Wednesday, May 24, 2017

San Francisco Book Haul

As I mentioned on my last post, I love buying books on vacation, even if they are things I could get at home.

City Lights Books, San Francisco
This was my fourth visit to SF and I shopped at two of San Francisco's bookstores- City Lights, in North Beach and Green Apple Books in the Richmond neighborhood. I've been to both before although I haven't been to Green Apple since my first SF trip in 2008. City Lights is often the very first place I go when I visit beautiful San Francisco.

As much as I love browsing the European literature section at City Lights, this time none of my purchases came from that part of the store.


Hadriana in all my Dreams, by René Depestre, is set in Haiti and tells the story of a woman transformed into a zombie during a festival in 1938, just prior to her wedding. It won the Prix Renaudot and was translated from the French.


On the nonfiction side, I picked up A Crack in the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester, about the notorious earthquake of 1906 that completely transformed San Francisco.

The Veins of the Ocean is an American novel set in Miami, about "a young woman's journey away from her family's painful past toward redemption and a freer future." No less a personage than Roxane Gay praised it as "lush and entrancing." Sounds perfect, and I'm going to Miami later this year.

I also got a zine called "Better Feminist Workbook," with questions about feminism and one's relationship to it, and space to write your answers.

At Green Apple, I picked up two books.

Such Small Hands is by Andrés Barba and translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. "Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up." I can't wait.

Finally I got Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri
Herrera, also translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. It's about a young woman who gets smuggled into America from Mexico with secrets in tow.

So for me it was a pretty modest haul. And there are other things I saw that I passed on. But I have been such a slow and unreliable reader lately, I just didn't feel like I should get lots of books. Plus I brought a very small suitcase and this is all that would fit.

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