New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2010

Itching for something new to read? Look no further. Below I repost The New York Times' complete Sunday Review of 100 Notable Books from 2010. Enjoy.

(Source: The New York Times, Sunday Review, Nov 24th, 2010)

Fiction & Poetry

American Subversive: By David Goodwillie. (Scribner, $25.) A bombing unites a blogger and a beautiful eco-terrorist in this literary thriller, an exploration of what motivates radicalism in an age of disillusion.


Angelology: By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings.


The Ask: By Sam Lipsyte. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job is the protagonist of this darkly humorous satire, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.


Bound: By Antonya Nelson. (Bloomsbury, $25.) For Nelson’s complacent heroine, the death of an estranged friend elicits memories of their reckless youth.


Comedy in a Minor Key: By Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Set in Nazi-occupied Europe, this novel, appearing only now in English, is a mid-century masterpiece by the centenarian Keilson, who served in the Dutch resistance.




Double Happiness: By Mary-Beth Hughes. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Hughes likes to juxtapose her characters’ relative passivity with the knife edge of evil within or, more often, outside them.

Foreign Bodies: By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) This nimble, entertaining homage to Henry James’s late work “The Ambassadors,” in which an American heads to Paris to retrieve a wayward son, brilliantly upends the theme, meaning and stylistic manner of its revered precursor.


Freedom: By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.


Fun With Problems: By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Stone’s collection.


Girl by the Road at Night: By David Rabe. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) In this tale of war and eros, two young people from opposite ends of the earth are caught up in events far beyond their control.


The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: By Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.


Great House: By Nicole Krauss. (Norton, $24.95.) In this tragic vision of a novel, Nadia, a writer in New York, faces a wrenching parting when a girl shows up to claim an enormous desk that has been in her safekeeping for decades.


How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: By Charles Yu. (Pantheon, $24.) Yu wraps his lonely story of a time machine repairman in layers of gorgeous meta-science-fiction.


How to Read the Air: By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $25.95.) Mengestu’s own origins inform this tale of an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his parents.


I Curse the River of Time: By Per Petterson. Translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson. (Graywolf, $23.) This novel’s lonely Scandinavian protagonist grapples with divorce, death and the fall of the Berlin Wall.


Ilustrado: By Miguel Syjuco. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A murder mystery punctuated with serious philosophical musings, this novel traces 150 years of Filipino history, posing questions about identity and art, exile and duty.


The Imperfectionists: By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.


The Invisible Bridge: By Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $26.95.) Orringer’s protagonist is a Jewish architecture student in late-1930s Paris forced to return home to Hungary ahead of the Nazi invasion there.

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip: By Lisa Robertson. (Coach House, paper, $14.95.) In these intellectual poems, the experimental curtains suddenly part to reveal clear, durable truth.


The Living Fire: By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $27.) Hirsch’s “living fire” is an irrational counterforce with which he balances his dignified quotidian.


The Love Song: By Andrea Levy. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)Levy’s high-spirited, ambitious heroine works on a plantation in the final days of slavery in Jamaica.


The Lost Books of the Odyssey: By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.


The Lotus Eaters: By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The photojournalist heroine of Soli’s Vietnam War novel ponders whether those who represent war merely replicate its violence.


Matterhorn: By Karl Marlantes. (El León Literary Arts/Atlantic Monthly, $24.95.) In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.


Memory Wall: By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?


Mr. Peanut: By Adam Ross. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.


The Nearest Exit: By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) The C.I.A. spy in this thriller is sick of his trade’s duplicity, amorality and rootlessness.


The New Yorker Stories: By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $30.) This collection of tales dating back to 1974 lets readers imagine their way into a New Yorker fiction editor’s moment of discovery.


One Day: By David Nicholls. (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls’s nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the halting romance of two children of the ’80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff.


The Privileges: By Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $25.) In this contemporary morality tale, a family stumbles along, rich and dysfunctional, without ethical or moral responsibility.


Room: By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.


The Same River Twice: By Ted Mooney. (Knopf, $26.95.) In this nuanced literary thriller, a deal to acquire Soviet-era cultural artifacts puts a Parisian clothing designer and her filmmaker husband in peril.


Selected Stories: By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) These stories, gathered from Trevor’s last four collections, are frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.


Shadow Tag: By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.


Solar: By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan’s funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist’s plans against global warming.


Something Red: By Jennifer Gilmore. (Scribner, $25.) Gilmore’s contemplative second novel explores the lost ideals and lingering illusions of a family once politically committed to bettering the world.

Sourland: By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Oates explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way.


The Spot: By David Means. (Faber & Faber, $23.) Like Beckett, Means reveals a God-like inclination to see his characters as forsaken case studies.


Super Sad True Love Story: By Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $26.) Exhilarating prose illuminates the horrors of a future America in this satire.


The Surendered: By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.


The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: By David Mitchell. (Random House, $26.) Mitchell’s historical novel about a young Dutchman in Edo-era Japan is an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of an adventurous rescue tale.


The Three Weissmanns of Westport: By Cathleen Schine. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Two Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.


To the End of the Land: By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two friends are deeply involved with the same woman in this somber, haunting novel of love and loyalty in time of conflict, set in Israel between 1967 and 2000.


Vida: By Patricia Engel. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Engel’s understated stories are told from the perspective of a daughter of Colombian immigrants.


A Visit from the Goon Squad: By Jennifer Egan. (Knopf, $25.95.) In her centrifugal, unclassifiably elaborate narrative, Egan creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them.


What Becomes: By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Though the characters in her harrowing fourth collection buckle under the weight of misfortune, Kennedy can go from darkness to humor in a heartbeat.


White Egrets: By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection is intensely personal, an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth.


Wild Child: By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) In these tales, Boyle continues his career-long interest in man’s vexed tussles with nature.


Nonfiction 


All the Devils are Here: By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/Penguin, $32.95.) More than offering a backward look, this account of the disaster of 2008 helps explain today’s troubling 


Apollo's Angels: By Jennifer Homans. (Random House, $35.) The question of classical ballet’s very survival lies at the heart of this eloquent, truly definitive history, which traces dance across four centuries of wars and revolutions, both artistic and political.


Big Girls Don't Cry: By Rebecca Traister. (Free Press, $26.) A colorful, emotional argument that 2008 gave feminism a thrilling “new life.”


The Book in the Renaissance: By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.)A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.


The Bridge: By David Remnick. (Knopf, $29.95.) This study of Obama before he became president, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”


Changing My Mind: By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The quirky pleasures here are due in part to Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”


Charlie Chan: By Yunte Huang. (Norton, $26.95.) The urbane presentation of Earl Derr Biggers’s fictional Chinese sleuth, in print and in film, ran counter to the racism of his era.


Christianity: By Diarmaid MacCulloch. (Viking, $45.) MacCulloch traces the faith’s history through classical philosophy and Jewish tradition, fantastical visions and cold calculations, loving sacrifices and imperial ambitions.


Cleopatra: By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence.


Colonel Roosevelt: By Edmund Morris. (Random House, $35.) The final volume of Morris’s monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt vividly covers the eventful nine years after he left office.


Common as Air: By Lewis Hyde. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hyde draws on the American founders for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.


Contested Will: By James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Shapiro is particularly interested in what “the authorship question” says about successive generations of readers.


Country Driving: By Peter Hessler. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Hessler chronicles the effects of an expanding road network on the rapidly changing lives of individual Chinese.


The Emperor of All Maladies: By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.


Empire of the Summer Moon: By S. C. Gwynne. (Scribner, $27.50.) The story of the last and greatest chief of the tribe that once ruled the Great Plains.


Encounter: By Milan Kundera. Translated by Linda Asher. (Harper/HarperCollins, $23.99.) Illuminating essays on the arts in the context of a “post art” era.


The Fiery Trial: By Eric Foner. (Norton, $29.95.) Foner tackles what would seem an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and sheds new light on it.


Finishing the Hat: By Stephen Sondheim. (Knopf, $39.95.) Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful.


Four Fish: By Paul Greenberg. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Even as Greenberg lays out the grim and complicated facts about the ravaging of our seas, he manages to sound some hopeful notes about the ultimate fate of fish.


Hitch 22: By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.


The Honor Code: By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.


The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: By Rebecca Skloot. (Crown, $26.) Skloot untangles the ethical issues in the case of a woman who unknowingly donated cancer cells that have been the basis for a vast amount of research.


Insectopedia: By Hugh Raffles. (Pantheon, $29.95.)In this beautifully written, slyly humorous encyclopedia, Raffles seeks to redress the speciesism that has cast insects as creatures to be regarded with distrust and disgust.


Koestler: By Michael Scammell. (Random House, $35.) Scammell wants to put the complex intelligence of Koestler (“Darkness at Noon”) back on display and to explain his shifting preoccupations.


The Last Boy: By Jane Leavy. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Many biographies of Mantle have been written, but Leavy connects the dots in new and disturbing ways.


Last Call: By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.


The Last Hero: By Howard Bryant. (Pantheon, $29.95.)Amid all the racism, Aaron approached his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record more as grim chore than joyous mission.


The Last Stand: By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $30.) The author of “Mayflower” gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others who fought that day, but Custer steals the show.


Life: By Keith Richards with James Fox. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Reading Richards’s autobiography is like getting to corner him in a room to ask everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones.


Long for this World: By Jonathan Weiner. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a proselytizer for radical life extension, is the main figure in this engaging study.


The Mind's Eye: By Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $26.95.) In these graceful essays, the neurologist explores how his patients compensate for the abilities they have lost, and confronts his own ocular cancer.


Operation Mincemeat: By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.99.) An entertaining spy tale about the British ruse that employed a corpse to cover up the invasion of Sicily.


Origins: By Annie Murphy Paul. (Free Press, $26.) Paul’s balanced, common-sense inquiry into the emerging field of fetal origins research is structured around her own pregnancy.


Parisians: By Graham Robb. (Norton, $28.95.)This series of character studies — some of familiar figures, some not — is arranged to give meaning to a volatile, complicated city.


Pearl Buck in China: By Hilary Spurling. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The vast historical backdrop of this biography informs but never overwhelms its remarkable, elusive subject.


Pops: By Terry Teachout. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This biography maintains that discomfort with Armstrong’s public persona has led detractors to minimize his enormous contributions to music and to civilization.


The Possessed: By Elif Batuman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15.) An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a graduate student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.


The Price of Altruism: By Oren Harman. (Norton, $27.95.) Harman surveys 150 years of scientific history to examine the theoretical problem at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why do organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?


The Promise: By Jonathan Alter. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) This appraisal by a Newsweek columnist is mercifully free of the sensationalistic tone of other recent campaign books.


The Publisher: By Alan Brinkley. (Knopf, $35.) The creator of Time and Life used his magazines to advance political favorites, paint an uplifting portrait of the middle class and promote American intervention in the world.


Ratification: By Pauline Maier. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Maier’s history lays out the major issues, the arguments, the local context, the major and minor players, and lots of political rough stuff.


The Sabbath World: By Judith Shulevitz. (Random House, $26.) This wide-ranging meditation is part spiritual memoir, part religious history, part literary exegesis.


Scorpions: By Noah Feldman. (Twelve, $30.) A group portrait of Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.


Secret Historian: By Justin Spring. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50.) A sad, dangerous, astonishingly eccentric 20th-century life, recounted in absorbing detail.


Supreme Power: By Jeff Shesol. (Norton, $27.95.) Contention over Roosevelt’s proposal to transform the court nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and severely damaged fragile Democratic unity.


The Talented Miss Highsmith: By Joan Schenkar. (St. Martin’s, $40.) A witty biography of the manipulative, secretive and obsessive creator of Tom Ripley, a character who was a version of Highsmith herself.


The Tenth Parallel: By Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A journey along a latitude line where two religions meet and often clash.


Travels in Siberia: By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Dubious meals, vehicle malfunctions and relics of the Gulag fill Frazier’s uproarious, sometimes dark account of his wanderings.


The Warmth of Other Suns: By Isabel Wilkerson. (Random House, $30.) This consummate account of the exodus of blacks from the South between 1915 and 1970 explores parallels with earlier European immigration.


Washington: By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow brings his considerable literary talent to bear on the continued hunger of many Americans for more tales of the first president’s exploits.


The Wave: By Susan Casey. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Brainy scientists, extreme surfers and mountains of water mix it up in Casey’s vivid, kinetic narrative.


Willie Mays: By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

Great Advice from Literary Agent Donald Mass

(Source: Backspace, The Elements of Awe)

Who spreads stories and why? Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania have been studying data provided by The New York Times showing which of the paper’s articles are the most often e-mailed.

Their conclusions have some relevance for fiction writers because they reveal what it is about stories that probably generate word of mouth. This month and next I’m going to discuss these elements and show how you can apply them in your novels.

The first element is one that will be obvious to most of us, so let’s cover it right away. Positive articles are e-mailed more often than negative ones. What does that mean for novelists? It means that excitement is more likely to be stirred by characters with positive qualities and by stories with happy endings.

No big surprise, like I said. If your characters are dark, miserable and self-loathing you can’t expect readers to be enthusiastic. Qualities of strength, especially when we see them right away, inspire readers to care. Downer endings also narrow a novel’s appeal. But you already knew that, right?
The next element identified by researchers is a little harder to appropriate. More frequently e-mailed stories tend to be emotional.

Stop. I know exactly what you’re thinking. All riiight! My novel-in-progress is highly emotional! Best-seller list here I come!

Not so fast. Every author thinks his or her novel is packed with emotion. Naturally they do. As they write, they feel tons of emotion. But that is not to stay that those emotions are getting through to readers, or in ways that move readers deeply.

What’s the strongest emotion that your protagonist feels: anger, disgust, shame, betrayal, terror, frustration, elation, arousal, love? Yawn. Sorry, not feeling it.

Here’s the point: You can’t expect your reader to feel what your protagonist feels just because they feel it. Only when that emotion is provoked through the circumstances of the story will your reader feel what you want them to.

Describing grief is fine but not as effective as your protagonist saying goodbye to her dying mother…and even that is not as good as saying goodbye after a rich experience of mother-daughter love…and even that is not as good as if that love was hard won. Welcome home is another heart grabber but only when it seems like it will never happen.

In other words, emotions aren’t gold. A story situation that provokes strong emotions is.

So, now to the practical application: What is the strongest emotion you want your reader to feel? Search and delete that word everywhere it occurs in your manuscript. Now, how will you provoke that emotion through action alone? Got it? Good. Next write down three ways to heighten that action. (Remember that underplaying can also heighten.) When you’ve built a story situation that will force the emotion you want-make it happen.

Next month I’ll delve into the element that makes characters fascinating and also creates a sense of awe as your story is read.

P.S. If you’d like to read the Times article in which the research is discussed, check it out here.

--

A literary agent in New York, Donald Maass’s agency sells more than 150 novels every year to major publishers in the U.S. and overseas. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2002), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004) and The Fire in Fiction (2009). He is a past president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc.

This article was originally posted on Writer Unboxed.

What You've Been Waiting For

...you will still have to wait for. Come back later, I don't have a post ready. I couldn't think of anything short to write about. Consider this a down payment. Should be up later today or tomorrow....or next week.

Yeah, what he said.

Intriguing Poll Results to Nathan Bransford's E-Books Question

Can't say that I'm surprised. Have mercy on me, (eventual) e-book overlords.

Literary Agent Colleen Lindsay: Why I May Have Rejected Your Query Letter

(Source - Backspace: The Writer's Place)

Lotsa reasons, some of which you can't control. But here are some things you can control in your query letter, and by doing so, increase your odds that I'm actually going to read the entire thing and possibly ask for more:
Spelling and grammar mistakes: Yes, I do notice them. And, yes, they do count against you. A query letter is basically your application for a writing job. To earn a job writing, you must be familiar with the tools of the language: spelling and grammar. 'Nuff said.

Typos: One typo I may forgive but a letter riddled with "teh" instead of "the" is getting rejected. Attention to detail matters.

You addressed me by another agent's name or no name at all or you included me in a mass-emailed query.You included the phrase "Cos, bitch, you're gonna love this!" in your query letter. (Yes, seriously. Not sure what he was thinking with that one.)

You spent five paragraphs telling me A.) how much you love writing, B.) how long you have been writing, C.) how much you have always wanted to be a writer or D.) all of the above. Not to seem heartless but...I don't care about any of this. By including this in your query, you're wasting precious space. Again, think of the query as a cover letter for a job. Would you write this a cover letter? "I have wanted to be a marketing manager since I was six years old. I spent my entire childhood marketing all of my friend's dogs, cats and hamsters...By the time I was in high school I had moved onto marketing for the Piggly Wiggly down the street, dreaming of one day marketing for a giant multi-national corporation in New York City." No, you wouldn't because it sounds ridiculous. Well, it sounds ridiculous in a query, too.

You told me that you'd previously self-published the book you're querying about but now want to reach a wider audience. Unless you sold several thousand copies of that self-published book (we're talking five digits here, kids), a legit trade publisher won't be interested. And neither will an agent. Write a new book instead!

You told me that you were previously published by someone like PublishAmerica...and meant it. This is akin to telling me that you would consider yourself previously published if you had Xeroxed pages of your manuscript and stapled them together.

You didn't read my submission guidelines: How do I know you didn't read my submission guidelines? Because you: A.) included an unsolicited attachment with your query, B.) snail-mailed your query, C.) didn't cut-and-paste the first five to ten pages of your manuscript into the email with your query letter, D.) sent me a query for a subject matter that I clearly don't represent like screenplays, poems, or Christian fiction, or E.) all of the above.

Try to give yourself a fighting chance before you hit "send" on that emailed query, okay?

Techboy's Tips for Living in SF

I've been living in San Francisco for over 12 years now and in that time I've learned a thing or two. The ones I'm not ashamed of, I'm writing about today. These are my own personal rules about navigating the chaos of the big city known as The City. Once again I've chosen to write about it here since it sort of dovetails into President's history as a tour guide, but not in a gay way.

1. Don't run to try to catch a MUNI bus. You can expect that nine out of ten bus drivers will not wait for you no matter how much you wave and yell. I've even seen people throw stuff at the bus to get their attention to no avail. Unless you are under 25 or REALLY need the exercise, save yourself the depressing realization that after all your efforts, you will have another 20 minutes minimum at the bus-stop to catch your breath.
2. Don't try to give something to every homeless person you see downtown. You will be bankrupt within a week. If you must be magnanimous, set yourself a homeless budget, like you would for coffee, or prostitutes.
3. People on bicycles will kill you. The biking community in San Francisco is a particularly zealous lot, especially the bike messengers. Assuming they will stop if you walk in front of them is dangerously optimistic. They would sooner run over you than be late for their next delivery or getting to Dolores Park. Just pretend they are like taxis in New York...with cleats on their shoes.
4. Do not drive downtown during Critical Mass. Oh, where to begin...first, I had forgotten the name of the event and Googled "biking anarchy" and got the name on the first hit. Does that give you an idea? Critical Mass is basically one day of the month where bicyclists take over the downtown streets to draw attention to the city being "bike unfriendly". Ironically, the chaos and traffic blockages that ensue pretty much guarantee everyone else will be unfriendly to bikes as well. This special day is characterized by an entire downtown of honking car horns, and nobody getting home in time for dinner or Desperate Housewives.
5. Dress in layers. The weather in SF is best described as, "defying all laws of nature". If you don't learn to dress appropriately you will be miserable and possibly die. This is a place where it can be dark and rainy at the beginning of a bus ride, and hot and sunny by the time you get off. Having a change of clothes every place you go is probably a good strategy.
6. Appear in 65% of tourists' home videos. I'm not sure this is really in the tip category but it's definitely true (as far as I'm concerned). For the first 6 months I lived here I was in a position to ride the California St. cable car to work. From my unstable perch on the very outside of the running boards, my head was captured on film enough times that I should have a star on the Walk of Fame. If you want cheap immortality, this is the way to do it.
7. Don't get in front of old Asian ladies when getting on the bus. Like bike messengers, those gals will push you to the curb to get on the bus. Let them get on first and then you look courteous. This is where they get it from...insane. I'm not moving to China any time soon, although I guess it's common in India as well. This is one cultural idiom I wish hadn't made the trip to the US. Speaking of crowded...
8. Crowded buses aren't worth it. Unless you like staring into the armpit of the guy standing next to you, and the smell of angry, sweaty commuters, wait for the next bus. Seriously, I don't get it. People will pack into stuffed buses to the point the doors won't close, forcing people who need to get out to climb over a dozen people who won't get out of the way. My rule of thumb, if I can't see light though the bus, I don't get on. I don't care if it makes me late for work. Better that I don't arrive at my destination in a bad mood. Also, my arms go numb if I have to grab those overhead bars for too long.
9. Fisherman's Wharf is for tourists. If you are a resident of SF, you should have no reason to go there unless accompanied by out-of-town friends. Ok, there are a couple decent seafood restaurants there, but seriously, it's like a shopping mall full of people who didn't pack the right clothes for SF. (see #5 again) One possible excuse would be if you are homesick and need to be surrounded by people from the Midwest.
10. If you don't see a Starbucks... or there is a long line at the one you're at, turn 180 degrees and you'll probably see another one. I'm not kidding, it's unreal! At least half the Starbucks are across the street from one another or only a block away from another one, or they are right next to a Peet's Coffee. If you can't find one, your eyes aren't open. I guess that says something about how much coffee we drink. Damn overachievers. For consistency, the chains are fine, but I'd recommend some of the smaller coffee shops. There are plenty of those too. Blue Bottle is probably the coolest. More coffee shops should look like chemistry labs.

Everyone manages to take the exact same picture of this setup.

People need to be more creative.

I'll stop at ten since that is the tradition, I'm out of time, and I might write a book about this. Actually it's more the second thing. If you have any tips, throw them into the comments.

No, I don't know when President's wifi will be fixed. I think he's dead anyway. Leave me alone!