Our Books - Read On Public Transportation!

One of the life's cheap thrills for librarians is to see books we have selected in the hands of readers on the bus, MUNI or BART. That's why it was a delight to come across these images from the blog People Reading Books In Public Places.

image source: People Reading Books in Public Places

This book, photographed on the K Ingleside train, is clearly a San Francisco Public Library book - the barcode placed in the upper left hand corner and date label at the top of the spine are the clues.

The photographed reader is enjoying Simon Reynold's Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews, a companion to his earlier Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.

For all you Simon Reynold's fans we have his two newest books at the Library. Bring The Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop covers Reynold's more recent music journalism. His Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past is a work of cultural criticism where he argues that the instant availability of nearly all of audio musical history that we have with the advent of internet has contributed to a contemporary culture that revels too much in stylistic imitation at the expense of originality.

image source: People Reading Books in Public Places

The blogger identifies this second book as Found: A Daughter's Journey Home by actress Tatum O'Neal. She notes that it is a library book being read on BART - but we don't know which library it was borrowed from. It could be one of ours - as of today's writing, San Francisco Public Library has 16 copies of this title. If a copy is not available at your branch, place a hold.

Here is a summary of Found from our Library catalog: "The actress reveals her efforts to pull her life together, make peace with her children, and forge a fragile relationship with her estranged father, Ryan O'Neal, after twenty-five years of public and private feuding."

If you have already read Found and enjoyed it, we also have several copies of Tatum O'Neal's 2004 book, A Paper Life.

Reading List:

Bring The Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop by Simon Reynolds (Soft Skull Press, 2011).

Found: A Daughter's Journey Home by Tatum O'Neal; with Hilary Liftin (William Morrow, 2011).

A Paper Life by Tatum O'Neal (Harper Entertainment, 2004).

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds (Faber & Faber, 2011).

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds (Penguin Books, 2006).

Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds (Faber and Faber, 2009).