March 5, Wednesday evening -- Reading Jeannette Walls

At Urban Cellars in Noe Valley, where they have the best marquee sign in town. On one side it'll say, like, around New Years, CHAMPAGNE FOR YOUR REAL FRIENDS and on the other side, which you look at after you've had a chance to think about it, REAL PAIN FOR YOUR SHAM FRIENDS. The other week it was, ANYONE WHO LIVES WITHIN THEIR MEANS .... SUFFERS FROM A SERIOUS LACK OF IMAGINATION. Today it was, on the first side, LOVE IS GRAND. The other side is at the end of this post.Reading The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. He said it was great--it's a memoir and it makes you think. While we were talking, Antonia Blue, publisher of the late Kitchen Sink magazine walked into the store. She had great things to say about The Glass Castle, too.

And, a guy who was in for a second bottle of Marissou Pinot Noir (it was so good last night he wanted another), --great wine for $10--said his favorite books were 1)Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi 2)The Glory of the Times, by Lawrence Ritter and 3)Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway, but if really pressed it'd be, Glory of their Times, which is about a guy in the 1960s traveling around the country interviewing men who played major league baseball at the turn of the century. The baseball players would travel around from town to town on a wagon train, getting paid peanuts for major league baseball.

But, back to the reader--he's reading this book for a class he's taking at City College. He's excited to get back to reading now that he's back in school. This is his first semester. Eight years ago he moved to Southern California from Mexico and stopped reading, but before that, he used to read books late into the night--Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez, who, he said, is often criticized for being a moralist.

He said the high school he went to in Mexico was different than high schools here. Students weren't told what literature to read, they read what they wanted to read. It's in college literature classes that you're assigned literature.

Not too long ago he read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. Up next is, he said, looking through the drawers behind the counter for a book his friend left--The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.

When he was a kid he liked the Marvel comics. There were comics, he said, by Mexican publishers, but he liked Superman and Spiderman.

On the other side of the marquee, following LOVE IS GRAND, -- DIVORCE IS TWO GRAND. Ha! The sentiment didn't stick with me long after I left the store. I was mulling it over until, just a few blocks away, walking down the hill on Dolores Street between 24th and 23rd Street, I saw, back lit by the San Francisco skyline and the glow of the headlights from passing cars, someone using the grassy palm tree lined median as a driving range. I thought, this is great. If you can read in a liquor store, you can golf in a median. Reading, though, I think, is probably more versatile. You might try to golf during your morning BART commute, but you'd probably hit somebody with your club.