“The horrible thing,” Rich said, after finishing
Charlotte’s Web
, “is that I’m never going to be able to kill a spider again.”
When I’d learned Rich had somehow managed to get through childhood without meeting the talking spider who saved an innocent pig, I gave him my copy, pulling it out of the huge pile of banned books in our living room.
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
Charlotte’s Web
was
banned
? Why? Seriously, why?
It seems some Kansas folks were offended by the book’s talking animals, insisting they’re “unnatural and blasphemous, as humans are the highest level of God’s creation.” Really? Have the seen the human folly in the headlines lately? Give me pigs and spiders any day.
To me, restricting kids’ access to books is like depriving them of oxygen or the right to eat chocolate on Halloween. How is anyone supposed to navigate childhood without lessons from Harry Potter or Goosebumps? Who can make sense of the adult world without
To Kill a Mockingbird, the Diary of Anne Frank,
and
The Great Gatsby
(
all removed from many high schools; see the banned lists here
)?
“I am a parent myself,” wrote
Khaled Hosseini, author of the much-banned novel
The Kite Runner. “
I understand the parental impulse to safeguard our children from harm. But banning books like
The Kite Runner
doesn’t ‘protect’ students at all. It betrays them. It robs them of the chance that we as parents and instructors owe them, the chance to broaden their human community, to let them walk the world in another’s shoes for a while, to foster empathy for others, to be challenged by the experience and perhaps take a small step toward becoming fuller, richer versions of themselves.”
I was horrified to discover that in the past three years,
6528 books have been targeted for censorship
in the US, according to
National Library Association
records. Challenges started in public schools and spread to public libraries. Statewide bans have begun. There’s talk of national book bans in 2025.
What can we do to protect our freedom to read? That’s the subject of discussions taking place this week all over America in libraries, bookstores, and coffee houses, because this is national
Banned Books Week
. Ask your local librarians and booksellers what they’ve got planned.
I’ve organized events in all the bookstores in San Rafael, the city nearest me, and I’ll be participating in the three shown below. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, drop in and say hello; I love meeting readers and catching up with old friends!
Find me at these San Rafael events:
Thursday 9/26
Rebound Bookstore | Banned Book Reading
6:00 – 7:30 PM | 1611 Fourth Street
Saturday 9/28
Friends Books
|
Banned Book Lottery
11:00 AM – 2:00 PM | 1016 C Street
Saturday 9/28
Copperfield’s Books
|
Banned Books Community Read-Aloud
2:00 – 3:00 PM | 1200 Fourth Street
Part of my outrage over book banning comes from hanging around City Lights and other activist bookstores I visited as part of my
Cheap and Cheerful San Francisco
project this summer. Rich and I made 20 trips into the city to investigate reports that it’s become a dystopian hellscape mired in a “doom loop” of poverty, drugs, and hopelessness.
Don’t believe a word of it.
I’ve been talking to San Franciscans, checking out the mood, eating in modest cafes, bistros, and diners, and asking everyone about the doom loop — a subject that always inspires hearty guffaws. “Doom loop? Hell no. This is a great place to live,” I was told over and over. Then they’d point me toward another fabulous eatery, more great bookstores, parks I shouldn’t pass up…
News flash! The media has been telling a lot of whoppers about San Francisco.
“A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.” Versions of this saying are attributed to everyone from Churchill to Mark Twain to Chinese philosophers, and proof of its accuracy can be found in the doom loop narrative. Much of the sneering is politically motivated; the Left Coast is a popular target. And after decades of writing about how cool San Francisco is, many jaded journalists cannot resist the chance to jump on the bandwagon and get snarky at the city’s expense.
But the truth is out there, my friends, and fact-checking with reliable sources reveals a very different picture.
Crime rates in San Francisco are dropping
, reports the SFPD. Year-to-date, larceny theft — including car and retail robbery — is down 40%. Homicides are 39% lower. There are 17% fewer burglaries. People and property are safer.
Money is pouring into San Francisco
. “In 2023, AI-related startups in the San Francisco Bay Area received an estimated $27.4 billion in investments — 52.6% of the global total — from seed, venture and private equity investors,”
Forbes
reports. San Francisco has the highest number of AI job postings in the nation, gearing up for what Price Waterhouse Cooper predicts will soon be a $15.7 trillion industry.
Of course, we have major problems; what metropolis doesn’t? But struggling to get a disaster-prone city under some semblance of control has always been our default status.
Coping with challenges hones our strength and creativity. As Orson Welles said in
The Third Man
: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
San Francisco isn’t a cuckoo clock kind of town. During its turbulent history, it’s given the world Levi’s, TV, 911 dispatch, no-fault divorce, Beatniks, The Summer of Love, gay marriage, fortune cookies, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, Eggo waffles, martinis, iPhones, and driverless taxis, to name but a few.
Above all, San Francisco is tremendous fun. Whether you’re as outrageous as Janis Joplin, just want a quiet place to read the books you love, or have a hankering for dive bars and dim sum, this city has it all. Where to start? Here are our suggestions.
Best Food
Foghorn Taproom
The Grove
Marcella’s Lasagneria
Delicious Dim Sum
Best Bars
Tempest Bar & Box Kitchen
Vesuvio Café
Twin Peaks Tavern
Best Bookstores
City Lights
Fabulosa
Best Tour
Tenderloin Tour
Best Museum
Beat Museum
Best Transportation
Waymo driverless taxis
I was touched by the kindness we received wherever we went (except the
Tonga Room
, of course, and the area patrolled by the
Waymo Vigilante
). And I am deeply impressed with the way the city continues to champion personal freedom. You can be yourself here. And that is a gift beyond price.
“San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people,” remarked author Rudyard Kipling. “San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave.”
But leave it I must. Next week Rich and I head back to Seville and our Spanish life. It’s not easy saying goodbye (cue Tony Bennett’s
I Left My Heart in San Francisco
), but we are moving on to fresh loony adventures in Europe. Stay tuned for updates!
ON THE ROAD AGAIN NEXT WEEK
I will have to skip next week’s post to accommodate my travel schedule, but after that I’ll have all new stuff to write about.
This is the last post in my series
OUT TO LUNCH IN
CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO
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