The best books about San Francisco

By Tim Martin

Should we start with “Tales of the City”? For a certain generation of readers, and for many who have come to them since, Armistead Maupin’s zillion-selling sequence of intertwined vignettes, starting in the hippy-dippy seventies and continuing through the AIDS epidemic to the early 21st century, are the quintessential San Francisco novels. Written with cheery élan and propelled by a humming engine of absurd coincidence, they’re the literary equivalent of a telenovela or a comforting Netflix binge – which, not coincidentally, is what they’re about to become. A leaf through the first few should let you know on which side of the Dickensian charm/banal tripe divide you fall. While you consider it, here are a few more options for your Bay Area reading list.

Rebecca Solnit,Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Written in 2010 and subsequently imitated/ripped off by who knows how many cunning exercises in data visualisation, this fabulous atlas of San Franciscan culture is both light-hearted and intensely serious-minded. Driven by Solnit’s searching intellect and backed up by a team of writers and illustrators, it maps the conscious and unconscious life of the area in wild and Borgesian fashion: butterfly habitats are plotted next to queer public spaces, artisan food producers mapped onto sites of toxic pollution and radioactivity, lairs of the military-industrial complex doodled alongside the peacenik landscape of Zen America. It’s a mind-expanding delight.