January 11, 2008 -- Friday evening

At a shop in the Haight, reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. Recently she read Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin; a biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; and reread Great Expectations. She's going through the classics.

Books she recommends--Mother Night, by Vonnegut; Mosquitoes, by Faulkner; and, for San Franciscans, Oh The Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey, about growing up in high-society San Francisco. She read Sean Wilsey's mother's book Oh the Hell of It All, too, but liked the son's book better. Reading these books is what made her pick up Maupin's Tales of the City because the mother is one of the characters.

Armistead Maupin, she said, has a keen sense of observation. He translates conversation at a human level, like your right there at the cocktail party.

She loves reading about San Francisco, like in scenes from On the Road, which pictures the Jazz scene on Folsom Street. She was born in the Presidio and has only left the city for periods of a few months to go backpacking or travel.

The Faulkner? Right now she would kill for a semicolon.

Next she's going to get in on the Haruki Murakami craze, starting with Norwegian Wood, which she found at Green Apple Books.

4 Comments:

Kennethwongsf said...

That's one of the oldest edition of The Sound and the Fury I've ever seen.

Unknown said...

I'm very interested to know what section of The Sound and the Fury she's in. Some characters are nearly impossible to comprehend.

I'm reading Norwegian Wood, rather I should say I've been reading it for a while. I think it's a little sentimental, but we'll see where it goes.

Anonymous said...

@Megan: Hey that's me reading!

I'm about 80% of the way done with TSATF, and I'm honestly glad to hear someone else had a hard time with character classification. But viva William Faulkner anyways, if it ends like any of the other titles of his that I've read, it will all make sense in the last 10 pages of the book. The chapter about the little Itallian girl was amazing.

We'll see how I like NW. I honestly chose it because I was looking at all of his titles at once and the yellow cover jumped out at me so I just grabbed it so I wouldn't agonize over choosing for too long...

Rosie Gibson said...

@kenneth: You've gotta love Green Apple Books on Clement and their used paper back annex. I specifically chose the copy I'm reading because of that cool, retro looking cover.

I have a tendency to collect multiple copies of my favorite books, Great Expectations and Through the Looking Glass, just for the covers. They're both such old novels, I've collected multiple beautiful copies of both over the years.