People Reading : October 8, Friday evening -- Reading Frances Lefkowitz

Thanks for visiting

I had been posting on Mondays 10am Pacific Time, but with Covid-19, I have slowed things down. For a while I was on lockdown in San Francisco and interviewed a few people from six + feet away. Now, I am in Taiwan, where I am learning how to say, "Can I take your picture for my reading blog?" I hope to continue posting pictures. Check back from time to time for new content.

As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, I am more aware that this blog is filled with few black and brown people reading. I am (or was) a privileged white person living in San Francisco. According to Wikipedia, San Francisco's makeup is: Whites 48.1%, Asians 33.3%, African Americans 6.1%, Native Americans 0.5%, Pacific Islanders 0.4%, other races 6.6%, two or more races 4.7%, Hispanics or Latinos of any race 15.1%. When I return to San Francisco, I hope to interview more people that look different than me.

What I'm reading

From January 2014 to most recent: lots of New Yorker fiction that I caught up on – I especially loved The Christmas Miracle, by Rebecca Curtis; Life of Pi, by Yann Martel; The Help, by Kathryn Stockett; The Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov; Haruki Murakami's 1Q84; Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant, by Ann Patchett; the choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit (intermittently); The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro; State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett; The Mystic Masseur, by the British/Trinidadian author, V.S. Naipaul; Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Sula, by Toni Morrison; two Swedish crime novels I read (in English) while in Sweden: Nephilim, by Åsa Schwarz & Killer's Art, by Mari Jungstedt; The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson; Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell, which my sister and friend, Colleen, recommended; Run, by Ann Patchett; When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World History, by Timothy C. Hall; The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (only half because the ebook I was reading expired- but it was a re-read); The Circle, by Dave Eggers; Our Hotel In Bali: How two young Americans made a dream come true by opening one of the first Balinese tourist hotels on Kuta Beach in the 1930s, by Louise Koke (which I got from the Cannes free library on the beach, Pages à la plage); Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, by Madhur Jaffrey (from cover to cover - I was craving a kitchen, while traveling); Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami; The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt; The Corsican Caper, by Peter Mayle (on audio book); Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (on audio book); The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. (Starting a new year, 2015) Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella; Shaking out the Dead, by K.M. Cholewa; The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery; English teaching text books and New Yorker fiction; Divergent and Insurgent, by Veronica Roth; The Wolf Gift, by Anne Rice; and My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgård. --- I've been lazy for a long time about posting the books I've read lately. I'm not going to go back in time, but today (Feb 5, 2017) I just finished listening to Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. Right before that I was on a Kim Stanley Robinson audio book kick and listened to Aurora and Shaman.

At the Hotel Monaco, during intermission for a Women's Memoir Litquake event
Reading To Have Not, by Frances Lefkowitz, one of the readers of the evening. She's intrigued with the book because she and the author have similar backgrounds. "I had a crazy childhood and got a good scholarship to an Ivy League school, too."

Another author she likes -- Pam Houston, who read at USF a couple days ago. Pam Houston is an outdoors woman and author of Cowboys are my Weakness.

Frances Lefkowitz read right after the intermission and I could only listen to 5 minutes of her story because I had to run down the street and meet friends to watch Scapin' at A.C.T. I was sorry I had to go. The excerpt from which she read was about winning a costume contest when she was a kid in the Mission District (the neighborhood where I live) and she won a gift certificate to Cliff's Variety Store (a fantastic hardware/everything store in the Castro that still exists) and, in that store, with the gift certificate, she felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie when they go to town and visit the General Store.