The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

read by Angela Dawe

Earth Abides meets Children of Men with a little Parable of the Sower thrown in for good measure in this post-apocalyptic tale about a midwife wandering a world in which almost everybody has died of a plague, very few of the survivors are women, and childbirth has become universally deadly.

The conceit here is that a professional midwife from San Francisco falls sick with an illness that has been killing a lot of her patients and wakes up in the hospital an indeterminate number of days later to find that everybody is dead. (Walking Dead, anyone?) But not quite everyone, it turns out; there are a few survivors roaming around. The vast majority of this handful of survivors are men, and this is not good news for the small number of women and even tinier number of children who are left.

Our midwife, who never gives out her real name, keeps a journal of her travels. The beauty of this book is the way the journal is written. Not that it’s beautifully written; on the contrary, it’s full of irrelevant asides and repetitive typographical quirks. It’s also very convincing—you feel, as you read, that someone you know might have written it. The world she comes from is ours, and the world she lives in is recognizably what our world would probably become in the wake of that particular disaster.

As the story progresses, this sense that the protagonist is a very real person just gets stronger. She’s strong, but not superheroically strong. She’s tough in some ways but fragile in others, like we all are. She’s smart enough to avoid making stupid horror-trope mistakes, but not so smart that we can’t identify with her perfection. We believe in her, which makes the trauma she goes through every single day matter. And what she does about it matters, too.

The most moving post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommend.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!

Earth Abides by George Stewart

read by Jonathan Davis (introduction written & read by Connie Willis)

Earth Abides was my first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Way back in the 8th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Felker, assigned it to the class. (We also read Flowers for Algernon that year, and the room was decorated with black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe. Go figure.) The book made such an impression that that post-apocalyptic became one of my handful of favorite sub-genres of science fiction, which I'd already developed a taste for, and I’ve never stopped reading it. To this day, if I leave my house at some ungodly hour and the streets are deserted, I think to myself, “It’s like Earth Abides out here.”

First published in 1949 (and the winner of the first International Fantasy Award in 1951), this novel is very much a product of its time. There’s all the breathtakingly casual racism, sexism, and jingoism that you’d expect (though to give him credit, I think Stewart, a UC Berkeley professor, really was trying quite earnestly to be open-minded and open-hearted). What’s wonderful about it to me, though, is that it’s also very much a product of its place. And its place is the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, Berkeley. More specifically, the Berkeley hills.

This, more than anything, helped me put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, Ish. When he comes home from a solitary camping trip (where he’d been working on his graduate thesis in geography), he’s coming home to his parents’ house on a fictional street within walking distance of Indian Rock Park. He uses both the university library on the UC Berkeley campus and the main public library downtown. As time passes, he makes his way through numerous familiar landscapes and neighborhoods, going so far as to describe billboards that were still recognizable to a local reader more than 30 years after the book was written. 

Ish goes on to mark the passage of days and years by watching where, along the horizon dominated by San Francisco to the south and Mount Tamalpais to the north, the sun sets—much as I used to do when I lived in a house with a western view in the Berkeley hills. (Though, unlike Ish, I had the help of up-to-date calendars and society generally.) He chisels the number of each passing year onto the face of one of the enormous rocks at Indian Rock Park, describing recognizable things there like the bowl-shaped depressions where the area's original inhabitants used to grind acorns and a cave-like area formed by two rocks leaning together. 

Ish—short for Isherwood Williams, though also, without doubt, meant to call to mind Ishi, the last of the Yahi people who himself walked down out of the hills into what we think of as modern civilization and lived out his in Berkeley, where he worked as a janitor when he wasn’t being studied by anthropologists—Ish is a familiar type in a university town. Like many academics, he lives very much inside his own head. He thinks of himself more as an observer of than a participant in life. He credits this tendency of his as the major factor that helps him, having survived a pandemic that has killed off all but a handful of humans on Earth, to keep himself together.

He does go into a sort of shock, of course, after his civilization dies. It’s not possible to survive something that has killed off 99% or more of your species without enduring major emotional trauma. But he doesn’t descend into drink or any of the other excesses now freely available to him; he doesn’t commit suicide, either quickly or slowly; and he doesn’t build a false life for himself, pretending nothing has changed. He observes; he accepts; and slowly, over decades, he becomes the nucleus of a group of more or less stable folks who start a new society in the rubble of the old.

Of course he’s not perfect. Far from it, even in his own terms. For one thing—and I couldn’t get over this as I was reading—he’s strangely passive about certain things. For example, he’s very aware, as an educated person, of the importance of literacy—and yet he doesn’t read stories to his own children or encourage his neighbors to do it when the time comes; he just grouses about the fact that none of the kids are learning to read. He does eventually start a school of sorts, but by the time the community’s children arrive there they are big kids with no background or interest in literacy. Those who aren’t already too old for school and don’t already have kids of their own, that is. 

And instead of thinking this through and encouraging parents and grandparents to start reading to the littlest ones at home, he throws his hands up and decides the new society he’s creating is just going to have to be too illiterate to use the treasure troves of knowledge that are available to them.

There are other examples—that’s just the main one that stands out in my librarian's mind. And yet. As Stewart points out himself, via Ish’s internal maunderings, those who are left after the great disaster and its secondary kill aren’t necessarily going to be the brightest or best of humanity. They’re a random sampling, in the universe of this book, of those whose immune systems were able to fight off the virus, and whose mental habits were conducive to getting on with life afterward. They were all hardy in their various ways, yes, but really had no other traits in common, good or bad. They were just regular people, doing their best in a world gone horribly wrong.

And that is another great thing about this book. It’s not about scientists, or tough guys, or utopians. It’s about a cross-section of folks, and about the world they live in. It’s about the ants and the rats and the housecats and the dogs. It’s about the pavement and the grocery stores and the electric and water grids. It’s about our world, as it might have been if things had gone wrong in just that way. And it’s fascinating, even now.

Locke & Key Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

A spooky mansion with magical doors and hidden keys—a Bay Area family with a secret history taking refuge there after a horrific tragedy—an echo in a well that is also a deeply malevolent creature—an unapologetically murderous teenager on the road trip from hell—a quiet New England town called Lovecraft—who could ask for more?

Go ahead and ask, because this graphic novel is also replete with glorious artwork and nuggets of sly, laugh-out-loud humor. Not for the weak of stomach or the faint of heart! But super rewarding for the stout-hearted reader.