San Francisco may be challenging to love. Whenever I feel conflicted, coming back to my favorite books about the city helps me connect with its history and discover hidden narratives that are often overlooked amidst the alarming headlines about the San Francisco “doom loop.”
I have selected my favorite books that cover different decades and neighborhoods. Additionally, I have created an interactive map featuring quotes from these books, which can serve as a starting point for hikes, walks, or simply bringing the words of the authors into the present-day reality.
How to read this map: open the original interactive map, zoom in, and click on the points of interest (each pin has a quote from the book and/or relevant image). All the pins are organized in groups representing one writer from my list. You can click on the legend to turn on each group and off if you only want to see pins associated with one of the writers.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller
Decade: 1960s
Neighborhood: Haight-Ashbury
This book is a collection of essays and short stories written by Cookie Mueller, who was an actress, socialite, and one of John Waters' muses. It Happened In The Haight, a short story included in this edition, is about Cookie's experience living on Haight Street in the late 1960s and her horrifying encounter with the members of the Manson Family.
Home Baked by Alia Volz
Decade: 1970s and 1980s
Neighborhood: Embarcadero
In this book, Alia Volz tells the story of her parents who started Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground weed brownie delivery service in the 1970s. I appreciate how Volz combines her parents' memories of that time with a wider historical context, covering the war on drugs, the AIDS crisis, and the subsequent legalization of medical marijuana, and connecting all these threads together.
Joan Brown by Janet Bishop and Nancy Lim
Decade: 1970s and 1980s
Neighborhood: Aquatic Park
This year, SFMOMA held a retrospective of Joan Brown, a Bay Area artist who was born in San Francisco and lived her entire life in the city. One of the most memorable series of paintings in the exhibition is dedicated to her passion for swimming. Brown took legal action against several swimming clubs in the city in order to join the South End Rowing Club. She then documented her experience of swimming in the Bay through a series of self-portraits. This book showcases this particular series of paintings, along with other works and a detailed biography of the artist that can be read as a guide to San Francisco during the 1970s and 1980s.
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Decade: 1970s and 1980s
Neighborhood: Fillmore and Western Addition
Although I'm not a big fan of Rebecca Solnit, her essay Men Explain Things to Me really resonated with me when I read it in my early 20s. However, I do appreciate her memoir because Solnit dedicates a lot of time to describing San Francisco in the 1980s. The most impressive chapters are dedicated to the time she lived in the Fillmore district and the stories of her older neighbors who moved from the South to the West Coast during the Great Migration.
Philosophy for Spiders by McKenzie Wark
Decade: 1990s
Neighborhood: Cole Valley
I became interested in McKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker after reading I'm Very into You, a book that documents their email correspondence during their brief relationship in the early 1990s. During that time, Wark was a young Australian scholar living in Sydney, while Acker had already established herself as an experimental novelist and countercultural heroine. In Philosophy of Spiders, Wark dedicates the book to Acker's writing and recounts his first visit to San Francisco, where he stayed with Acker in Cole Valley.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Decade: 1990s
Neighborhood: Castro
"How to Write an Autobiographical Novel" is a collection of essays by Alexander Chee. The book delves into his life as a gay Korean-American writer. It is not a guide on writing autobiographical novels, but rather a memoir in essay form. Chee shares his personal experiences, including his essays on living in San Francisco in the early 90s and working for A Different Light, one of the first LGBT bookstores in San Francisco.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Decade: 2010s
Neighborhood: Bayview
Jenny Odell, an artist and writer based in Oakland, is included in this list because her work intersects with the tech culture represented by San Francisco. In her book, Odell explores how we can reclaim our time and navigate the attention economy. My map includes a couple of locations associated with Odell's work. One of them, the Bureau of Suspended Objects at Recology SF, is not directly related to the book, but I decided it’s worth highlighting anyway. In this early research project, Odell meticulously collected, researched, and archived 200 discarded objects, providing detailed information about their histories. While it’s not connected to our experience of time, I believe this project makes an important statement about the kind of consumerism that San Francisco tech companies are often enabling.
What are your favorite books about the city you live in? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this SF map and book recommendations!
Thanks for this list! I'm a San Francisco native and although I have read Solnit and Chee, there are several works here that I hadn't come across before.
Have you read David Talbot's Season of the Witch, and Gary Kamiya's Cool Gray City of Love? Both are excellent, and essential reading for any lover of this great City.
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