Another quick update: I’ve decided to expand my Chrome extension beyond the San Francisco Public Library, to be able to lookup books at libraries all across the Bay Area. I think it covers most of them, with some exceptions (for example, Berkeley). More may be added in the future. For now, the full list is:
- San Francisco
- Alameda County
- Contra Costa County
- Hayward
- Livermore
- Marin County
- Napa County
- Oakland
- Palo Alto City
- Pleasanton
- San José
- San Mateo County
- Santa Clara County
- Sonoma County
The county-wide library systems represent libraries from various cities in those counties. To switch between systems, you need to alter a setting in the extension’s options page. For more information, see previous posts, or here.
In the spring of 1942, George Takei and his family were forcibly removed from their home in Los Angeles, subject to internment as people of Japanese descent living in the United States during World War II. George was five years old. Their next stop was a literal horse stable, where they would spend months before being moved to a series of camps, little better than prisons, where they would be surrounded by barbed wire fences and watched by armed guards.
I don’t read a lot of memoirs. None, really. I can get behind a good biography, and maybe even an autobiography, sometimes. But the idea of slogging through a few hundred pages of the self-important reminisces of someone gazing through the lens of their own nostalgia appeals to me about as much as being FedExed the plates from whatever they ate for dinner last night. But when I heard famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had published such a book, my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up a copy. For the most part, it was worth it. 
When Netflix released Devilman Crybaby last year, I enjoyed the anime, but it made me realize that although I was cursorily familiar with the character, I had never really gone back and read Go Nagai’s original manga from the early 1970s. When I found out that Seven Seas Entertainment had released Devilman: The Classic Collection in two volumes the same year, I decided to check it out. And what a ride it is. 
Ah, Stephen King. I’ve always had a mixed relationship with his work. Some of it, I would say, makes his reputation as one of our leading fiction writers well deserved. Other examples are just bad. Unfortunately, The Outsider, a 2018 entry into the prolific author’s oeuvre, belongs squarely in the latter category.