The Book Pirate

Blurb for the back cover:
“A fantastically enjoyable book”

Tales of the City, the first book in a current seven book series, centers around the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane in San Fransisco in the 1970’s. We enter the drama already in progress as we follow Mary Ann Singleton as she bids farewell to Ohio and extends her vacation permanently. Anna Madrigal is the landlady of 28 Barbary Land and acts as mother figure to the tenants often offering them advice and comfort in the form of marijuana. The other tenants include: Michael, the novel’s token gay man; Mona, Michael’s roommate and sorta-lesbian; Brian, former lawyer, current womanizer; and Norman, the mysterious stranger who lives on the roof and starts a relationship with Mary Ann. There are so many more characters in this book but to try and list them all here would be ridiculous.

Speaking of the characters, I would like to address one of the problems I had with this book. It seemed to me that all the characters knew everyone else and never ventured out of their social circle. If one character knew Jon, then so did everyone else and at least two people were sleeping with him. In the city of San Fransisco I would imagine that people knew other people that their friends did not know. That is not the case here. However, to try and include even more people in this novel would just make it harder to keep up with what everyone was doing. Instead I grew to view the characters not as people but as archetypes (the gay man, the cheating husband, girl who moves from small town to big city). Maybe this isn’t exactly what Joseph Campbell had in mind back in the day, but it works.

The way Tales of the City is written may at first seem a little odd. Each chapter is only three pages long and tend to focus only on one or two characters. This probably goes back to the fact that originally the text was originally serialized in the San Fransisco Chronicle. Maybe each chapter was published once a day. I don’t see the short chapters as a bad thing. This made it incredible easy to pick up and put back down if I needed.

Tales of the City is a fantastically enjoyable book that I quickly read and just as quickly purchased the second book in the series, More Tales of the City. My goal this summer is to read all seven books.