Join us for Storytime on Sunday and Wednesday mornings. 
Check out our beginning and intermediate knitting classes with instructors Thea & Sue. 
Five Sunday evening sessions with Dr. Abby Caplin.
Reader Reviews
Hello! My name is Abby Westfield. I go to a public middle school in San Francisco which I love (sometimes). My teachers are relatively nice and I get a moderate amount of homework. Luckily that leaves time for a very important thing: reading. I have been an avid reader since the age of four, and curling up with a good book is something I still do every night. It is a true passion. My favorite types of books are mystery and adventure. While reading a mystery I become the protagonist, sleuthing out clues to find the truth. In adventure books, I climb the highest peaks and descend deep, dark caves, saving all who need it along the way. There is no other way I can think of to gain knowledge and enjoy myself at the same time. When I’m not doing homework or reading, I take my two dogs for a walk — or rather they take me for a walk! I love them both very much. Sometimes my friends and I try to dress them up (it never works but we try anyway!). I wonder what a dog's perspective would be if it wrote a book…
I hope you enjoy my review.
Happy reading!
Abby
ABBY RECOMMENDS:
I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You
by Ally Carter
Cammie Morgan is not your average teenager. She goes to the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women - which, in reality, is a school for spies. Hilarity ensues as Cammie's friends help her to find love with a civilian boy while trying to juggle her hectic life as a spy. Along the way, Cammie's new teacher and other larger-than-life characters show that things are not always what they seem. Action, suspense and teenage drama will leave you wanting more of this amazing trilogy by Ally Carter.
ABBY RECOMMENDS:
Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy
by Ally Carter
Cammie and her friends are hoping that this semester will be a normal, relaxed one but that is far from reality. This semester, things are different at the Gallagher Academy. For one thing, the East Wing is closed and no one is telling them why, and Cammie’s mom is acting strange. Join Cammie and her friends as they try to figure out why everything is so different this semester. New and old characters come together for a great second book in this trilogy.
ABBY RECOMMENDS:
Don’t Judge A Girl by Her Cover
by Ally Carter
When one of Cameron Morgan’s friends finds herself in grave danger, Cameron does everything in her power to ensure her friend's safety, even if it involves a beat-up truck and some heinous disguises. As you embark on this literary journey, unexpected plot twists and new characters will leave you on the edge of your seat. This book is a great addition to this exceptional series, and hopefully not the last we hear from the amazing Ally Carter.
Staff Favorites
JOSE RECOMMENDS:
Words For Empty and Words For Full
by Bob Hicok
Hard to convey the urgency with which you should pick up this or any other poetry collection by Bob Hicok, except to say he is without doubt the most vital, necessary American poet writing today. If you think this is an exercise in hyperbole, do yourself the greatest favor since getting that last biopsy or smashing haircut all your friends went batty over, and read “For the time capsule” (pg 95), or the first poem in the collection, “In these times.” Or dip into 3rd gear and take the scenic route along “Meditations on a false spring” (pg 57). Come to think of it, just buy this book and tune into the pulse of a country as it hums out its last days of empire in city, factory, prairie, home, and school. Not since Whitman or Ferlinghetti has America been so vindicated by one with such a generous bardic gift.
Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
The Manhattan of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City is to be found somewhere between the latitude of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and the longitude of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. There's something wondrously intoxicating and marvelously perverse about this strange hybrid of a narrative, in whose pages we find an amalgam of obscure pop culture ephemera and an hallucinating ensemble by the outré names of Chase Insteadman, Perkus Tooth, Russ Grimspoon and Georgina Hawkmanaji (better known as the Hawkman). Their predicaments include: a spectral gray fog that chronically materializes at various points in the city; an obsession over a certain virtual commodity called a chaldron; a lost astronaut who sends Chase heartrending love letters from space, and an ever-morphing tiger that could be the dreaded beast of Sumatra's riverbanks or a subterranean demolition machine gone amok. There are also myriad allusions to Infinite Jest, and anyone familiar with that masterpiece will experience a soft halation when those passages go gliding by…Lethem is one of the few anointed mesmers of American Letters. Bravissimo!!!!
JESSE RECOMMENDS:
Nothing Right
by Antonya Nelson
These taut, lyrical stories cemented Nelson's place - in my mind at least - as one of the preeminent crafters of short fiction at work in America today. The original hardcover edition of this book included praise from a few guys who know a thing or two about good fiction: Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace...even Raymond Carver has given up literary props to Toni. So you gotta check her out, especially since her first new novel in ten years is coming out in October, and guess where she’s going to be reading it? Mmm hmmm. Oh yeah, that’s right! Here at B.S.W.P!
BRIAN RECOMMENDS:
Invisible
by Paul Auster
Don't hesitate in the throes of a decision whether or not to pick yourself up a copy of this book. No, seriously, buy this book. Auster here outdoes himself shining brilliantly in a novel that bares its teeth in an ever-shifting textual cornucopia. Told through various perspectives, truths, half-truths, and all that comes in between, Auster's most recent yarn involves a semi-written book concerning people who may or may not have existed and acts of violence that may or may not have occurred…spun in his telltale combination of erudite and beautifully ruminative prose. A must-read!
LAURETTA RECOMMENDS:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall
by Anne Fadiman
It is with empathy, objectivity and grace that Fadiman explores the misunderstanding that develops between a refugee Hmong family with a sick daughter and the Western medical professionals who try to help them. An absolutely beautiful and stunning book that you won't forget.