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The Best Bookstores In Berkeley

In a bustling city like Berkeley, California, there are many bookstores that offer the best in sales and also in history. Many bookstores have been present since the 1950s and continue to serve the community for all of their reading needs. With both the size and formation of these captivating collections of books, your trip to Berkeley will be filled with books of new discoveries and old favorites.

1. half price books.

Half Price Books

Located in Downtown Berkeley, Half Price Books has been a longtime favorite of residents and visitors alike. Spending an hour (or maybe two) browsing through the wide selection of both new and used books, movies, and music will feel like no time at all. Offering low prices on classics and contemporary works will have you planning your next trip.

Half Price Books, 2036 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA, USA , +1 510 526 6080

Half Price Books | © Connie Ma/Flickr

2. Books Inc.

3. mr. mopps’ children’s books & toys, mr. mopps’ children’s books & toys.

When visiting Berkeley with the smaller ones, Mr. Mopps’ Children’s Books & Toys is a stop that should be on the itinerary. Providing an engaging learning space for children and teens, there is no need to think twice about stopping by for a visit. Classic and recent children’s literature line the shelves along with toys that spark children’s imaginations.

Mr Mopps’ Children’s Books and Toys, 1405 Martin Luther King Junior Way, Berkeley, CA, USA , +1 510 525 9633

Inside Mr. Mopps’ | © s.jo/Flickr

5. Fantastic Comics

Bookstore, Store

6. Pegasus Books

Pegasus books.

With helpful and knowledgeable staff, Pegasus Books is a local independent favorite. Greeted with music as you enter, a roomy and mellow warmth welcomes you. Offering all things from books, magazines, and low-priced calendars, you can find many great deals. And if you have found a book that you feel must be shared, there is a DIY gift-wrapping table.

Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA, USA , +1 510 649 1320

7. Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore

Bookstore, Shop, Store

Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in.

Culture Trip launched in 2011 with a simple yet passionate mission: to inspire people to go beyond their boundaries and experience what makes a place, its people and its culture special and meaningful — and this is still in our DNA today. We are proud that, for more than a decade, millions like you have trusted our award-winning recommendations by people who deeply understand what makes certain places and communities so special.

Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together.

Culture Trips are deeply immersive 5 to 16 days itineraries, that combine authentic local experiences, exciting activities and 4-5* accommodation to look forward to at the end of each day. Our Rail Trips are our most planet-friendly itineraries that invite you to take the scenic route, relax whilst getting under the skin of a destination. Our Private Trips are fully tailored itineraries, curated by our Travel Experts specifically for you, your friends or your family.

We know that many of you worry about the environmental impact of travel and are looking for ways of expanding horizons in ways that do minimal harm - and may even bring benefits. We are committed to go as far as possible in curating our trips with care for the planet. That is why all of our trips are flightless in destination, fully carbon offset - and we have ambitious plans to be net zero in the very near future.

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SPECIAL10% GROUP SAVINGS: Save 10% on the cabin fare. Valid for new bookings only, subject to availability, may not be combined with other offers, and is not applicable on airfare or extensions. Follow the Pacific Northwest's storied waterways traveled by early explorers, settlers, and indigenous peoples as we take in spectacular scenery, tour museums and historic sites, and indulge our senses with the region’s culinary splendors and world-class wines.

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Books Inc. Berkeley

Store hours:, meet the manager schyler baker, book clubs: , staff favorites.

Killers of a Certain Age (Paperback)

Too much fun! Four sixty-year-old women who just happens to be a assassins are themselves targeted and say, "Hell no!" And then do what they do best. Loved it.  - Liz, Berkeley 

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (Paperback)

Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven intractable and difficult to solve as the eel. This meditation on eels highlights the mysterious nation and life cycle, still largely unknown of these endangered creatures. - Elena, Berkeley 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Paperback)

A powerful book about hope and mercy in the face of devastating injustice. Stevenson seeks out the victims of tremendous unfairness and fights for them. Challenging, inspiring, heart-breaking, hopeful.  - Jeffrey, Berkeley

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Paperback)

A perfect combination of self help and social science, Emergent Strategy shows how small acts can enact big change and bring us closer together. Important for activists or anyone engaged in social work of any kind. - Alex, Berkeley  

Stories to Keep You Alive Despite Vampires (Paperback)

Do you know every scary story there is? I bet you haven't heard the versions in this collection! Connoisseurs of creepy will find new tales and funny spins on classics herein, all told with an off the wall sense of humor. Doubters should turn to page 13 and read, "Diagnosis: Wolf" for a taste of what to expect from this hilarious anthology.  - Dav, Berkeley 

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Travel writing.

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Finding Bibliographies

A bibliography is list of bibliographic citations, (also called Works Cited, Literature Cited, Reference List) at the end of a journal article or book that lists the sources used by an author.

Bibliographies can also be research tools that bring together in one location (either print or electronic) citations from articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, conference proceedings, primary materials, and other academic sources about a specific topic. That topic might be broad, such as "Medieval history" or very narrow, such as "Red-haired women mentioned in courtly literature."

Bibliographies can be useful for discovering additional sources for your research. Since they include many different types of sources, it is important to be able to identify the type of source from the citation, in order to locate it.

In UC Library's advanced search, change the Any Field search filter to Subject and change contains to is (exact)  and search for  bibliography, combining it on the next line with your topic.    The term bibliography appears in multiple places in catalog records, looking for it in the subject field will limit your results to resources that have been identified as bibliographies.

Bibliographies of travel in North America

• American travelers to Mexico, 1821-1972: a descriptive bibliography Call Number: NRLF (UCSC) Z1425.C64 or Bancroft Z1425 .C56
• Early Midwestern travel narratives: an annotated bibliography, 1634-1850 Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks F351.A12 H8 Records and describes first-person records of journeys in the frontier and early settlement periods which survive in both manuscript and print. Geographically, it deals with the states once part of the Old Northwest Territory--Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota--and with Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska.
• French travellers in the United States, 1765-1932 Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks E161.A12 M67 1961 Also available at the Internet Archive .
• Travel literature of colonists in America, 1754-1783: An annotated bibliography with an introduction and an author index A Ph.D. dissertation available from ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses database.
• Travels in the New South: a bibliography Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks F215.A12 C5 Lists over 1100 works of travels in the South from 1865-1955.
• Travels in the Old South: a bibliography Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks F206.1 .C55 (V1 can be requested from NRLF) Bibliographies for scholars in search of eyewitness evidence of life in southern commonwealths.

Bibliographies of travel in Central & South America

• Accounts of nineteenth-century South America : an annotated checklist of works by British and United States observers Call Number: Doe Reference F2223.A1 N3 A bibliography of English language travellers' accounts of Latin America in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the countries of South America from Colombia and Venezuela to Argentin and Chile (excluding British, French, and Dutch Guiana). Also available at the Internet Archive .
• The exploration of South America: an annotated bibliography Over 900 annotated entries that focus on the period of discovery and exploration.

• Travel accounts and descriptions of Latin America and the Caribbean, 1800-1920: A selected bibliography Call Number: NRLF (UCSC) Z1609.D47W44 1982 Also available at the Internet Archive

Bibliographies of Travel in Asia & South Asia

Bibliographies of travel in Europe

• Bio-bibliografía de viajeros por España y Portugal. Siglos XV-XVI-XVI Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks G419 .G37 2001
• Viaggiatori italiani in Italia, 1700-1998: per una bibliografia Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks Z2356 .C585 1999 More than 1800 titles, organized chronologically, with an index of authors and places.

Bibliographies of travel not specific to a region

• Bio-bibliografía de viajeros españoles by Carlos García-Romeral Pérez Siglos XVI-XVII at Main (Gardner) Stacks G287.A12 G37 1998 Siglo XVIII at Main (Gardner) Stacks G287.A12 G37 1997 1900-1936 at Main (Gardner) Stacks G465.A12 G37 1997
• European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750 This link opens in a new window A searchable bibliographic index to books, manuscripts, and other materials printed in Europe relating to the Americas, 1493-1750. more... less... Contains more than 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750. It covers the history of European exploration as well as portrayals of Native American peoples. A wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery.
• Global odyssey: a bibliography of travel literature before 1940 Call Number: G463.A12 G55 2006 Doe Reference
• Global odyssey: a bibliography of travel literature, 1940 to the present Call Number: G463.A12 G56 2006 Doe Reference
• Reports of Explorations Printed in the Documents of the United States Government Primarily nineteenth-century reports of explorations funded by the US government.
• Victorian & Edwardian women travellers: a bibliography of books published in English Call Number: G151 .T54 2006 NRLF (UCB)

Bibliographies of travel in the Middle East

Bibliographies of travel in Africa

• A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages Call Number: Main (Gardner) Stacks DT476.A12 F34 1994 Also available online from the University of Wisconsin.
• A Supplement to a Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa: Corrigenda Et Addenda Journal article that is available online.
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Three great bookstores in three great neighborhoods!

Pegasus Books, with locations in Berkeley and Oakland, offer a unique mix of new, used, and remaindered books. Our selection of beautiful, funny and artisan greeting cards is renowned in the Bay Area. And our December-January calendar sale has been a community-favorite event for more than 50 years. Ask us for a recommendation, or browse our shelves.

Thanks for continuing to support Pegasus Books since 1969. Here's to fifty more!

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A baker’s dozen of new books with Berkeley ties to read this spring

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For spring, nonfiction books — many of which are memoirs — dominate the 13 new titles written by local authors, set here or otherwise connected to Berkeley in some way. 

The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found

The unnaming of kroeber hall: language, memory, and indigenous california, a chance to harmonize, outside voices: a memoir of the berkeley revolution, the poet and the silk girl: a memoir of love, imprisonment, and protest.

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Groovy, man, a coincidental life, odd affinities.

By Summer Brenner Spuyten Duyvil, 280 pages, $20

One of the most intriguing blurbs for Summer Brenner’s memoir describes it as “Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“You can’t beat that description,” Brenner said. She described growing up in a Jewish household in 1950s Atlanta as “Southern Jewish Gothic” — and wished she would have included that in the book.

“Even friends who knew all my intimacies didn’t really know what my family was like,” she said. “I guess mine was somewhat of a doozy considering all the reactions.”

Over the course of her career, Brenner, 79, has written mostly fiction and poetry, including two novels, I-5 and Nearly Nowhere , and three youth novels about social justice set in Richmond, Oakland and San Francisco. 

She’s also written the occasional essay, most notably in Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas . This is her first book of nonfiction, whose serious subject matter — mental illness — is buffeted by Brenner’s humor, acute observations and lyrical writing.

The book’s cover includes the image of a boy, the first hint that Brenner is not going to be the focus of this memoir. Instead, Brenner describes the plight of her younger brother, David, who after a schizophrenic episode in his 20s, lived a sequestered existence under an overbearing mother. 

“She had a stranglehold on him and whenever he met someone she had to mediate it,” Brenner said. “When she died his whole world changed and all possibilities changed. We never expected that he would come and live here but that’s what happened.”

Brenner herself had fled the family home for Berkeley 50 years ago “ for survival” and felt as if she had abandoned her brother. After a cancer diagnosis, David came to live with Brenner in 2002 and spent the last year of his life under happier — if not joyful — circumstances. 

“It proved to be this fantastic experience for both of us, but also my group of friends who circled around him,” Summer said. “As I say in the book, for the first time he was loved for who he was.”

By Sylvia Brownrigg Counterpoint, 336 pages, $28

In 2012, while living with her family in “a full, messy home with books and dog toys and sports equipment,” the novelist Sylvia Brownrigg received a package at her Elmwood home. The package was addressed to her father and was late — by more than 50 years. 

Because the package had been hidden in an L.A. basement since the 1950s, her father did not receive it until he was 80. He did not open the package, but years later Brownrigg and her brother did.

That package contained letters and family documents that tell the story of her paternal grandfather Gawen Brownrigg, a well-born Englishman whose life reads like a saga from the glory days of the British Empire. He wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age 27. 

Brownrigg had known little about her grandfather because she knew little about her own father, Nick, a would-be writer who had left her mother when she was born and moved to a cabin without a phone or electricity near Ukiah. 

“The subject of his English family was a source of pain to my father and he wanted to leave all that behind,” Brownrigg said. Her father never spoke of his English family at all. 

Brownrigg’s new memoir, The Whole Staggering Mystery, her eighth book, weaves together the stories of these two missing fathers, tackling issues of sexuality and silences and childhoods fractured by divorce.

 “Above all, I learned that my grandfather was a loving and funny and warm person, and would have been a good father to his son if he had lived,” she said. “I also learned more about his writing and his ambitions to the future.”

Brownrigg will launch the book Wednesday, April 24 at 7 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloway’s , where she’ll be in conversation with her friend and fellow Berkeley author Peggy Orenstein.

By Andrew Garrett MIT Press, 450 pages, $55

In 2021, UC Berkeley unnamed Kroeber Hall, which had been dedicated to the anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber in 1960, but was by then considered “a powerful symbol that continues to evoke exclusion and erasure for Native Americans,” according to its website . 

Kroeber’s most offensive action, according to a review committee, was to collect Native American remains and take custody in 1911 of Ishi, a Yahi man who lived at the UC’s anthropology museum, where he acted as a living exhibit for museum visitors. After dying of tuberculosis in 1916, Ishi’s body was autopsied, which went against the wishes he’d expressed to Kroeber. 

Andrew Garrett’s heavily footnoted, 450-page book argues for the unnaming. Garrett is a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and directs its California Language Archive. Since 2001, he has been working with the Yurok Tribe to document and revitalize the Yurok language. 

Garrett acknowledges the university’s “difficult” relations with California Indigenous people, mostly related to its “immense collection of ancestral remains.” At the same time, he points out that Kroeber spent years documenting California’s Indigenous languages and culture, argued against racism and eugenics, collaborated with Indigenous scholars and advocated for Native cultural and land rights. 

“How did he come to be excoriated as ‘racist’ and ‘astonishingly detached from ethical standards’ at his own institution?” Garrett asks. To him, the unnaming represents “a serendipitous alliance between activists’ desire for salutary change and elites’ need to deflect a threatening discomfort.” 

By Sheryl Kaskowitz Pegasus Books, 272 pages, $30

During the height of the Great Depression, a little-known government-run music unit recorded more than 800 folk songs and brought music to homesteads operated by the Federal Resettlement Administration. The homesteads, encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, were established to help those in the hardest hit areas of the country to start over. 

“The idea behind the music activities was to boost the morale on these government homesteads, to create a sense of community that would support the Resettlement Administration’s hope that they would do cooperative farming and start coop businesses,” said Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America From the Great Depression — One Song at a Time.  

The music unit was led by Charles Seeger (Pete’s father), who would go on to co-found the field of ethnomusicology in the U.S., the subject of Kaskowitz’s Ph.D. at Harvard. The work of the unit laid the foundation for the folk music revival that would follow, inspiring a young Pete Seeger, who heard the records in his home, and helping him to connect with the young folk collector Alan Lomax. 

Kaskowitz describes both the homesteads and the music units as “one of the most progressive — one could say radical — experimental programs of the New Deal.”

The music unit worked almost entirely under the radar for almost two years before the Resettlement Administration was shut down by a conservative coalition in Congress that deemed the homestead program dangerously “socialistic.” The Resettlement Administration became the Farm Security Administration. 

The collected songs are not commercially available but can be heard at the Library of Congress. Twenty-three of them, however, can be heard on Kaskowitz’s website so readers of the book can listen to the works mentioned in the chapters. 

By Joan Gelfand Post Hill Press, 256 pages, $29

Joan Gelfand’s memoir joins a growing genre of Boomer authors scrambling to capture the glory days of the ’60s and ’70s for posterity. A San Francisco-based poet and short story writer, Gelfand spent many of her defining years in Berkeley. 

In this coming-of-age tale, Gelfand flees the comforts of Forest Hills, Queens and summers in the Catskills after the death of her father, arriving in Berkeley in 1972, the year Ms . magazine is founded, auspicious timing. Second-wave feminism plays a starring role in her journey. When she finds a room of her own in a quiet, wood-shingled house, she finds her tribe among like-minded feminists and artists. 

Gelfand dabbles in many of the converging social and artistic experiments of the era. She becomes a community organizer, visits communes, co-founds Loaves and Dishes, a women’s restaurant in a church dining hall fashioned as “the working women’s Chez Panisse.” She also writes songs and toured with The Berkeley Women’s Music Collective. 

“The Berkeley Revolution,” she describes, comes to an end when her tribe presents her with an ultimatum: No men allowed. At the time, Gelfand writes, the women’s movement was fracturing, and the Berkeley community, once open and free-flowing, was embracing separatism as the answer for women to move to the next level of liberation.

For Gelfand, the next level of liberation meant breaking the chain of generational despair, outgrowing the “men vs. women” mentality and pushing herself to become her own person and embrace her identity as a writer.

By Satsuki Ina Heyday, 291 pages, $35

Growing up, Satsuki Ina told people she was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp in Northern California, one of many so-called “relocation centers” where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. The responses she heard baffled her: mumbling about her parents being “traitors and troublemakers” who were “disloyal” to America. 

Her parents never discussed their four-year internment and told her to say that she was born in Newell, California, a small town just outside the prison. But her questions about why people would say such things remained. A journey to the Tule prison in 1994 ignited Ina’s interest in her parents’ silenced history. Years of research into their interment and its impact on their lives form the basis of her book, The Poet and the Silk Girl.

Ina uses diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters and haiku exchanged between her parents, to reveal how they navigated love and loss during a defining moment in recent American history, when more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast— both American citizens and immigrants — were forced from their homes into what Ina calls “American concentration camps.” 

Her father was separated from the family after refusing to bear arms for the U.S. after his constitutional rights were taken away. 

Ina’s family history has informed her work as a psychotherapist who specializes in trauma. For five years she held a series of “Children of the Camps” workshops with Japanese Americans who were incarcerated as children. She produced a documentary film for PBS called Children of the Camps in 2000, which was followed by a PBS documentary about her parents’ story in 2005. 

The book took a little longer to produce, published when Ina was 79. 

“I don’t feel like I had a choice about writing this book,” she told KQED in March. “The way my parents saved their letters and their diaries and their poems, they were asking me to not let their story die.”

Forage. Gather. Feast. 100+ Recipes from West Coast Fores, Shores and Urban Spaces

By Maria Finn with photographs by Marla Aufmuth Penguin Random House, 281 pages, $30

Around this time a year ago, Berkeley photographer Marla Aufmuth shot the cherry blossoms of Berkeley, found in the hills near the Claremont Hotel and Solano Avenue. She photographed the blossoms not because they were beautiful but because they are delicious. Called sakura in Japan, the blossoms are prized there for their slightly sweet floral taste with a hint of bitterness. 

Images of Berkeley’s cherry blossoms, along with three recipes on how to eat them, appear in the new cookbook Forage. Gather. Feast., which includes recipes for wild foods found in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. 

The book is written by Maria Finn, a Sausalito-based food writer Aufmuth has collaborated with and is likewise a forager. Finn is known to Berkeleyside readers for sharing her tips on wild plum foraging and her wild plum chutney recipe in 2022. 

Another California staple Aufmuth photographed for the book was seaweed sourced near Jenner. That shoot proved a bit more challenging than the cherry blossoms. “You have to time it with the low tides, get up very early and climb down steep cliffs,” she said. 

The Physics of Relationship s

By Chas Halpern Guernica World Editions, 223 pages, $18

In the acknowledgments, Berkeley author Chas Halpern notes that his Parisian wife, Pouké, who reads all his novels, had no harsh words for his eighth novel, The Physics of Relationships . “I consider that a crowning achievement,” he writes.

Pouké was also helpful in another way. Halpern credits her and their daughter, Yarrow, with helping him craft the fictional memoir’s female characters in this tale of loss, aging, female friendships and renewal. 

The protagonist, Lexi, is a 60-year-old widow whose life is thrown into turmoil when she takes in a desperate young woman, which is followed by the unexpected arrival of her best friend, who has separated from her husband of 40 years. The mix of these very different personalities causes Lexi to re-examine her life. 

By Mark Dowie New Village Press, 123 pages, $1 7

The award-winning journalist Mark Dowie of Berkeley, a former publisher and editor of Mother Jones who recently retired from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, spent the last six months of Judith Tannenbaum’s life with her, talking about her pending, physician-assisted death. 

When Dowie met Tannenbaum, he had been advocating for physician-assisted dying for terminally ill people in California for years and helped many along this path. But it wasn’t until he was introduced to Tannenbaum that he came to a profound new understanding of death. That experience has become the basis of his ninth book, Judith Letting Go . 

In the preface, Dowie writes that the book “should not be read as yet another book about dying, or death and dying. Instead, he said, “It’s about letting go of everything that matters to the living—attachments, hopes, plans, fears and expectations—in preparation for the ending that awaits us all.”

By David Tussman Warbler Press, 202 pages, $16

In response to Jimi Hendrix’s question, “Are you experienced?” David Tussman would have answered a definitive yes to all the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll his Boomer generation offered. His memoir, Groovy, Man, his first book, recounts many of those adventures and the four marriages he “survived.” 

Tussman, who was born in Berkeley and still lives here, graduated from Berkeley High in 1964 and entered UC Berkeley that fall. While his parents were intellectuals “only interested in ideas” Tussman chose a different path. “The allure of living a secret underground life, of illicit drugs and money, intoxicated me,” he writes. 

At Cal, he becomes both a user and a dealer of pot, then switches to dealing acid after trying it. Along the way, he catches the Beatles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, practically stalks Joan Baez and is jailed overnight for participating in Cal’s Freedom of Speech protests. 

Eventually, he winds up going to law school and becomes an attorney for the fledgling Greenpeace, where he is put on the payroll at a rate of $80 a week. In 1978, he flew with a team to Newfoundland to protest the seal hunt, which ended with the clubbing to death of a seal as soon as a Greenpeace activist was escorted away. 

Out of Tussman’s many experiences, at least one has had staying power: Tussman Programs, a Berkeley-based software program for law offices he created in 1985, is still in business. 

By Ron Kemper Atmosphere Press, 250 pages, $19

Ron Kemper has many real-life insights into the main characters of his books, who, likewise hail from Brooklyn. Kemper’s first novel, Sink or Swim, Brooklyn (2020), follows the protagonist, a young Stevie Alpert, during the tense, post-war years when southern Black and Puerto Rican newcomers begin moving into the mostly Jewish and Italian-American neighborhood of Brownsville.

His new novel continues Alpert’s journey after he trades Brooklyn for San Francisco and is reunited with his high school friend, Billy Feeney, at a bus stop many years later. Billy, who is trouble with a capital T, sets in motion a series of actions that defy conventional wisdom. Against this backdrop, Stevie’s life weaves into Billy’s, sparking a chain of events that blur the lines between choice and happenstance. 

A Coincidental Life is a meditation on the vagaries of friendship and individuation. Ultimately, Stevie matures into someone who, buffeted by political and personal forces, learns to hold his own, even through the most grievous losses.

Kemper, who’s lived in Berkeley for 46 years, served as a Berkeley Board of Education member from 1986 to 1990. Before retiring in 2014, he had a four-decade career as a writer, editor, public relations manager and lobbyist at Kaiser Permanente and Director of Business Development at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center.

By Elizabeth Abel The University of Chicago Press, 302 pages, $32.50

In Odd Affinities , UC Berkeley English professor Elizabeth Abel frees Virginia Woolf from her longstanding position within literature’s female tradition and characterizations that paint her as an insular British writer. In this scholarly examination, Abel demonstrates how Woolf’s profound influence can be heard in the writings of major 20th-century writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald.

 “By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called ‘odd affinities’ that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence,” according to the publisher’s description. 

By Jude Berman SparkPress, 336 pages, $17

Jude Berman is a Berkeley artist and blogger who had a career in academic research before building a freelance writing and editing business and running two small independent presses. 

Her book The Die is a sci-fi novel set in “the democratic nation of California,” where Darah discovers the game she’s working on in a Silicon Valley tech company has been tampered with. She turns to a hacker friend, Jedd, for help. Jedd and his friends uncover a mind-control plot that is a bigger threat than they imagined. Together they have to consider whether it’s worth risking everything to prevent the plot from going forward.

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Joanne Furio

Joanne Furio is a longtime journalist and writer of creative nonfiction. Originally from New York, she has been a staff writer, an editor and a freelance magazine writer. More recently, she was a contributing... More by Joanne Furio

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Inside the Literary Travel Boom

Book butlers! Curated libraries! Custom cruises! Literary-themed vacations are the hot new trend in tourism.

In January, when packing my bags for a “reading retreat” in the Dominican Republic, I agonized about which books to bring. A few days later, bellied up to the beachside bar at the all-inclusive Dreams Macao Beach Punta Cana resort (where, in place of barstools, swings are suspended from the thatched ceiling), I sipped a mojito, cracked open James Salter’s Light Years, a novel I reread annually, and knew that I’d chosen well.

But if I’d had any regrets, summoning a new paperback would’ve been as easy as ringing for a book butler. I was down in the DR to experience Pages in Paradise, a collaboration between the publisher Penguin Random House, Belletrist Book Club (the brainchild of actress Emma Roberts), and Apple Vacations (no relation to the iPhone maker). For readers who like to beach, the retreat left no page unturned. The programming kicked off even before check-in: Ahead of arrival, guests could log in to the resort’s app to reserve beach reads from an on-site library curated by Belletrist. Housed in the airy hotel lobby, the collection included buzzy contemporary fiction by the likes of Zadie Smith and Curtis Sittenfeld. Guests could also order books via room service (or personal butler) anytime or select one from the chic library carts located at the adults-only pool. The property’s various bars featured the “Pages Pour,” a specialty cocktail themed to the program’s inaugural book-of-the-month selection, Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Holding Pattern . They called the drink a gin-fashioned—a fruit-forward riff on the old-fashioned, zippy with pineapple-cinnamon syrup.

Exotic as this tropical gathering of book lovers might have been, it’s just one example of a fast-growing business trend: literary-themed travel. We have the pandemic to thank. Reading surged in the early days of Covid, and the habit stuck as lockdowns eased: The biggest two years on record for print book sales in the U.S. were 2021 and 2022. Hotels and tourism companies, eager to lure back travelers, seized on the surge and began featuring books in their marketing. What began as a travel perk has become a full-blown movement to cater to readers with an explosion of new programming, from big-ticket experiences promising author access to solitary retreats. I know, I know—planning a trip around your reading list may never replace your annual golf weekend, but when else will you get the time to actually enjoy that stack on your nightstand? And if it all sounds like giving yourself homework, don’t worry—there definitely won’t be a quiz, and did I mention the drinks?

As a professional book recommender, the question I’m asked most often is “What book should I bring on my vacation?” ​But now there’s a new question to consider: What kind of literary vacation should I plan?

Not every reader is content to lie by the pool and read for days on end. Some are looking for a more kinetic experience—one that lets them interact with fellow readers, and even their favorite writers. Enter the “ Gone Girl cruise.” In fall 2022, author Gillian Flynn set sail down the Danube with some of her biggest (and most well-heeled) fans as part of Avalon Waterways’ Storyteller Series, cruises that offer literary travelers a chance to voyage in close quarters with authors and other storytellers. When Flynn tweeted about the cruise, it quickly became a viral sensation. On-board accounts detailed a true-crime extravaganza, with guests returning to their rooms each night to discover blood-spattered notes, themed to Flynn’s novels, on their pillows. Sure, it’s a little dorky—but we’re all fans of something, and if crime novels are your thing, what could be better?

For readers who can’t splash out for getaways abroad, there are literary destinations closer to home, too. In the artsy hamlet of New Hope, Pennsylvania, the historic luxury hotel River House at Odette’s offers Riverside Reading (in partnership with Bedside Reading), a program that pairs complimentary access to a curated library (via digital app or hard copies throughout the hotel) with intimate author experiences. With bookshelves stationed on each floor and authors rolling through seasonally, guests can dip in and out of the programming as they please.

When I visited River House deep in the grips of a harsh Pennsylvania winter, I discovered a reader’s paradise: My room boasted a fireplace, a private balcony, and serene views of the rushing Delaware River. After turndown service, I found a keepsake leather bookmark on my pillow. That evening, a few dozen guests gathered for a talkback with the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. In a ballroom festooned with red carnations (a nod to the cover of her latest book, The Latecomers ), Korelitz fielded rapid-fire questions about her inspiration, her writing process, and her hit novel The Plot . After the formal conversation concluded, starstruck guests crowded around her at the bar. “When people come up to you and say, ‘I loved your book,’ that really means something to writers,” Korelitz told me. As the owner of BookTheWriter, a service connecting authors and readers through pop-up book clubs hosted in New York City apartments, Korelitz knows a thing or two about making connections. In the recent boom of literary travel experiences, she sees a broader post-pandemic trend of readers craving the chance to get up close and personal with their favorite writers. “The ways of access to authors have multiplied exponentially,” she said. “I find it to be very inspiring.”

For an early-career author like Xie, who was at Pages in Paradise, seeing her novel highlighted was both exciting and transformative. That’s the thing about literary travel—it allows us to transcend our ordinary lives in more ways than one. “There’s a certain sense that we don’t have the space to read unless we’re traveling or living outside of our day-to-day,” said Xie. “A book takes you outside of your physical environment and your lived experience. Travel does that, too, so they join together in this really beautiful way to truly transport you.” That’s a journey worth taking.

HOW TO PLAN YOUR OWN LITERARY VACATION

Ready to take off on a bookish getaway? Literary travel isn’t “one size fits all,” so whatever type of reader you are, we’ve got a prescription for it. Choose your own adventure below.

For the fan

The Gone Girl cruise is over, but Avalon Waterways isn’t slowing down anytime soon: Its upcoming slate of Storyteller Cruises includes actor Graham McTavish (sailing down the Rhine River) and Outlander phenom Diana Gabaldon (voyaging down the Danube).

For the R&R chaser

Looking for a more relaxed experience? At the Reeds at Shelter Haven, an upscale resort on the Jersey shore, guests can participate in Reeds’ Reads, a seasonal book club featuring guided discussions, with authors sometimes joining via Zoom for Q&A sessions.

For the aspiring writer

Chances are, your favorite author is side-hustling by leading retreats in pastoral Europe. To get in on the action, pay close attention to their social-media feeds, or search for guided trips through an experiential-tourism outlet like TrovaTrip.

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Sustainable Travel Guide

Learn how to be more sustainable and reduce your travel-related carbon footprint. Based on the 2019 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory , air travel accounted for 13% of UC Berkeley's total greenhouse gas emissions.

To support the university's Carbon Neutrality goals, we encourage all staff, faculty, and students to adopt sustainable travel practices. Please use this sustainable travel guide before booking and during your next trip.

Evaluate Your Trip

Assess your meeting to determine if travel is necessary. Many meetings can now be effectively conducted virtually. UC Berkeley utilizes some Video Conferencing solutions (for example, Zoom and Google Meet), which are available to all staff, faculty, and students.

Use Direct Bill and ConnexUC

Utilizing Direct Bill and ConnexUC to bill your airfare to UC Berkeley directly will save you time and money. The UC Travel Center (UCTC) and BCD Travel's Concur portals enable travelers to search and sort flight choices by emissions.

Instructions

Step 1. Once you input your flight search parameters, select 'Emissions' from the 'Sorted By' drop-down menu

Step 2. Click 'View Fares' to expand any flight selection

Step 3. Click on 'Flight Details' to expand any selection

Step 4. Note the pounds of CO2 emissions in the flight information sections

Book Direct Flights

Choosing to fly non-stop eliminates half of a single flight’s emissions as you are avoiding extra landings, takeoffs, and taxi times.

Use a UC Travel Partner

Utilize a UC Travel partner (UCTC or BCD) for complex or multi-leg trips. Full-service agents are experts at identifying routes and airports that will work best for your trip, cutting down on extra travel time and expense.

Fly Coach or Economy class

A World Bank study noted that the emissions associated with flying business class were about 3 times as great as flying coach. In business class and first-class, seats are larger, so fewer people are being moved by the same amount of fuel. In addition, the study estimated that a first-class seat could have a carbon footprint 9 times as great as an economy seat.

Use an Electronic Ticket

If possible, do not print your airline tickets, and use an e-ticket. With many passengers flying out of San Francisco International Airport and Oakland International Airport every day, that equates to thousands of single-use pieces of paper being discarded. Please utilize digital e-tickets on your Smartphone or digital device where applicable.

Carpool with Your Colleagues

When traveling with others, carpool to reduce the amount of fuel and carbon emissions.

Choose an Appropriate-Sized Vehicle

If you are not traveling with colleagues, consider a smaller vehicle.

Rent an Electric or Fuel-Efficient Car

When booking through ConnexUC, you can get access to all-electric or hybrid vehicles at participating locations that will meet UC Travel policy guidelines for reimbursement. Hertz has Teslas available at SFO, LAX, SJC, OAK, ATL, FLL, MIA, JFK, LGA, ORD and many other major airports. Hertz, as well as Dollar and Thrifty, also have hybrids available at select airports. Please keep in mind that supplies are limited, so the further in advance you book your reservation, the better chance you have of finding an ell-electric or hybrid vehicle available. Rental vehicles are only reimbursable when booking through the UC contract in ConnexUC.

• Hertz Electric Vehicles EV Quick Tips

Please use the following instructions to check if the location you are traveling to has an electric or hybrid vehicle available:

• Log in to ConnexUC
• Go to the Trip Search page
• Click the Car Search button
• Enter your travel dates and locations
• Click the Search button
• A list of vehicles that Hertz offers will be displayed
• Select a vehicle in the 'Intermediate Elite' category and with 'Electric power' in the description
• A list of vehicles that the selected rental car company offers will be displayed
• Select a vehicle in the 'Intermediate Car Hybrid' category

Intermediate Car Category

Any vehicle in the Intermediate Car category is within policy. As long as the vehicle is listed as Intermediate elite, it should be within policy and reimbursable, but it is always good to confirm this first with your funding approver and/or the travel department if there is any question. It is ok if the EV is slightly higher in cost daily than a gas powered intermediate class car, as you will be spending significantly less on electric charging when compared to gas expenses.

If the daily rate is significantly higher than other intermediate vehicles, please email us at [email protected] and we will confirm if it is within policy.

Take a Lyft or an Uber

Employees can expense rides by selecting their preferred payment method for trips, routing business ride receipts directly to their work inbox, and switching between personal and professional rides.

Public and Alternative Transportation

Take a train.

Taking a train can reduce your CO2 travel emissions by as much as 90% compared to a plane. The ConnexUC portal offers an Amtrak option where you can book business class.

Use Public Transportation and/or a Bike Share

Using public transportation can further cut down on business travel expenses and can reduce your CO2 travel emissions. When available, take advantage of bike-share programs. Check to see if your hotel offers free bike rentals.

Bay Area sustainable transportation options:

• AC Transit operates a fleet of hydrogen fuel cell buses
• BART is taking steps to make its fleet of light rail trains more sustainable
• AMTRAK reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% from 2010 to 2019
• Caltrain : The Peninsula Corridor Electrification Project is currently converting Caltrain's diesel operations to an electric system

Airport Shuttle Service

Consider an airport shuttle service or public transportation to and from the airport both at home and your destination. Many locations offer great public transportation options and even free services. Consider whether a rental car is needed.

Walk When it is Convenient

Walking when you are traveling is a great way to see a new place up close, to get a little exercise, and to save on your business travel budget - all while reducing your carbon footprint.

Accommodations

Book leed-certified hotels.

Book hotels that are Green Seal or LEED-certified. Hotels with these designations integrate environmental considerations into their business practices to decrease their carbon footprint.

Please refer to the following links to search for LEED-certified green hotels:

• Green Hotels Association

All LEED-certified hotels will display their certification on their website. You can look for the LEED logo. Many of these sustainable hotels can be found in ConnexUC. UC partner brand Marriott has a large selection of LEED-certified hotels to choose from. Some hotels offer free bike rentals.

Conserve Energy

Turn off all lights and the air conditioning or heater when not in the room. As you would at home, conserve as much energy as you can when you are not occupying your hotel room.

Reuse Towels

Hang your towels after use. Many hotels encourage guests to reuse towels to reduce energy and water use of washing towels after the first or second use.

Avoid Using the Hotel's Laundry Service

Try to avoid using the hotel's laundry service. Many times, they wash guests' clothes separately, even if there are only a few items to clean.

Leave the Do Not Disturb Sign on the Door

Leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the door for the duration of your stay. This cuts down on chemical cleansing agents, electricity used in vacuuming, and the washing of bed linens.

Try Staying at Airbnbs or Similar Accommodations

Staying at an Airbnb (available via ConneUC) instead of a hotel can make it easier for you to recycle and compost. In addition, you can make your meals and conserve water.

Choose a Sustainable Restaurant when Dining

There are numerous restaurants to choose from that care about sustainability:

• Green Restaurant Association
• Ocean Friendly Restaurants (Surfrider Foundation)

Say No to the Plastic Bags and Straws at Restaurants

Plastic bags and straws account for a large percentage of plastic pollution in the environment due to their inability to be recycled. The US alone goes through over 500 million straws a day. That's enough straws to fill 127 school buses!

Eat Locally

By eating at local restaurants and street food places, you can avoid the use of plastic takeaway containers and utensils. Also, look for businesses that use locally-sourced and/or seasonal produce.

What to Pack to Support Zero Waste

• A reusable water bottle and/or travel coffee mug
• A reusable takeout container and cutlery set
• Reusable straws
• Reusable cloth napkins
• Reusable shopping bags

Please feel free to search online for other eco-friendly travel-related product ideas.