By Suzanne Kleid It would have been surreal enough on Sunday, March 27th if Britney Spears’s free concert had gone on as originally planned in the street in front of the Castro Theatre. But things got extra strange when the show was moved indoors, due to threats of rain—to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, across [...]

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By Byron Spooner A thriving viral colony has set up camp in my upper respiratory tract for about the last four weeks.  At this late date to say they are setting up camp is, truthfully, an understatement, it’s more like SimCity or Deadwood or something, where they’ve gone from camping out to settling down and [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan After 15 months of renovations, one of the most historic libraries in the San Francisco Public Library system, the Presidio Branch Library, celebrates it’s grand re-opening. The Carnegie is a beauty-a true gem if you will-with a grandiose reading room, beautifully restored arched windows that let in plenty of light, a [...]

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By Rennie Ament Recently, I have not been reading Atlas Shrugged. I sometimes flip it open and scan a sentence, but mostly the jacket just gets eyeballed.  It’s a stellar cover-there’s an art deco aesthetic combined with a metaphor that even a fetus could understand. Somewhere in San Francisco, a white guy has this illustration [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan Sorry for the late post today. Us folks here at The Readers Review are still trying to recover from the awesome IMBIBE library cocktail party on Friday, that we almost forgot tell ya about the new ZZYZZYVA website! Unveiled earlier today, ZZYZZYVA‘s site has a fresh, clean look, some new staff [...]

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By Byron Spooner If a friend tries to hand you a copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet run immediately in the other direction, preferably not carrying the book with you since that would only weigh you down and hinder your escape. After you stop, hopefully at a safe distance, call and arrange [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan Books, beer, babes and Blue Angel Vodka?  Sounds like one of my dreams!  Wait, it’s an after-hours party in a library?  Count me in! Friends of the SF Public Library invite you IMBIBE in every sense of the word at the Eureka Valley Branch Library. The quarterly event series kicks off [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Well, there’s no requisite position for absorbing a sustained narrative, but sitting still helps.  Does nobody hunker down with a big, long book anymore?  Why have we turned into such grazers and twitchers and surface assessors? In The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, Los Angeles [...]

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By Rosie Levy Merlin Although my position at the library involves a whole lot of work around book clubs and community reading projects, I have never been in a successful book club. Until now. Well, I’ve only been to one meeting (missed the first with a sick baby–will forever have missed out on insights about [...]

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