maybe some of you will come to it as a result of me writing it now.
Read if you like: “The People’s Almanac”, the cow palace, Sounds of San Francisco
Available from: City lights!
I grabbed it out of desperation. I was late. I knew I would finish Ruth Rendell before the end of my train ride to Philadelphia. My only options in the lobby were a 2007 Fodor’s Guide to the Berkshires and this copy of “The Custom of the Country,” which someone seemed to have downloaded from the internet. oh well I thought. I haven’t read it since college, and even if it’s printed in Noto Sans, Edith Wharton is better than nothing.
How had I forgotten how incredible this novel is? The story of an adventure in general, it’s one of Wharton’s most impressive works: She’s as unflappable as ever, and as upbeat about the vagaries of high society, but it’s also clear how much fun she’s having depicting her silly behavior. (Spiritual note: The pigeon blood notebook with white ink is downright déclassé.) And in Undine Spragg, the small-town beauty determined to conquer New York, Wharton gives us one of her most remarkable creations. Undine is spoiled, willful, ruthless, and vulgar, an amalgam of all of Wharton’s ugliest Americans. But even in the larger context, he remains a fully realized human being. You love to hate her – sometimes it’s like the author wonders how monstrous he can make her and keep reading – and yet a part of you can’t help but root for her.
Time and time again, I found myself listening to dogs or underlining lines whose wording simply couldn’t have been better (one advantage of a copy of this hardback is that you feel free to comment without guilt). Take this passage, after Undine has had an outburst of anger: “This incident had left her half ashamed, half afraid of her conduct, and she had tried to atone for it by the indirect arts which were her nearest approach to recognizing herself in the wrong.”
Read if you like: “The House of Mirth”, “The Gilded Age”
Available from: The internet obviously
Why not…
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Do you judge a book by its cover? Last weekend, I stopped by the current exhibit at the Grolier Club: Book bindings from 1470-2020. But you don’t have to be in New York to see it. their programs are beautifully digitized.
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Make your escape? There’s Escape, and then there’s The Rome Affair, by British author Karen Swan. Want glamor and romance in the Eternal City? He’s got you. How about some terrible family secrets, hidden passages, yachts, scrappy heroes, vintage dresses, missing jewels and identical twins? I often think how much more boring my life would be if some anonymous benefactor hadn’t left this Gate Swan in the lobby of my building, introducing me to beach reads’ Moët & Chandon Imperial Vintage 1946.
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Self-actualization? One of my recent gift table acquisitions is a blank notebook. Always useful, right? Except this notebook, entitled “In my humble opinion”, is full of … abuse. On every page there is some sour, misanthropic saying: “Do not overestimate the decency of the human race” (HL Mencken). “I don’t have pets, I have whole kennels of irritation” (Whoopi Goldberg). I assume it’s for ventilation. I use it mostly for shopping lists. Today: ingredients for lentil soup. “Humanity is a piggery, where liars, hypocrites and lewd spirits congregate.” (George Moore)
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