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Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.
For August 16, Coté will read aloud from Charles Dickens’ novel Tales of the City – 28 Barbary Lane.
Summary: Armistead Maupin’s series of novels about San Francisco life begins in 1978 with Tales of the City.
You can dip into these warm, accessible, heavily peopled and sweet-and-sour novels almost anywhere, but for the purposes of this list we’re going to stick with the first three, which have been collected under the title 28 Barbary Lane.
The address is that of a large house, presided over by a pot-growing, free-spirited landlady, and occupied by diverse residents, gay, straight and otherwise.
Has any other American writer loved his city so much and so well?
San Francisco, under Maupin’s gaze, becomes the setting for an elaborate comedy of manners, and the early novels were among the first mainstream works to put queer and straight characters on equal footing. Maupin’s men and women came here to find themselves, and to find others like them. That they so often succeed makes these novels glow in your hands. “This city,” one character says, “loosens people up.”
Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.
Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net