Summerreadings: How Strange it is to be Anything at all

I’m not taking any summer classes & work has been uber-slow which accumulates to free time, & reading!!! & with free time in my hands ill do some  summer book reviews up in here. A couple of weeks ago I went to Mime to attend a Zine festival/show with local LA bands performing, and in the movements/set changes of the bands some guy with a Girls T-shirt (the band) would read  passionately from a book, one of his passages captured my attention, with the following words: “Hate your grocer, your postmaster, the local head of the PTA, the pigs, the feds, but most of all those fucking meter maids with the flitzy helmets.” When I heard this I figured this guy was bold….

Any who I didn’t know who he was, figured it was just another LA face. As the night develop some how we ended up having a short conversation in where out  of curiously I asked if he was from SF (since his Girls T said SF) and if he wrote the book he was reading passages from. He said yes to both questions & I became intrigued by his book….yet I lacked the $ to purchase it from him, but at  the end of the night before I departed from the  venue, our paths crossed again & he agreed to let me have his book for $4 (for that’s all I had in my wallet).  

This mysterious guys name is Joe Riley and he’s author of How Strange it is to be anything at all and after reading his book which is a collection of short stories its persuade me want to move out to SF even more! His book was never dull, each page has something interesting and new to say….Most of it being his personal experiences and point of views. Yet I was able to relate with him in many points dealing with our generation and the way most humans act and are…our day to day cycles, and how silly some of the rituals which society implies on us are. Any ways I highly recommend this book especially to those of you in the ages between 17-25 it’s a fun read, jammed packed with themes of life, love, lust, drugs, society, growing up, fucking up. & perhaps Joe Riley writings will also persuade you to venture out and live in San Francisco.