Armistead Maupin

The divinely human comedy that began with Tales of the Cityrolls recklessly along as Michael Tolliver pursues his favourite gynaecologist, Mona Ramsey uncovers her roots in a desert whorehouse, and Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with the amnesiac of her dreams.

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Tales of the City

Ryan Mateyk

After watching the 2019 Netflix reboot and seeing a friend claimed the book series as one of his favourites on Facebook I had to read it. These characters! The drama! Short chapters! This was everything my gay ass wanted!

Anvita Bhagavathula

This book just really encapsulates what being a young (queer??) person feels like while you’re trying to figure out things you’ve never experienced before. It follows the stories of several characters in San Francisco in the 1970s who are all connected in some way. While the set up takes a while, Maupin really makes you fall in love with each character. They’re all so deeply flawed and so fundamentally human, that you can really resonate with each one. 

The book brought me a lot of comfort at a time that I needed it; it made me feel like I wasn’t alone in feeling all my ugly emotions.

I enjoyed this book after I found out that it was originally in serial format. Fun characters and story line. Not a lot of emotional connection for me but still an enjoyable quick read. 

Abigail Swallow

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

A Novel

Laura Mauler

LOVED this book! It was so much fun to hear the names of streets and neighborhoods that I know, and to look up businesses mentioned in the book to see if they're still around. I can't wait to start the next book in the series.

Traci Wilbanks

A definite page-turner with short chapters that jump between the various characters who all live in the boarding house on Barbary Lane. For someone who lives in San Francisco, it's cool to follow the characters as they navigate through familiar places. The content and the characters are not very deep. This is a great book to take on a road trip or to the beach.

Riah Forbes 

Meh. I was surprised to find myself getting bored with this book. Review to come!

I'm going to do some background on this for a paragraph. I read this for the Great American Read list, and I'm not a huge fan of it by the end. It's weird, because people tell me they hate my favorite book, The Great Gatsby, because they could not relate to the characters and felt like nothing happened. I might as well laugh, because those are my exact feeling about Tales of the City. 

I don't know if it's because the thrill factor has waned since it was written in the 70s, where talk of drugs, homosexuality, and cheating is normalized, or because I don't really know San Francisco well, but the charm of the first few chapters wore off fast. The characters were one dimensional and the moments that could have been incredibly powerful felt hollow, because there were too many characters and not enough plot. For instance, a character located secondary characters out of the blue. No hint as to how they found the people, how hard or easy it was, and how they even knew where to begin.

Another issue I had was that the writing itself had garbled dialogue that read like a screenplay. Not only did each short chapter jump an undetermined length of time setting, and cast, but paragraph to paragraph you lose actual actions characters performed. There was a possible relationship that wasn't even a defined relationship, and I still don't understand what it was supposed to be. The ending was hollow and just weird.

This is one that leaves me scratching my head as to why it's still popular.

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