There are few things quite so sublime as reading a good book on the ferry. Take a look around, and you’ll see scores of fellow commuters concentrating on their ebooks, paperbacks or prized signed first editions.
By Paul Duclos
Published: January, 2014
There are few things quite so sublime as reading a good book on the ferry. Take a look around, and you’ll see scores of fellow commuters concentrating on their ebooks, paperbacks or prized signed first editions. Here are four recently published works—all by Bay Area writers—that hold special appeal this season:
Unfathomable City
By Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker
University of California Press
Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than 20 essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city’s remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native American voices and local experts, as well as the coauthors’ compelling contributions.
Featuring 22 full-color two-page maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.
The innovative maps’ precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city—by erosion, crime, corruption and sea level rise—and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.
The Valley of Amazement
By Amy Tan
Ecco Press
Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement is a sweeping, evocative epic of two women’s intertwined fates and their search for identity, that moves from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village.
Spanning more than forty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement resurrects pivotal episodes in history: from the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty to the rise of the Republic, the explosive growth of lucrative foreign trade and anti-foreign sentiment, and the lives of the foreign "Shanghailanders" living in the International Settlement.
A deeply evocative narrative about the profound connections between mothers and daughters, The Valley of Amazement returns readers to the compelling territory of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. With her characteristic insight and humor, she conjures a story of inherited trauma, desire and deception, and the power and stubbornness of love.
Shakespeare Insult Generator
By Barry Kraft
Chronicle Books
Barry Kraft is a professional actor who has specialized in Shakespearean roles for over 50 years. Here’s he’s produced a book designed to put dullards and miscreants in their place with more than 150,000 handy mix-and-match insults in the Bard’s own words. This entertaining insult generator and flip book collects hundreds of words from Shakespeare’s most pointed barbs and allows readers to combine them in creative and hilariously stinging ways. From "apish bald-pated abomination" to "cuckoldly dull-brained blockhead" to "obscene rump-fed hornbeast," each insult can be chosen at random or customized to fit any situation that calls for a literary smackdown.
Featuring an informative introduction on Shakespearean wit and notes on which terms were coined or only used once by the author in his work, this delightful book will sharpen the tongue of Shakespeare fans and insult aficionados without much further ado.
More Baths Less Talking
By Nick Hornby
McSweeney’s
The author of Shakespeare Wrote for Money has another worthy book circulating on ferry docks these days.
"Read what you enjoy, not what bores you," Nick Hornby tells us. That simple, liberating, and indispensable directive animates each installment of the celebrated critic and author’s monthly column in The Believer.
In this delightful and never-musty tour of his reading life, Hornby tells us not just what to read but how to read. Whether tackling a dismayingly bulky biography of Dickens while his children destroy something in the next room, getting sucked into a serious assessment of Celine Dion during an intense soccer match featuring his beloved Arsenal, or devouring an entire series of children’s books while on vacation, Hornby writes reviews that are rich, witty,and occasionally madcap.
These essays capture the joy and ire, the despair and exhilaration of the booklover’s life. They appeal equally to monocle-wearing salonnières and people who, like him, spend a lot of time thinking about Miley Cyrus’ next role.
