Books: September 2008 Archives

A thin e-reader designed to display newspapers and magazines? Sign me up! Especially if they start making the New Yorker available this way, so I can switch my dead-tree subscription over.

I have just finished reading one of the most un-put-downable reads I've come across in the last few years, and it comes from an unlikely source: Aaron Cometbus of Cometbus zine fame. He devoted issue #51 to a history of bookstores on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

Doesn't sound all that interesting, you say? Well, when you consider the story encompasses the Free Speech Movement, the Summer of Love, the People's Park protests, riots, teargas, the SLA and Patty Hearst, cigar-chomping bookstore managers who yell at their customer base, a journey to Cuba to volunteer for the Revolution, urban planning gone horribly wrong, and musings on the tension between the hippie old guard and Generation X, plus more wonderfully insider stories and bitchy comments by the author (a cranky fellow, he calls Salman Rushdie a "total ass" and complains of hippies that "they can't live with themselves when the lights are out,") than you can throw a latte at, it turns out to be one hell of a read.

You can find "Loneliness of the Electric Menorah" at independent bookstores and magazine shops around the Bay Area — I found my copy at Issues on Glen in Oakland, but it's also available online. Strongly recommended.