SFist's online reserve queue from the SF Public is at a standstill these days, as we haven't heard about any books intrugoing enough to reserve. Please make some suggestions in the comments, so we can reserve or buy some new or used books from one of our local independent bookstores. We need MUNI reading! Help!
At the Centre Pompidou bookstore, Jet-Setting SFist Mary-Lynn picked up Sophie Calle: Did You See Me? which is a catalogue of her work published in conjunction with an exhibition they had there last spring. She'd heard about her before but didn't really know much and the book is just an amazing outline of the work she's done that Mary-Lynn really is loving so very much.
SFist Cheshire just finished Annie Proulx's Bad Dirt, and is now not only excited to read her other collection of Wyoming stories but also The Shipping News. In the meantime, however, he's gone back to Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own, a chronicle of the author's quest to build a hut in the woods near his house where he could write and think, or, as his wife suggests, where their nearly born son would go fifteen years later to smoke pot. Chesh, as usual, loves Pollan's ability to meld the individual and universal. He thinks this one is just a little more self-conscious than other works of Pollan's that he's read (The Botany of Desire as well as several magazine pieces), but he still marvels at Pollan's ability to place himself and his desires in a much larger context.
Shamelessly cute dog and book picture from Teen Twist site
Sfist Shane is reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice with a reading group in Berkeley. They read all kinds of classic junk like that, usually with an emphasis on big fat books like Moby Dick or Don Quixote that no one ever gets around to finishing by themselves and merit taking a couple of months to of biweekly sessions to discuss. He's also wading through the first volume of the recent big fat New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is a lot of fun but one hell of a heavy book to hold up in bed at night. And a lot of Giants blogs.
The unofficial book of the SFist staff is apparently Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, as Rita read it, Emily wants to, and Eve and Matt are reading it right now. From Matt: "I'm completely skeptical. The guy is totally head-over-heels for First Impressions. It reminds me of a bit in The Importance of Being Earnest, where two characters have just met and are being very friendly; one of them says "Something tells me that we are going to be great friends. I like you already more than I can say. My first impressions of people are never wrong." several pages later, they've turned against each other, and the same character says, "From the moment I saw you I distrusted you. I felt that you were false and deceitful. My first impressions of people are invariably right."
Eve has similar misgivings, once she realized that the book wasn't a novelization of the Madeline Stowe movie. She's reading Rita's chicken-stained copy, so it might just be the grease, but the book keeps sliding out of her hand to be replaced by a fashion magazine, EW, or the like. She wonders how many damned examples is he going to give us to prove the point that people make snap judgements? Is this new news, that people decide things based on all sorts of random factors? She is, however, going to refer to all her dating mistakes as "Harding Errors" from now on, so it hasn't been a total loss.
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you can't go wrong with ayelet waldman's "daughter's keeper," jennifer traig's "devil in the details," or stephen elliott's "happy baby." plus, you'll feel good about supporting local authors.
I did read Devil in the Details, and wasn't blown away -- it seemed weirdly glib and strangely brittle to me. Daughter's Keeper and Happy Baby sound great and have been added to my reserve list - thanks!