While I was in Israel, I plowed through an astounding amount of reading material. I’m not sure I’ve had a more productive reading month since I left high school. In addition reading the paper every day, I also plowed through four New Yorkers (that had piled up from my previous trips to Minneapolis and Portland) and several books. Here are some capsule reviews. I’ll sort them in order of how much I liked them.

If you want any of these books, let me know (except for The Corrections and The New Kings of Non-Fiction, which aren’t mine). First come, first serve, mmhmm.

On the Lower Frequences: A Secret History of the City by Erick Lyle

This is a history of San Francisco in a particularly weird decade: the mid-90s through the mid-00s. Which, in San Francisco more than anywhere, was shaped entirely by the dotcom boom and subsequent dotcom bust. The story, however, is told by someone who, in the “About the Author” describes himself as “proudly unemployed”. This is the story of the city’s most bizarre decade as seen through the eyes squatters and homeless, punks and anarchists.

About half the book is journalism. He published a DIY newspaper and much of the text of the book comes out of that. At one point, his paper gets an interview with Mayor Willie Brown in which the mayor suggests that poor people should all pack up and move somewhere cheaper. The quote becomes political fodder and is repeated over and over in flyers opposing his reelection. He interviews people setting up needle exchange clinics, free-food distributors, and the the guys who threw a pie in the face of Willie Brown. He also spends a lot of time documenting the changes that occur to the city with the influx of money and people, and specifically how all that gentrification directly affected him. This part of the book is particularly interesting if you’ve lived here since he talks a lot about the Mission, the Tenderloin, and SOMA.

But intermingled with the reporting is a memoir. Since the book is almost entirely reprinted writings of his past, you can, even when he doesn’t explicitly talk about his emotions, get a real sense for how he’s feeling at any given time. He spends a lot of time documenting his many enterprising punk-rock acts. His adventures vary mostly from the potentially illegal to the definitely illegal. They’re entertaining enough to make you want to throw everything away and join the squatters just so can have the fun they’re apparently having. For example, to distribute his newspaper, he would steal newspaper boxes, carry them home, repaint them, and then put them on the street. The cops would reclaim them and he would repeat the process, enough times that the cops eventually just gave up.

Many of his capers involve doing massive things in plain sight. His (apparently correct) assumption is everyone will think “no one could possibly be brazen enough to do that without permission.” For example, many of his friends painted gigantic anti-capitalist murals on the sides of buildings in the middle of the day. And, most notably, a large group of them broke in to a gigantic abandoned movie theater on Market Street (right smack dab in the middle of downtown, about a block from the famous cable car turnaround), cleaned it all out, and ran a free-food café, squat house, and music venue out of it for months.

All told, it’s a fascinating book, especially if you’re familiar with the city. It’s full of history and full of happenings and full of humanity. It made me in love with this city even more, despite the fact that the book is filled with pages and pages of angry rants against gentrifiers like myself. Sorry about that, Erick!

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Can you believe I’d never read anything by Vonnegut? Nothing. I probably still wouldn’t have if Carissa hadn’t loaned me this book last time I was in Portland. I mostly find scifi annoying, so I guess I had just steered clear. This book made me feel like an idiot for avoiding him all this time. (The feeling was compounded by an amazing list of “Best Kurt Vonnegut Quotes” from the 2008 Best American Non-Required Reading that I just read yesterday.) I’m sure there’s been enough said about this book that I don’t need to write any more. But anyway, you should probably read it.

Also, next time you’re in a bookstore, grab the Non-Required Reading book, and read the excerpts that start on page 26. So many wonderful things.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Again, this book has been so hyped that I scarcely think I need to add more. Just read it, yeah? It’s great.

The New Kings of Non-Fiction

I stole this book from Carissa who, in turn, had borrowed it from Abe. This casual misuse of property rights works both ways, though: she borrowed The Corrections from me, even though I was borrowing it from Emily. Anyway, this is a collection of (duh) non-fiction articles ripped by none other than Ira Glass from the usual list of publications (New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc.). Ira, in the introduction, describes this as “an age of great nonfiction writing, in the same way that the 1920s and ’30s were a golden age for American popular song.” I have no way of evaluating this claim, but sure. He specifically talks a lot about his love for stories where the journalist isn’t afraid to insert herself into the story (e.g. Erick Lyle’s book I talked about above). Unsurprisingly, these are all stories that wouldn’t seem out of place on This American Life. Which is a good thing. There are several names you’d expect to see (specifically: DFW, Chuck Klosterman, Malcom Gladwell, Michael Pollan, and Susan Orlean) and at least one that I didn’t: Dan Savage, even though I’d read his article previously. Actually, I’d already read several of these articles before, but they were all good enough that I didn’t mind reading them again.

The Constant Rider Omnibus: Stories from the Public Transportation Front by Kate Lopresti

This book collects all the issues of The Constant Rider, a zine published (in seven issues) from 2000 to 2005 about the author’s experience on public transit, mostly in Portland. My friends in SF bought it for me because I’d fed them several great stories from my many bus trips in Portland. Have you heard about the woman who insisted I call the police on my own cell phone because she claimed I’d broken her foot? Or the man sitting next to me on an overcrowded bus who asked if he could buy my half-full Big Gulp and then proceeded to whip his dick out and pee in it? (Actually, that’s pretty much the whole story.) Aside from six months in which I bought a brand new Honda Civic and then totaled it, I haven’t had a car in 12 years, so I have some great stories. So, it seems, does Kate Lopresti. Her stories are funny and easy to read, especially after she learns to stop typesetting them in a sans-serif font. It was a quick read, but enjoyable.

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I loved The Corrections, so when I saw another of Franzen’s books in the (very small) English-language section of an Israeli bookstore, I grabbed it immediately. It’s a memoir that he wrote, mostly about his tween to teenage years. It’s gotten great reviews, but it came off to me like a David Sedaris wannabe. Parts of it were great, but parts of it seemed incredibly tedious. I dunno. That’s about all I feel like writing. It’s still not a bad book, but all that sticks out in my mind at the moment are the boring parts. It’s definitely better than I’m making it out to be, but…

Crumbs 3

I don’t know much about this. I got it at Little Otsu. It’s just some small-press book of six or seven short stories. There’s no table of contents, and I’m too lazy to count. It’s put together in Toronto, but there’s no “about the author” paragraphs, so I have no idea who these people are. There’s an address for submissions, so probably the stories arrived like that. Some of them are pretty good, but the whole thing is dragged down by a story that takes up half(!!!) of the book which isn’t very good. I liked the first two Crumbs, but you’ll probably never find them anyway, so this is kinda a pointless “review”.

The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket by Trevor Corson

I think I first heard about this book on The Splendid Table. From the cover, it sounds like my favorite kind of book: the highly-specific single-subject non-fiction book. (One of my favorites, and a perfect example of the genre I have trouble naming, is John McPhee’s Oranges.) And about half the book was like that! It was filled with interesting details about the history and story of sushi, many of which were surprising and educational. But then he mixes it with my least favorite kind of writing: the faux-novel non-fiction, where somehow the author knows what every character is thinking at all times, even though that’s an impossibility in a non-fiction book. The book is intermingled with the story of several students attending a California sushi academy. I think he followed the Ira Glass school of journalism and felt compelled to insert some “human element”. Which is fine, but it just doesn’t seem to fit in this book. It’s almost two books in one. I wanted to skip over the sushi academy parts and just read about the history of the food.

I admit that I have a very specific grudge against what I call the “In Cold Blood-style of writing”: where an author writes non-fiction as though he were omnipotent. I don’t care how many interviews you’ve done; if you’re putting thoughts into someone else’s head without attributing a source in the same sentence, it just feels like lies to me. (”Laura said she was scared” vs. “Laura was scared”.) You can’t possibly know what they were actually thinking, only what they told you they were thinking. Um, maybe I’m being pedantic. If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you as much, maybe you’ll like this book.