Except if you’re anything like legions of my friends who’ve moved a few times since undergrad, you probably don’t. And that’s precisely where reading becomes a burden; if you don’t like a rerun of Friends, you can just switch to a rerun of Seinfeld. But if you don’t like a book you’ve bought, G-d forbid, in hardcover, you’ve just flushed $25.50 down the toilet.  Anyone who’s made that mistake would think twice about buying another book, even from Moe’s or the Strand.

Plenty of local libraries are better stocked and more flexible than you remember, and what they don’t have they’ll bend over backwards to get for you.  In turn, libraries give you the flexibility to try something on a whim and hate it and not feel like you have to forgo lunch for the next week. To illustrate, I’m posting a list of all the books  I read, borrowed or acquired this month (with a little bleed-back into September), including the totals I spent on them, starting from the most recent and working backwards.

October:

1)Ted Conover, Routes of Man, review copy acquired from Mother Jones (in progress)

2) Zadie Smith, On Beauty, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (read)

3) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (read)

4) Patrick Neate, The London Pigeon Wars, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (began and returned w/o finishing)

5) Leslie Chang,  Factory Girls, San Francisco Public Library, Sunset Branch (in progress)

6) Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind, advanced copy acquired from Mother Jones (read)

7) Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, advanced copy acquired from Mother Jones (in progress)

And that’s just this month. Just saying

Michael Ventura quoted me being a badass in the Voice

“I grew up with doom and gloom,” counters Sonja Sharp, 23, who was paralyzed at eight and, despite being told she would never walk again, is now ambulatory. “So you can doom-and-gloom until you’re blue in the face, and I’ll yawn.” She knows things are “apocalyptic” now, but believes journalism will emerge all the stronger for it. “I decided when I was nine—and in a wheelchair—that I would write,” she says. “I still want to be a journalist because I’m stubborn, and dropping in on total strangers and having them open their lives to you is addictive, and I’m not a ‘just say no’ person.”

Sharp turned down an education beat at a Los Angeles weekly in favor of Columbia, and started in the newspaper concentration. “Journalism marries the two things in the world I’m actually good at—being nosy and writing for money,” she says. After graduating, Sharp landed a six-month internship at Mother Jones. “I don’t know where I’ll be next year, but I’ll be somewhere,” she says, adding that uncertainty is fine “when you’re young and you don’t mind living hand-to-mouth.”

From my post:

Charney and AA haven’t been exactly subtle in expressing their feelings on immigration. This is a company that advertises its manufacturing jobs exclusively on Los Angeles’s 107.1 Super Estrella and other Spanish language media. Yes, the announcer reminds applicants to bring their documents. But the company didn’t do a whole lot to make sure those documents weren’t fake. Then again, neither do the majority of California cash cow industries—agriculture, service, and hospitality, to name a few—nearly all of which rely on undocumented labor.

If you drive up to the AA factory as I did last Friday, you’ll be sure to see bright yellow signs in English and Spanish advertising the warehouse as a “sanctuary.” Half the employees you encounter will be wearing “Legalize LA” gear and many will be immigrants. Because of the slouching economy, the company said it won’t miss the immigrant workers if, after a “reasonable” amount of time to prove their legal status elapses, it’s forced to let them go. But the workers will probably miss American Apparel. Whatever you may think of figurehead Dov Charney, American Apparel is a model for sustainable labor in the US. Charney has built a neo-Marxist celebration of the worker, a happy little world where everybody makes $12/hour, eats subsidized lunches (they even have their own taco truck), has access to exclusive gear, and health benefits. It’s a far cry from the rest of the state.

White Tiger author Aravind Adiga chatted with me about his new book, Between the Assasinations

Aravind Adiga, the 34-year-old author of last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger, is back with a new India lovers’ delight: Between the Assassinations. The novel-in-stories takes the form of a guidebook to the fictional city of Kittur, a hamlet on the southwestern coast of India, as it existed between 1984 and 1991. Adiga spoke with Mother Jones from Toronto, Canada, about global terrorism, the problem with Bollywood, and why 1991 is the most important year ever.

If you don’t understand the political situation in Sri Lanka and would like to, please visit 3rdWorldImagineer and click through some of my analysis.