Same Page SF | The last issue of 2023
Thanks for a great two months; here's to a great next year!
Welcome back to Same Page SF, your friendly, well-informed, and spectacularly nerdy source for all things local and literary.
It’s the last issue of 2023, and we’re feeling reflective! We wanted to share a bit about who we are and how we got here. It’s wild that we’ve only been doing this since early November - it feels like a whole lot longer, in the best way.
After missing one too many book events we learned about after the fact - and, as booksellers, working one too many author events attended by a whopping zero readers (I recently heard about a no-show signing for Gabrielle Zevin - yes, that Gabrielle Zevin, of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow fame) - we dreamed up Same Page SF to summarize and signal-boost the great things happening across our independent bookstores, library branches, and cultural centers.
On a typical week, we choose to highlight a manageable five out of 20 or 30 different options, then mention as many others as possible on social media. It’s incredible that there’s so much going on! But it’s so atomized. The effort that goes into reviewing, aggregating, and fact-checking - across newsletters, Instagram pages, websites, and even by calling or visiting - is significant.
We love to do it - but as they say, there’s no mission without margin! So if you’ve benefited from the work that goes into this newsletter and want it to continue, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. (To those of you who have pledged: thank you!) We’ll activate pledged payments in early 2024 - and as a reminder, we’ll donate 10% of all revenue pledged by then to Books Not Bans and The Children’s Book Project.
We’ll never restrict access to the newsletter based on payment status, but in the new year, we’ll be introducing ✨ giveaways ✨ for authors heading to the Bay Area on tour (we’ve got some incredible books and tickets lined up!) and those will only be open to paid readers.
If paying isn’t in the cards but you still want to support, we can’t understate the value of sharing! In the spirit of transparency, we’re hoping to make Same Page sustainable in the long term through a combination of paid subscriptions and thoughtful sponsorships, so building our readership is crucial. Book people know book people, so please connect us with yours!
We’ve got big plans for Same Page SF - eventually, we’d like to bring on contributors, build a dynamic events calendar, and even integrate with our favorite book-tracking platform, Italic Type. (Imagine getting notified every time an author you love is planning to be in SF, kind of like how Spotify alerts you when your favorite artists will be in town - bridging the gap between your digital and IRL book life!)
Our mission is to inform, connect, and support the literary community of our city. And in just two months, we’ve made real progress. We’re excited to see what comes next!
In the meantime, it’s a quiet holiday week on the literary front, but here are a few book-adjacent gatherings of interest:
Book-adjacent gatherings
Not *about* books, but around them
✉️ The San Francisco Solidarity Collective, which does prison abolitionist work, is holding a letter-writing night at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery. They’ll provide statements from incarcerated individuals, addresses, stamps, and envelopes. Monday 12/18, 6-8pm, free.
🎶 City Lights is celebrating the Grateful Dead with a “scholarly and musical evening” held at the Lost Church. Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there - specifically, Tuesday 12/19, 7:30pm, $15.
💬 Manny’s is hosting a panel with Board of Supervisors candidates and local retailers to discuss what elected officials can and should be doing to support small businesses. Tuesday 12/19, 6:30-8pm. $15, with complementary tickets available.
📜 SFCB is closing its exhibit Paper is People: Decolonizing Paper Cultures after Thursday 12/21, so don’t wait any longer if you’ve been meaning to visit! The works on display “seek to open a conversation around what paper is across cultures today: a vessel for collective memory, a body, a site of meaning, a living ancestor, and a form of cultural survival and resistance.”
Have an event you’d like me to include? Want to share an idea or ask a question? I’d love to hear from you! Just reply to this email or message me on Instagram.
Cheers,
Christina
Same Page SF
Book recommendations are my love language.
A bonus for those who reach the bottom: each week I’ll feature one book - sometimes more! - I’ve recently read and wholeheartedly loved.
In honor of the last issue of 2023, this week I’ll be sharing my ten favorite books of the year - not necessarily published in 2023, though many are, but read for the first time in 2023. (I had to exclude rereads because they have an unfair advantage!)
I read an admittedly unreasonable 150-200 books per year, so this is certainly not a comprehensive list of books I loved - but it’s a good summary of my absolute favorites! In order of recency:
Happy Like This by Ashley Wurzbacher
I’m a sucker for a good short story collection, and Happy Like This is far and away the best I’ve read this year. It opens with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse - “They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this” - and it’s aptly organized into two sections, Like That and Like This.
Each story, about a woman with a choice to make, is a world unto itself; I can’t choose a favorite, I can’t wait to reread, and I’m weirdly jealous of my past self for getting to read it for the first time. (PS: If my shouting-from-the-rooftops enthusiasm isn’t endorsement enough, you should know that Carmen Maria Machado personally selected this collection for publication.)
Strongly recommend if you like Bliss Montage (Ling Ma), Bad Thoughts (Nada Alic), You Never Get it Back (Cara Blue Adams), Our Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado).
Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas
At LitQuake’s opening party, I got to talking with a woman who invited me to join her book club (hooray for literary community!), and WOW was I blown away by their first pick. I still can’t believe Idlewild is Thomas’s debut - his precision of language and command of storytelling are stunning.
It’s a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel. If the terms “fanfic” or “LiveJournal” or “theater drama” ring a bell (and strike fear into your heart), it’ll take you back in time. Plus, Thomas discovered he’s a trans man in the course of writing this book, and his interviews about that process are fascinating.
Strongly recommend if you like stories that treat teenagers seriously and aren't afraid to explore the underbellies of close friendships.
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
I don’t think I’ve ever described a 500+ page biography as “compulsively readable,” but King: A Life was riveting. I learned a great deal not just about MLK but about America in the thirties through the sixties. Eig’s writing is exceptional - it’s impressive to write crisply and beautifully throughout, say, a novella, but it’s another thing entirely to keep that up over the course of a lengthy biography.
A powerful snippet from the introduction:
To help readers better understand King’s struggle, this book seeks to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography. In the process of canonizing King, we’ve defanged him, replacing his complicated politics and philosophy with catchphrases that suit one ideology or another. We’ve heard the recording of his “I Have a Dream” speech so many times we don’t really hear it any more; we no longer register its cry for America to recognize the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality” or its petition for economic reparations. We don’t appreciate that King was making demands, not wishes … We’ve mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity … We’ve failed to recognize that King was one of the most brutally divisive figures in American history - attacked not only by segregationists in the south but also by his own government, by more militant Black activists, and by white northern liberals. He was deliberately mischaracterized in his lifetime, and he remains so today.
Strongly recommend if you’re taking steps to (re) educate yourself about American history, white supremacy, racism, and the ways in which all three are inextricably intertwined.
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when it comes to writing about misogyny and female rage, Jessica Knoll is second to none. And Bright Young Women is incandescent with it.
It’s ostensibly about a serial killer, but it’s not actually about him at all. It’s about the women he killed and the women who loved them and the lengths to which they’ll go for justice, whatever that means to them. One storyline follows Pamela, a sorority president who’s always played by the rules and whose best friend was among the victims. My heart broke for her at the strangest moments - like when she finds herself alternating between picturing her best friend’s body, and thinking that she must let the hosts for that evening’s party know that they’ll be down one dish, since Denise had been asked to bring a dip. Knoll does an incredible job at articulating the disbelief of grief - and, later, the swell and crest of rage.
It’s propulsive, unforgettable, and utterly shattering - and I say that as someone who doesn’t normally enjoy thrillers or true crime.
Strongly recommend if you liked Knoll’s first book Luckiest Girl Alive and Megan Fernandes’ exquisitely barbed collection I Do Everything I’m Told.
Babel by R. F. Kuang.
I overlooked Babel: An Arcane History for far too long because I didn’t like the cover 😬 - which was, unequivocally, my mistake. Set at Oxford in an alternative version of Victorian England in which translations drive economic growth, it’s a footnote-heavy novel about colonization, education, and power. It’s got fantastical elements, and it’s wildly imaginative, but the questions at the heart of the story - what does it mean to be a colonizer? can resistance ever succeed peacefully? - ring vividly, violently true.
I don’t even know who to strongly recommend this book to since I’ve yet to meet anyone who hasn’t loved it! This is one of a few books that my husband and I were equally obsessed with (the last book to achieve this was City of Thieves by David Benioff).
So as not to overwhelm, I’ll leave the details of the last five for first thing 2024!
Thanks for reading Same Page SF and, more broadly, for being a good literary citizen. We hope you have a wonderful end to 2023.
These links will bring you to my Bookshop.org page, and I’ll earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase - but I’ll be delighted if you buy directly from one of our indie booksellers or borrow from the SFPL. If you do, please send me a note to let me know - it’ll make my day!