It’s been a grim, chaotic, and difficult year for many, and we’re not quite to the halfway mark. The weather has been strange, too, at least where I’m writing from in the Bay Area—warm and clear one moment and cloudy the next. The dogwoods are in bloom, and the all-too-brief lilac season is still underway in some places. But the elements are showing the first signs of summer—public school closures and nights of theater and music in the park are just around the corner. And we could all use some respite from political news.
Books, even when they consider serious problems, are often a salve. For the June California Book Club gathering, we’re reading Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, an insightful and clear-eyed blended account of wildfires in the state and chronic pain. And this summer, join us for illuminating discussions of three notable works: a reported nonfiction book, a graphic novel, and a nature journal.
CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA, BY ROSANNA XIA
July can be a time of fog on the Central and Northern California coast. Many Californians make trips to the beach to escape the heat in the cities and suburbs. Yet the Pacific coast is threatened in a way that not enough people attend to. Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline is a remarkable book about California and local community responses to sea rise precipitated by climate change. These are essays that take a kaleidoscopic view of sea rise, reporting on every angle, from property owners to activists, from scientists to public officials. Much in the state’s future depends on local efforts to stem harm from the erosion of the coast, California Against the Sea intelligently demonstrates. Some communities understand the tremendous dangers involved in sea rise, while others are reluctant to let the sea win. If you love the California coast, as so many of us do, you must read this urgent and beautiful work of journalism.
SHORTCOMINGS, BY ADRIAN TOMINE
August is likely to be a dry scorcher—disappear into a slim, honest graphic novel about race and intimacy that is sometimes marked by humor. In Shortcomings, which Adrian Tomine both wrote and drew, our misanthropic protagonist, Ben Tanaka, is a 30-year-old Japanese American who manages a Berkeley movie theater. It’s irritating to him to go to an Asian American film festival and watch a movie he thinks wouldn’t be good enough to show in his theater—with his cynical comments about why the audience likes the film, he annoys his girlfriend, Miko, who manages the festival. We later learn that she finds him “relentlessly negative,” but their perhaps more-pressing problem is that he prefers white women. Miko takes a New York City internship, which leaves Ben free to pursue his interests. He and his best friend, Alice Kim, a lesbian, dissect their love lives as they unfold. Shortcomings provokes us to consider whether Ben is relentlessly negative—or suffering from the racial melancholia of a lonely individual up against challenging social dynamics.
THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES, BY AMY TAN
Fall migration usually starts in September in California, and that month, we’ll be featuring bestselling author Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Seeking refuge from racism and divisiveness in 2016, Tan took a nature-journaling class with John Muir Laws. She couldn’t drive to other locations to bird-watch and began drawing those birds that came to her backyard. The Backyard Bird Chronicles uses excerpts from journal entries across five years; these include both written notes and lovely colored-pencil drawings. The entries demonstrate careful attention to the plumage and expressions of birds—dark-eyed juncos, California scrub jays, pygmy nuthatches, great horned owls, and Cooper’s hawks—as well as their encounters with one another and Tan. Occasionally, these entries take the form of dramatic cartoons, in which the birds are rendered with strong personalities. Both intimate and memorable, the book is built around a practice different from the one Tan’s taken with her novels; in these pages, she was free from the creative expectations of others. It’s a marvelous journal.•
Join us on Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Manjula Martin will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Last Fire Season. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read an opening passage from The Last Fire Season. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Read CBC author Manjula Martin’s resonant list of reasons she writes. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the event to discuss Gold Fame Citrus, read a recap or watch the video. —Alta
ARTIST-MOTHER
Read author Bridget Quinn’s illuminating review of Jordan Troeller’s book Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury. —Alta
SAN FRANCISCO REPORTER
Read Anita Snow’s review of past CBC author Isabel Allende’s latest novel, My Name Is Emilia del Valle. —San Francisco Chronicle
“DAWNING MASS MEDIUM”
Todd S. Purdum, author of the forthcoming Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, writes about what the story of Arnaz could teach Hollywood today. —New York Times
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