SFist Reads
Some of our fondest childhood memories are those from our local library's summer reading club, which either makes you think that we are kinda sweet or total f**king nerds. Well, we're obviously not the only ones on staff who associate the warm weather with reading, because this is our biggest and best SFist Reads ever! Some of us reserved our books online, and others of us purchased what we're reading at one of our fine local independent bookstores, but all of us are reading until our tiny little blogger eyes fall out of our heads.
SFist Rain is reading Winners by Eric B. Martin (not to be confused with the Eric Martin of "Mr. Big" "fame.") It's set in the City during the beginning of the dot com boom. She says it's been fun reading about a time not so long ago, and an industry that she was a part of (for better or worse), and she always get a kick out of reading books set in San Francisco just to nit pick (does anyone actually call it "Mission Dolores Park" and not just "Dolores Park"?) But the book is FULL of scenes about pick-up basketball games, and if there's one thing she finds more boring that watching basketball, it's reading about basketball. She can't really fault the book for that, as that's just her bias, so for someone who lives in San Francisco AND loves basketball, it might just be the most perfect book ever.
SFist Derrick is taking a break from his normal food and wine selections to read this year's Best American Essays. He looks forward to the collection every year.
SFist Jer (in his role as your Trimethyldioxypurist)is reading The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, by Stewart Lee Allen. While the back cover's claim that Allen is "The Hunter S. Thompson of coffee" may be a tad overblown, this book is an interesting combination of the history of coffee, an examination of other sorts of addictions (coffee derivatives; tea; qat), and Allen's misadventures through remote and dangerous parts of the world.
SFist Isaac is reading A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb. Brazil is the hot, hot, hot cultural bandwagon to jump on right now, and a lot of sh**ty magazines in particular are writing real superficial two-page stories about the things like Favela culture and Baile Funk. Which is fine, he guesses, but Robb's book, based on 30-odd years in Brazil, digs much deeper, framing his own exploits in a larger cultural and historical context. Very evocative stuff.
While SFist Jackson was off in the hinterlands, he did find one book by a local author kicking around -- Bone by Fay Ng. It's an intimate story narrated by Leila, the oldest daughter in a struggling family in Chinatown. The structure of the book is non-linear, but pulls it off as a way to frame the protagonist's emotional memory of growing up helping her mom in the garment industry, dealing with her neurotic stepfather, losing her younger sister to a suicide and coming to terms with being the American daughter of Chinese immigrants -- trying to hold on to the best of her family's traditions while simultaneously embracing the cultural of personal freedom. Really good, actually.
SFist Jon quickly read through Speak, Commentary: The Big Little Book of Fake DVD Commentaries by Tom Bissell and Jeff Alexander, published by McSweeney's. It's fake DVD commentary (duh!) from people like Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky on The Fellowship of the Rings (the Orcs are merely an oppressed race held down by the Man-Elf Coalition) or Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza on Aliens (the Alien is a liberal, those who want to keep it alive "Alien Huggers" and Ripley a symbol of robust, NRA styled Reaganism). It's very funny.
SFist Sam recently read The Chowhound's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, covered on this site by a Ced a few days earlier. Like Ced, Sam found the guide difficult to follow but thinks its major drawback is that the information Chowhound is selling is not in the slightest bit up to date. Ruth Reich'ls Garlic & Sapphires was a slow, leisurely read with insight into what it is like to be a paid restaurant critic. Sam felt Ruth teased her too many times as she built up dining-out scenarios that left the reader hanging. Sam wanted more dirt, more juicy gossip, more follow through on the stories. Ruth, are you listening?
SFist Ted just finished Mr. Nice. It's banned in the U.S. because our Nixonian DEA cries "National Security" whenever it is embarrassed. Mr Nice is the story of Howard Marks, a Welsh Oxford grad that loves marijuana and spent 20 years concocting bigger and bigger dope deals (always pot or hash). Marks has the memory of an elephant and the adores marijhuana like a Sadhu. Buckle up as he partners up with the Provisional IRA, England's CIA, and some of the biggest and groggiest dealers all over the globe. Finishing that he decided it's time to go deeper and it's time for a reread of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Within 5 pages Conrad, a pole born in Russia before the turn of the century has embarked on a recounting of a story that will take all night to be told. We know we must go up that river and we know we'll never come back. Deeper deep into the hot dry undergrowth, blind with thirst, mistaking corpses for branches we must belly forward, forward forward.