San Francisco Book Group Seeking New Members

For twenty years, we have been meeting on the first Monday of the month for a potluck dinner and literary discussion.

Authors have ranged from Jules Verne to V.S. Naipaul, Fanny Burney to James Baldwin, Claude Levi-Strauss to Ulysses S. Grant, Iris Murdoch to Kenneth Grahame, Thorsten Veblen to Jim Thompson

If interested, call Frank Hanny, (415)552-2729 or email

Below, some of the books we have read, with my comments:


A Bend in the River	V.S. Naipaul	Flawed but very powerful story of post-colonialism in Africa.
A Distant Mirror	Barbara Tuchman	More than you wanted to know about the 4 horsemen in the 14th century.
A Frolic of His Own	William Gaddis	Badly in need of copy editing.
A Hero of Our Time	Mihail Lermontov	Greater than the sum of its parts, and very Russian.
A Modern Instance	William Dean Howells	Excellent 19th Century American social problem novel.
A Severed Head	Iris Murdoch	Cynical and amusing.
Adam's Diary/Eve's Diary	Mark Twain	Good yucks.
Against Criticism	Susan Sontag	Very dry, not very rigorous.
Among the Believers	VS Naipaul	Aspects of the anti-Enlightenment.
Animal Family, The	Randall Jarrell	Charming fantasy.
Atonement	Ian McEwan	Well written and researched, but somehow forgettable.
Autobiography	Benjamin Franklin	Venery for health, but not to excess.
Autobiography	Charles Darwin	Stick to the major works.
Autobiography	Dalai Lama	A sheltered childhood.
Autobiography	W B Yeats	Fairies in the garden of a tone-deaf laureate, but fascinating nonetheless.
Belinda	Maria Edgeworth	Didactic but intriguing. I preferred the characters before they reformed…
Benito Cereno	Herman Melville	Tabloid material transformed by genius.
Bible	Ywh	A popular religious text.
Black Prince, The	Iris Murdoch	Dark, strange and brilliant.
Brothers Karamazov	Dostoyevsky	Remember the TV series with Fred MacMurray?
Castle Rackrent	Mariah Edgeworth	Delightful 18th Century Anglo Irish satire.
Chaos	James Gleick	Like a good 3 part New Yorker article.
Collected Poems of	Elizabeth Bishop	2nd rate
Confessions	Jean Jaques Rousseau	A fascinating document about a not very nice man with a persecution complex.
Conformist, The	Alberto Moravia	Fascism anatomized.
Consciousness Explained	Daniel Dennett	An amusing materialist.
Continental Op, The	Dashiell Hammett	Bad early stories. Read The Dain Curse or Red Harvest instead.
Crowds and Power	Elias Canetti	Polyymathic brilliance from the original of Iris Murdoch’s magus figure.
Death Comes For the Archbishop	Willa Cather	Good enough to overcome the anti-Catholic bias I acquired in parochial school.
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark	Carl Sagan	People believe the goddamndest piffle. Carl deplores this at tedious length.
Devils of Loudun, The	Aldous Huxley	The spiritual biography of a deranged exorcist by an admirer. Bludgeoning erudition brought to bear on the evils of intellectual pride.
Education of Henry Adams	Henry Adams	Fascinating, dripping with ideas and beautifully written, a surprise hit.
Epitaph of a Small Winner	Machado de Assis	19th Century Brazil's foremost, a philosophical fantasy narrated by the deceased protagonist.
Evelina	Fanny Burney	Solidly engaging, and occasionally startling in its depiction of a violent, vulgar and amoral era.
Fathers and Sons	Ivan Turgenev	Short and almost perfect.
Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	Not bad for a 19 year old girl.
Go Tell It on the Mountain	James Baldwin	An impressive meeting of the King James Bible and Freud.
Guns, Germs and Steel	Jared Diamond	Firstest with the mostest.
Heartbreak House	G B Shaw	For once a drama richer than the didactic purpose stated in its preface.
His Monkey Wife	John Collier	Exquisite irony.
House of Mirth	Edith Wharton	Very fine.
Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	Several novels about a boy.
Innocents Abroad	Mark Twain	The Ugly American.
Insurgent Mexico	John Reed	Participatory journalism by a romantic.
Invisible Cities	Italo Calvino	Metaphysical candy fluff.
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	Great! Read Villette too, which is even better!
Jurgen	James Branch Cabell	A monstrous clever fellow.
Language, Truth and Logic	A. J. Ayer	Clever, clever, clever...
Life of Charlotte Bronte	Mrs Gaskell	A Gothic biography of a gothic novelist. Duty over pleasure.
Lives of A Cell, The	Lewis Thomas	Biological belles lettres.
Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	Big yucks.
Man Who Loved Children, The	Christina Stead	Unique and wonderful book by an unclassifiable writer. Her Letty Fox, Her Luck is also great.
Martian Time Slip	Phillip K. Dick	Another head-twister from the master paranoiac.
McTeague	Frank Norris	Not a pretty picture, but sticks to your ribs.
Memoirs of US Grant	Ulysses S. Grant	Another surprise hit: terrific prose, great sincerity and character.
Mind of A Mnemonist	A. J. Luria	Fascinating study of a man whose extraordinary memory seemed of little benefit.
Moby Dick	Melville	Many novels centering on a whale.
Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	I prefer Orlando .
Mysteries of Winterthurn, The	Joyce Carol Oates	Repulsive and tin eared 19 ^th century gothic pastiche.
Nicholas Nickelby	Dickens	Didactic and sentimental.
No Man Knows My History	Fawn Brodie	Bio of Joseph Smith, the man who found God in his hat.
No Man’s Land	Harold Pinter	I saw the original production with Gielgud and Richardson.
Nothing	Henry Green	A minor 20th C. English writer with a unique style and sensibility.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit	Jeanette Winterson	Slight.
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The	George Meredith	18 ^th century style, 19 ^th century psychology.
Our Mutual Friend	Charles Dickens	Characters you will never forget. The Master.
Palace Walk	Mahfouz	Solid 19 ^th century novel.
Pere Goriot	Honore de Balzac	Oddly disappointing and sentimental. Read Droll Stories instead.
Posession	A. S. Byatt	Talent misused. The 19th C. pastiche is clever, the 20th C. satire tedious.
Professor and the Madman, The	Simon Winchester	An ok version of a terrific true story.
Psychopathology of Everyday Life	Freud	The book that introduced the "Freudian slip" into popular culture. Ponderously Teutonic but fascinating.
Rasselas	Samuel Johnson	Exquisite style and charming story. 18th C.
Rats, Lice and History	Hans Zinsser	Our friend the plague. Fascinating.
Redburn	Melville	A potboiler by a genius
Remains of the Day	Ishiguro	Honest but forgettable.
Roderick Random	Tobias Smollett	A comic masterpiece.
Savages	Joe Kane	Journalism re South American Indians and oil politics. Well done.
Seven Years in Tibet	Heinrich Harrer	Someone was ready when opportunity knocked.
Six Character in Search of an Author	Luigi Pirandello	No doubt a novel exercise in it’s day. Seems dated now.
Some Buried Caesar	Rex Stout	Classic murder mystery.
Songlines	Bruce Chatwin	Excellent travel book on Australia , In Patagonia is even better.
Souls of Black Folks	W.E.B. Du Bois	Sad but true.
Sylvie and Bruno	Lewis Carroll	Twee. Odd. Twee.
Ballad of the Sad Café, The	Carson McCullers	Disappointing Southern Gothic.
Beast in the Jungle, The	Henry James	Short and almost perfect.
Betrothed, The	Allesandro Manzoni	Italy's Sir Walter Scott. Scene of ruffians carousing atop a wagonload of plague victims astonishing.
Death of Ivan Illich, The	Leo Tolstoy	Short and almost perfect.
Egoist, The	George Meredith	A Jane Austen plot and a very elaborate prose style. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it.
Girls of Slender Means, The	Muriel Spark	Elegant! read "The Comforters", "Memento Mori" and "Ballad of Peckham Rye" while you’re at it.
Good Soldier, The	Ford Madox Ford	A painful gem. Also read his modernist masterpiece Parade's End .
Hobbit, The	Tolkien	A better if more modest work than the trilogy.
Killer Inside Me, The	Jim Thompson	The author is a very sick man.
Masterpiece, The	Emil Zola	Bleak and powerful.
Monk, The	Matthew G Lewis	Torture, incest, rape, necrophilia, transvestism, Satanic posession and clerical incelibacy: how can you go wrong!
Old Regime and the French Revolution , The	Alexis de Toqueville	A very smart guy, with some very deep insights.
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The	George Meredith	18 ^th century style, 20 ^th century psychology.
Oresteia, The	Aeschylus	All in the family, Greek style.
Sea and the Jungle, The	H M Tomlinson	Terrific travel book, and a real vocabulary builder.
Things They Carried, The	Tim O'Brien	Vietnam
Virginian, The	Owen Wister	Smile when you say that.
Warden, The / Barchester Towers	Anthony Trollope	A 2 piece comic gem.
Theory of the Leisure Class	Thorsten Veblen	Absolutely brilliant! One of the great satires, and a profoundly insightful work of sociology at the same time!
Tiny Alice	Edward Albee	A disturbing theological puzzle.
Tragic Muse	Henry James	Very minor James.
Travels of	Marco Polo	An utterly prosaic business man goes to another planet, and for 500 years is believed a liar.
Travels With A Donkey	Robert Louis Stevenson	One of the prose masterworks of the 19th C. Absolutely delightful!
Tristes Tropiques	Claude Levi-Strauss	Intellectually scintillating, stylistically superb, another pick hit!
Under Milkwood	Dylan Thomas	Music to the ears.
Undiscovered Self, The	Carl Jung	A highly implausible political speech which proposes direct experience of God as the only alternative to Soviet style totalitarianism, style good, content incoherent.
USA	John Dos Passos	Unique modernist masterpiece and sociological document at once.
Valleys of the Assassins	Freya Stark	An English broad with serious chutzpah (and a good prose style) wanders around Persia in the early 1930's.
Voyage of the Beagle	Charles Darwin	Everyone loved this: excellent plain style, fascinating observations, and a delightfully modest narrator.
Voyages of Dr Dolittle	Hugh Lofting	Wonderful, and thankfully not bowdlerized in my copy!
Wapshot Chronicle, The	John Cheever	Perhaps the finest American stylist of the post WWII era. A very funny book.
Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys	Skip this and read "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie".
Wind in the Willows, The	Kenneth Grahame	Poetically wonderful, albeit with some disturbing political angles when read as an adult.
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions	Dostoievski	Witty, Burkean pan-Slavism, believe it or not.
Woman in White, The	Wilkie Collins	Great 19th C. mystery. The Moonstone is also terrific.
Wonderful Life	Stephen J. Gould	Pretty unreadable. His essay collections are much better.
You Must Remember This	Joyce Carol Oates	Surprisingly good sex scenes.
Young Torless	Robert Musil	Fin de Siecle S&M in a military academy. Skip this and read The Man Without Qualities .
21 Balloons	William Pene Du Bois	Delightful text and pictures.
44: The Mysterious Stranger	Mark Twain	For devotees of textual variants.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea	Jules Verne	A great novel virtually devoid of psychology.
Undaunted Courage	Stephen Ambrose	Bipolar exploration.
A Coffin for Dimitrios	Eric Ambler	The pattern tale of Balkan suspense.
Quark and the Jaguar, The	Murray Gell-Mann	A Nobelist, lucid on how complexity derives from simplicity.
Decline and Fall	Evelyn Waugh	Cruel, funny and very well written.
Possessed, The	Dostoyesvsky	Surprisingly funny, psychologically brilliant, politically deplorable, a masterpiece.
Circular Staircase, The	Mary Roberts Rinehart	An old dark house mystery from the golden age.
Story of My Experiments With Truth, The	Ghandi	Crank diets and sexual anxiety lead to Indian independence.
Mysterious Island, The	Jules Verne	Men without women. Utopia. Darn that volcano.
Travels With Charley	John Steinbeck	An articulate boy and his dog.
Iris Murdoch, A Life	Peter J. Conradi	So she screwed around. Read the novels instead.
The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	Scary.
The Sixth Extinction	Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin	Dead critters.
A Midsummer Night's Dream	Shakspeare	Whimsical.
Betrayal	Harold Pinter	See the film!
Selected Letter of Gustave Flaubert	ed/trans Francis Steegmuller	Hard to tell if he was leading or following the trends.
Journal of the Plague Year	Defoe	Further proof of intelligent design. Amazing.
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War	Barbara Ehrenreich	Read her sources, including Canetti, instead.
V.	Thomas Pynchon	Terrifying intelligence, occasional silliness. "Mondaugen's Story" will leave permanent scars.
Miles, the Autobiography	Miles Davis	Listen to the music, and skip this narcissistic piece of crap.
The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	Best villainess in literature!
Memoirs of a Polyglot	William Gerhardie	Fascinating memoirs of a British upbringing in pre-Soviet Russia..
My Name is Red	Orhan Pamuk	A colorful and intelligent novel of ideas.
Two Years Before the Mast	William Henry Dana	California before the real estate boom, and well before OSHA.
Palimpsest	Gore Vidal	Written in a hurry, presumably for money.
The Greek Coffin Mystery	Ellery Queen	Enough plot for 4 mysteries. Still under the shadow of SS Van Dine.
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution	Howard Rheingold	If one must read ephemera, it should be current. This was not.
Uncle Tom's Cabin	Harriet Beecher Stowe	A solid 19th century novel which gives the devil some of the best tunes.
Turkish Reflections	Mary Lee Settle	Ms. Settle seems preoccupied with her place in the pecking order of knowingness, and occasionally writes sentences that aren't.
Sirens of Titan	Kurt Vonnegut	This warped my juvenile mind, and holds up very well.
A History of the End of the World	Jonathan Kirsch	The embedded text of the Book of the Apocalypse is far more interesting than the trite commentary.
Parzival	Wolfram Von Eschenbach	A surprisingly readable Medieval Arthurian romance.
All the Shah's Men	Stephen Kinzer	The prototypical CIA "intervention", and a truly unfortunate precedent.
Hajji Baba of Ispahan	J.J.Morier	An hilarious amoral picaresque.
The River of Doubt	Candice Millard	She never met a cliche she didn't like.
The Bachelor of Arts	R.K. Narayan	A lovely bit of writing, doubly impressive since in the author's second language.
Dead Souls	Nikolai Gogol	Funny, Russian, unique.
The Birth of Tragedy	Friedrich Nietzsche	Utterly improbable, but brilliant.
Satanic Verses	Salman Rushdie	The consequences of being too famous to submit to an editor.
The Cheese and the Worms	Carlo Ginzburg	When belonging to a book group had consequences.
West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story	Tamim Ansary	A surprisingly uninteresting man from a very interesting background.
Coast of Utopia	Tom Stoppard	Read Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers" instead.
Bury me standing : the Gypsies and their journey	Isabel Fonseca	Fascinating look into a genuinely alien culture, and a test case for moral relativism.
Angle of Repose	Wallace Stegner	Why do these dual historical/contemporary narratives seem to do better at representing the past?
The Wisdom of Crowds	James Surowiecki	Note recent counter evidence.
John Adams	David McCullough	Workmanlike bio.
King Hereafter	Dorothy Dunnett	Her usual astonishing erudition, and a plausible representation of the mind of a political genius.
Map of Another Town	M.F.K. Fisher	Neurasthenic sensibility, meticulous prose.
The New Life	Orhan Pamuk	An endless, self indulgent, post-modern binge.
Rabbit, Run	John Updike	He really could write.
The Language of Clothes	Alison Lurie	Mildly amusing journalism.
If Beale Street Could Talk	James Baldwin	Minor work by major writer.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise	Abelard and Heloise	Love letters from Abelard to himself. The pattern intellectual male egotist.
Disgrace	JM Coetzee	Depressive, morally incoherent, fascinating.
The Buried Mirror	Carlos Fuentes	The book of the TV show meets the ramblings of the autodidact.
American Lion : Andrew Jackson in the White House	Jon Meacham	Earnest, but preoccuipied with tabloid scandal.
Billy Budd	Herman Melville	Motiveless evil, and a temptation to reductionism.
The White Tiger	Aravind Adiga	Black humor, and a consistent narrative voice.
The Canon	Natalie Angier	NY Times science journalist makes many feeble puns.
The Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	ICharming, but I prefer the movie.
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons	I saw something nasty in the woodshed.
English Hours	Henry James	"...how veracious and courteous the fresh, pure journals."
Wise Blood	Flannery O'Connor	A most unusual disquisition on the spiritual life.
Wind, Sand, and Stars	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	A pre-modern sensibility enamored of modernity.
The Franchise Affair	Josephine Tey	An excellent mystery without a death.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men	James Agee	Journalism and self abnegation.
The Twelve Chairs	Ilf & Petrov	A very funny Soviet satire. Really!
The Viceroy of Ouida	Bruce Chatwin	Not a travel book. Had he been reading "100 Years of Solitude"?
The Quiet American	Graham Greene	Cynical, wise and sad.
The Lost World of the Kalahari	Laurens Van Der Post	Lovely writing about some ambitious but incompetent travelers.
Treasure Island	R.L. Stevenson	A gem. One of the best villains in literature.
Up From Slavery	Booker T. Washington	Fascinating and still topical.
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	A modernist masterpiece, and yes, a shocking commentary on race.Eerie to read so soon after Booker T. Washington
Baltasar and Blimunda	José Saramago	Odd, lovely, cruel, and sad.
The Demon in the House	Angela Thirkell	Comic gem that does not obscure the egotism of childhood.
Fabled Shore	Rose Macaulay	Portugal as it once was.
My Antonia	Willa Cather	A masterpiece of unrequited love.
Noble Savages	Napoleon A. Chagnon	A late career defense of the very good "Yanomamo, the fierce people" (1964)
Five Children and It	E. Nesbit	Children's literature.
The Waning of the Middle Ages	Johan Huizinga	Life was very different then, as the author makes beautifully clear.
The Invisible Man	H.G. Wells	Rustic comedy abruptly turns to moral tragedy. A great read nonetheless.
Cain	Jose Saramago	Biblical pastiche by brilliant Portugese eccentric.
At the Back of the North Wind	George MacDonald	I am decidely neither a Christian nor a mystic, but I loved this.
A Movable Feast	Ernest Hemingway	Papa engages in nostalgie de la boue, and mocks the infinitely superior writer Ford Madox Ford.
Night and the City	Gerald Kersh	An interesting early novel by an interesting minor writer. Very different in tone from the excellent film.
The Crime of Father Amaro	Eça de Queirós	A 19th century Portugese anticlerical masterpiece on the level of Flaubert.
The Great Cat Massacre	Robert Darnton	Fine essays in cultural history.
The Man in the High Castle	Phillip K. Dick	Eerie alternate history.
Self-Consciousness	John Updike	Not quite the Confessions of Rousseau, but warts and all.
On the Marble Cliffs	Ernst Jünger	A fascinating anti-Nazi poetic parable by a right wing nationalist, published in Nazi Germany.
Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	A very funny angry young man.
The Memoirs of Hadrian	Marguerite Yourcenar	A brilliant and plausible entree into the mind of a Roman emperor who is a political genius.
The Stammering Century	Gilbert Seldes	Cults and cranks of the 19th century U.S. Folly from the top down.
Design for Living	Noel Coward	Brittle. Brittle. Brittle. The movie script by Ben Hecht is better.
West with the Night	Beryl Markham	A lost world.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber	Julian Rubinstein	True crime as farce in post-communist Eastern Europe.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	Rebecca Skloot	A piece of science history turns into a tragedy of familial dysfunction.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont	Elizabeth Taylor	Old age, death, and snobbery in a superb black comedy.
100 Years of Solicitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Loved this as a stoned college boy, found it annnoyingly arbitrary this time.
Night and the City	Gerald Kersh	Interestingly less dark than the film, and perhaps less good, but a distinctive voice.
Domestic Manners of the Americans	Mrs. Frances Trollope	Spiritual ancestors of the Trumpites anatomized.
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana	Carlo Emilio Gadda	Modernist/surrealist murder mystery set in Fascist Italy. Unique.
The devil in the white city	Erik Larson	An unfortunate collision between architetcural/cultural history and true crime. Should have been 2 shorter books.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court	Mark Twain	Terrific piece of storytelling.
Naples '44	Norman Lewis	An observant young Briton's wonderfully written journal of the Allied occupation of Italy, as managed by Lucky Luciano.
A Study in Scarlet & The Sign of the Four	Arthur Conan Doyle	Holmes.
Into the Heart of Borneo	Redmond O'Hanlon	Recreational hell-holing. Hilarious if you like loathesome diseases and parasites.
The Bottle Factory Outing	Beryl Bainbridge	Polished style and black humor.
The Shellfish Gene	Richard Dawkins	A clever if not entirely convincing thought experiment.
She	H. Rider Haggard	Masterpiece of mystical adventure.
Pack My Bag	Henry Green	Memoir by the modernist novelist. Worthwhile, but the fiction is better.
The School for Scandal	Richard Brinsley Sheridan	Wit and construction at an exalted level.
The Bramble Bush	Karl N. Llewellyn	Good plain style on the why and wherefore of the Law.
Numero Zero	Umberto Eco
Unreliable Memoirs	Clive James	The Antipodean youth of a very funny man.
Lament for a Maker	Michael Innes	A brilliant mystery told in Scots dialect.
According to Queeney	Beryl Bainbridge	Meta-biography of Samuel Johnson from the POV of his patron's daughter.
Tough Trip Through Paradise	Andrew Garcia	Memoirs of a sqaw man. Vivid idioms.
Casino Royale	Ian Fleming	Memorably disturbing torture scene, surprisingly inept secret agent, massive plot holes.