January 28, Wednesday evening -- Reading Lonely Planet

Here for two weeks from Sweeden
Reading Lonely Planet's San Francisco City Guide, not so much for what to do, but to see what she's done. Cold Stone Creamery was a big hit today -- she's here with her six-year-old.

She marveled at San Francisco's bookstores. In Sweeden, they don't exist anymore. People buy their books on line. The books here, she said, are.... she lacked the words to explain. In our San Francisco bookstores she's discovered "radical sewing" books.

If she were to write her own book, it'd be the South American type of magical realism crossed with how-to...and she'd tell you what is magical and what is real. In real life, in Sweeden, she works with handicapped people, helping them put together autobiographical books about their lives. Sometimes, she said, they get the word order wrong in the phrases they write and she wonders, should it be changed or left as is?

A Sweedish author she likes -- Selma Lagerlöf, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and who, inspired by Rudyard Kipling's stories, wrote a children's story to teach Sweedish geography for the Primary School Board.