Showing posts with label City Lights Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label City Lights Books. Show all posts

Top Ten Best Bookish Memories

Tuesday, February 5, 2013


This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for my Top Ten Best Bookish Memories. I love this list! I have so many great memories connecting with books and authors and I had fun just thinking over all of them.

1) Seeing Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey where so many of my favorite authors are buried!

2) Browsing in the infamous City Lights Bookstore and getting a drink at the Vesuvio Bar where Jack Kerouac and the beats used to hang out.

3) Visiting Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris for the first time.

4) Wandering around the streets of Savannah, GA and seeing all the places mentioned in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

5) Waiting in line to get my copy of Harry Potter books 5 and 7 at midnight.

6) Visiting Monroeville, AL, the hometown of Harper Lee and the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. The old courthouse is now an incredible museum devoted to Lee and Truman Capote!

7) Running out of books to read in Budapest, Hungary and finding a little English-language used bookstore and buying a battered copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

8) Hearing some of my favorite authors speak and meeting them afterwards to get books sign: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Lois Lowry, John Green, Nicole Krauss and Jhumpa Lahiri.

9) Visiting Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore.

10) Going to The Strand bookstore and seeing the Algonquin round table in New York City.

Photo of Vesuvio mural in San Francisco by moi. 

Reading the States: California

Friday, February 3, 2012


State: CALIFORNIA
Fiction:
- East of Eden* by John Steinbeck
- The Graduate by Charles Webb
- Women's Murder Club series by James Patterson
- Tales of the City* by Armistead Maupin
- Gold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter by Blaise Cendrars
- Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
- Cannery Row* by John Steinbeck
- Sideways by Rex Pickett
- The Crying of Lot 49 is a by Thomas Pynchon
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
- The Jane Austen Book Club* by Karen Joy Fowler
- Shopgirl* by Steve Martin
- The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
- Ask the Dust by John Fante
- The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
- The Loved One* by Evelyn Waugh
- The Swan: Tales of the Sacramento Valley by Andrew F. O'Hara
- McTeague by Frank Norris
- Ask the Dust by John Fante
- The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life, by Gavin Lambert
- The Big Sleep* by Raymond Chandler
- Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
- House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
- The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
- A Visit from the Goon Squad* by Jennifer Egan
- The Joy Luck Club* by Amy Tan
- If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Hime
- Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber

Nonfiction:
- Freedom Writers* by Erin Gruell
- The Soloist* by Steve Lopez
- A Crack in the Edge of the World* by Simon Winchester
- Baghdad by the Bay by Herb Caen
- The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* by Dave Eggers
- Wild Yosemite edited by Susan M. Neider
- The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston 

Authors Known for Writing About the State:
- Dashiell Hammett
- Sue Grafton (Alphabet murder series)
- Michael Connelly

Authors Who Lived Here:
- John Steinbeck
- Amy Tan
- Jack London
- Raymond Chandler
- Joan Didion
- Allen Ginsberg
- Octavia E. Butler
- Christopher Moore
- Ursula K. Le Guin

Great Bookstores in the State:
City Lights Books 

Literary Places to Visit:

*Books I've read


Photo by moi.