The most recommended books about San Francisco

A masterful book about a tough subject.

Separated from her young son, Romy Hall is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing a customer from the Mars Room, a strip club where she’d been dancing. Brilliantly written with compassion and dry, dark humor, the book explores Romy’s relationships with her fellow prisoners and the despair, dangers, and absurdities of life behind bars.

I loved this novel’s gritty texture, its sentences, its characters, and how it forced me to think more deeply about why and how we incarcerate people. The final sequence in Muir Woods is heart-pounding, wondrous, devastating, and strangely hopeful.

I was shocked when I realized S.A. Lelchuck was male.

Nikki Griffin, a hardnosed San Francisco detective slash bookstore owner, is such a dynamic, fleshed-out female character I just assumed she’d been penned by a woman. Well, you know what they say about assuming. Nikki is a kick butt, take no prisoner’s PI with an agenda.

Like the PIs in the books above, she veers onto the wrong side of the tracks often. Actually, she jumps over them and runs along the wrong side of the tracks while brandishing brass knuckles and a baton.

Even when she’s breaking the law, you’re kinda okay with it because, well, Lelchuck’s bad guys are really bad. 

Each one of these stories is a mini-novel, which are the sort of stories I love. Black never leaves you hanging, like some writers do, and you will feel like you’re right in there watching the story unfold. The writing has been called pitch-perfect and I agree. Every word is right, every moment fits and every character is trying to make sense of the world as we all do, every day. She deftly explores the emotional DNA passed from generations before and what that means for each of our lives going forward. So you get a great tale well told. and a lot to think about at the same time. Exactly what I love to read and what smart modern women are drawn to. 

Many people imagine that healing and dying are antithetical. However, this is not necessarily so. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, death can be healing not just for the person whose life is ending but for those who love them. 

Unfortunately, American hospital care does not usually facilitate such graceful transitions.  Kaufman, a medical anthropologist, compiles case histories of end-of-life care in medical facilities in order to help us understand the complexities that face us in these contexts. Since most Americans now die in some kind of medical institution, this book should be required reading for everyone—before it happens to us.

What bell hooks has shown me about the possibility of personal narrative and memoir writing is endless because she consistently shows that your story is never-ending. But mostly bell hooks likes to hurt me on purpose. This is my favorite memoir by her because it centers on two of my favorite topics: words and whirlwind romance that refuses to interfere with the words at stake, and I knew this book would be one I would return to in order to figure out my own priorities once I read, “I’m willing to give up everything I love if it means I won’t be crazy.”

What is better than finding a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk? Finding a copy of a book you haven’t read by a favorite author. 

I still don’t understand how I could have overlooked Black Dove. I shocked myself when I discovered I had not read every single Steve Hockensmith’s western mystery. His mysteries transport me to a time I love — the old west — not the old west of villains in black hats, but citified business bad men like the ones we have today. Better yet, these books are laugh-out-loud hilarious.

I almost feel like I need to mention this first and foremost: I’m a huge fan of Stranger Things. Why does that matter? Because if you loved Eddie and Chrisy and wanted more of them, this is THE book for you.

Not only do we see these inspired characters, but we also see them deal with their own prejudice. Trigger warning for deep religious trauma on Rebecca’s end, but let me tell you, as someone with religious trauma, this book was deeply healing for me in some ways.

The trauma is really well written, and I was thoroughly engaged in this forbidden romance.

What do you get when you cross paths with an unhinged truck driver on a lonely stretch of isolated highway? You get the book Duel, by Richard Matheson. Based on a true event of unprovoked road rage the author himself was put through, Duel is the story of a businessman heading to San Francisco who is confronted and pursued by an unseen psycho behind the wheel of a gasoline tanker and trailer. Subjected to a life-and-death game of cat and mouse, Man, as the protagonist in the book is called, has to out-maneuver this menace, or die trying. If you are into isolation terror, with get-up-and-go pacing, Duel is a must-read.

Perhaps the most kindred title to my own book, Here and Now and Then is the story of Kin Stewart, and time-traveling spy from the year 2142, who becomes stranded in the 1990s after a botched mission. Having assimilated to life in the past, even marrying and starting a family, Kin's got a bad bout of brain fog and amnesia resulting from the ordeal, (time travel is hard!). And then, his rescue team shows up 18 years too late. They bring with them the revelation that Kin has only been gone for 2 weeks relative to their time.

While admittedly full of some heavy-handed “this author clearly loves Star Trek and soccer” dialogue in the beginning, once this book finds its feet, it really takes off and is a fun romp, with a cool look into the author's speculative future.

This book blew my mind when I first read it. In my opinion, it is one of the most visceral, scary, and under-rated serial killer novels of all time. Published in 1986 in the midst of America’s much-hyped real and fictional serial killer ‘epidemic,’ Killer on the Road stands out as a first-person serial-killer narrative, as well as putting forward a new kind of character (for the 1980s) – the homosexual serial murderer. In this novel, Ellroy delves into the phenomenon of motiveless serial murder from the perspective of the killer on a subversive journey through a hellish suburban America. From the prologue to the epilogue the reader is presented an interior world-view saturated with violence and nightmarish insights into the psychopathology of a disturbed killer.