April 22, 2017, Saturday morning -- Reading Raymond F. Dasmann

In the Mission District

He is reading The Destruction of California, published in 1965 by Raymond F. Dasmann, a wildlife biologist and conservationist. He got it at a thrift store up north and is finally getting around to reading it. Something else good he read recently was The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin. When he was a child his favorite book was The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer. Like The Destruction of California, it was also published in the 1960s.

April 1, 2017, Saturday afternoon -- Reading George Saunders

In my backyard

We were really just having cocktails, but then my sister and brother-in-law pulled out their matching Lincoln in the Bardo books, George Saunders's first novel. Together they've also read Dissident Gardens, by Jonathan Lethem, and How Music Works, by David Byrne (and saw Byrne's exhibit in Palo Alto).

Other good things they've read recently have been Embassytown, by China Miéville for him, and Tenth of December for both of them (but they didn't read it together).

April 1, 2017, Saturday afternoon -- About to read Pat Carey

In the Mission District on a sunny afternoon

She is about to read, or, she admitted, probably flip through and read parts of, Growing up Irish Catholic, and Surviving my Mom's Eleven Sisters, by Pat Carey, that she just found at one of those itty bitty free birdhouselike libraries.

Like this one, her favorite books are biographies. Right now she is also reading a biography about Lincoln, which she is not reading linearly and completely either.

April 2, 2017, Sunday afternoon - Reading Margaret Atwood

On Bernal Hill, on a perfect, windless sunny day

She is reading The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood. She saw it at Green Apple books, and got it when she realized that there was a Margaret Atwood book that was published a couple years ago that she hadn't read yet.

Margaret Atwood is her favorite author because she makes the characters feel very real, very human. For example, she said this book is dystopian and outlandish, but the characters are real.

The reader is a novelist herself. Check out her book, The Deception Artist, about an American family in the 1980s.

On a side note, even after a hiker came by and said he'd seen a snake nearby, she kept on reading in her spot in the grass. Who cares about snakes if you have a good book.