Thanks for joining me for the ninth issue of the Golden Stats Warrior, a newsletter for data-based insights about the Bay Area. If this is your first time reading, welcome! If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do that here. I continue to be incredibly grateful for all the support.

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I didn’t love it. It was partly due to some difficult personal circumstances, but also because so much of the dialogue about the city was about its problems with rising housing costs and gentrification. These were important issues to discuss, but I felt there was still a lot to celebrate about the region. In an effort to get myself to spend more time thinking about the Bay Area’s rich history, diverse culture, and physical beauty, I did what I usually do. I turned to a book.

On the recommendation of a few friends, I picked up David Talbot’s Season of the Witch. It is a remarkable book. In a novelistic style, Talbot tells the story of most of the major events that took place in San Francisco from the 1960s to 1980s. From the Summer of Love, to the Jonestown massacre, to the murder of Harvey Milk, it’s astonishing to think of all that happened in that short period (The section on Jim Jones’s influence on local politics is particular illuminating). Season of the Witch helped me engage with the Bay Area, and think about how I could preserve what was good about the city and fight what was bad.

So what else should I be reading?

Probably the best way to make that decision would be look at lists made by the good people at KQED or the East Bay Express. But this is a data newsletter, so I took another approach. I wrote some code to identify books about or that take place in the Bay Area, according to readers on the website Goodreads. (I found lists of books about the Bay by searching here, and collected data on all of those books. The lists were user-made.)

My search led me to over 1,500 books, both fiction and non-fiction. For each of those books, I have the rating it received on Goodreads, number of reviews, number of pages and primary genre of the book. The table below has the 25 Bay Area books with the most reviews, which is a good proxy for the overall popularity. One caveat is that Goodreads reviewers skew female and young, and of course, they tend to be book lovers. A full searchable list of all the books can be found at this link.

One of my favorite parts about analyzing data about culture is that it takes you out of your bubble. While I wasn’t surprised to see Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club top the list, I hadn’t even heard of a number of the others.

The number four book on the list, Redeeming Love, is a 19th Century Christian novel based on the Book of Hosea. It received the highest rating of any book with more than 10,000 reviews. In contrast, the number eight book is the erotic novel Wallbanger (Cocktail #1)—I loved the synopsis. I also had no idea that so many of the hugely successful mysteries by James Patterson’s took place in San Francisco. (The number two book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is the book on which the movie Blade Runner is based.)

Of these 25 books, readers of Dave Eggers’ The Circle were least pleased. Its 3.45 rating is well below the 3.95 average for the 140 books that have over 10,000 reviews. The only books with 10,000 reviews that did worse were Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music (3.15), Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (3.31) and Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (3.38). I also disliked Telegraph Avenue, so this gives me some faith that the ratings are of some value.

Besides Redeeming Love, the other highest rated books with over 10,000 reviews are the bildungsroman Martin Eden by Jack London and the 2017 graphic novel by Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do, about her family’s experience leaving Vietnam for the US.

The most recent book to make the top 25 most popular books is There There by Tommy Orange. The book’s 3.98 rating may not look too impressive, but literary fiction books (as in, not romance or mystery) are generally rated more harshly. There There, a novel about the lives of Native Americans living in Oakland, is actually among the best rated fiction books that takes place in the region. (An interactive version of the chart, where you can click on each dot, is available here.)

You might have noticed that very little non-fiction made the list. That’s primarily because non-fiction books tend to get far fewer reviews on Goodreads. Only three got more than 10,000.

If we lower the threshold for non-fiction to 1,000 reviews, we get 19 books. In the table below, I’ve ranked them by rating. The top two books are about the Black Panthers. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party is an academic look at the emergence of the party, and Revolutionary Suicide is the biography of Huey Newton, one of the original members.

If you are curious, this exercise convinced me to read The Best We Could Do and There There. Tell me if you want to do a book club :)

Also, please let me know what notable books you think didn’t make these lists. I would love to highlight one in the next edition.

Bay Area media recommendation of the week

“Can San Francisco be fixed?” For a recent story in Curbed San Francisco, Brock Keeling asked that question to a number of activists, policy makers and one very famous tech CEO. I was a little wary of the premise, as it suggests nostalgia for a past that really wasn’t so great. But the responses are nearly all thoughtful and some of them are inspiring. They are a reminder that if we want our region to be better, the key is getting involved. I particularly liked this quote from Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery’s response:

The big changes require big levers, government, taxes, laws. But part of caring for a city is rolling up your sleeves too. Vote and agitate, but also adopt storm drains, plant rain gardens and street trees, pick up garbage. If we all do a little bit more, we make a corner of the city better, and find allies for greater actions.

(If you read or listened to something great about the Bay Area this week, please send it to me!)

Dan’s favorite things

I am not handy. I may know how to scrape a website, but put me in front of a broken appliance and I become paralyzed. In order to improve my abilities with tools, I recently took a woodworking class at The Crucible, a non-profit industrial arts center near the West Oakland BART stop. It was awesome. I learned a ton, but I was not just impressed by the teaching. The Crucible is a truly community-oriented organization, making sure that classes are accessible for those who live in the area regardless of income. They offer 10-week courses, as well as shorter weekend courses. Not only do they offer the usuals like ceramics, woodworking and glassblowing, but also digital fabrication and MIG welding.

Thanks for your time, and see you in a couple weeks.

If you think a friend might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it along. You can follow me on Twitter at @dkopf or email me at dan.kopf@gmail.com

The Golden Stats Warrior logo was made by the great Jared Joiner, the best friend a nervous newsletter writer could have. Follow him @jnjoiner. Also, thanks to the fabulous Tess Brustein for copyediting this week.