Fog Blog

The Year of Fog on Culture Vulture–a review by Frances Dinkelspiel.

Robert Owen took this photograph of Java Beach just off La Playa in San Francisco. This is one of the places where Abby posts flyers in The Year of Fog. Robert recently swung through San Francisco and has posted a whole new slew of wonderful photographs in his Year of Fog set on Flickr.

Thanks to readers and booksellers, The Year of Fog will have a third run on the New York Times best seller list.

It’s always nice to see The Year of Fog on top of someone’s TBR pile. This pile happens to belong to a photographer, someone named Val who publishes the lovely photography blog Picture Perfect. Thanks, Val!

I mean, I hearted New York when I lived there, almost a decade ago, but now I heart it even more…as I just found out that The Year of Fog, which was released in paperback about four weeks ago, has made the New York Times bestseller list. Go Yankees! (Or is it the Mets?)

It’s been a fun ride with The Year of Fog, which came out in April and went into its fourth printing a couple of months ago. I’m thrilled that The Year of Fog is included on the Washington Post’s list of top-rated books in 2007, as well as Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007.

Thanks to librarians for giving readers a chance to discover a book that otherwise might have fallen through the cracks. The Year of Fog has been very much a word-of-mouth book, one which owes a great deal of its success to the librarians and booksellers who have been so kind as to give a novel by a relatively unknown writer prominent placement on their shelves. And of course, thanks to the readers! Please keep your emails coming. It has been such a pleasure to hear from you over the last few months.

A photographer and sea captain named Robert Owen in Oregon has embarked on this fabulous photo tour of THE YEAR OF FOG. You can follow Owens’s photos from Ocean Beach into the Mission and beyond.

I’ve received a lot of interesting questions from readers in the seven months since THE YEAR OF FOG was published, but this one from Ron and Holly in Aurora, Colorado, may be my favorite:

Do you have the recipe for the french toast Nick made, with the Nes-quik & vanilla extract?

To Ron & Holly and anyone else who’s jonesing for some French Toast a-la-Nick, recipe coming soon!

Fog Bay has some nice photos of the Mechanics Institute Library, where my character, Nell Novotnoy, is a librarian. Nell, Abby’s friend and neighbor, introduces her to seminal works on memory by Frances Yates, Raymond Lull, and others. For me, researching memory–how we works, the differences between the reality of memory and how we perceive memory–was one of the most interesting aspects of writing THE YEAR OF FOG.

A significant part of the novel takes place in my own neighborhood, San Francisco’s Outer Richmond. It’s purely coincidence that my last name happens to coincide with the name of the neighborhood. My father-in-law grew up in this part of town, which is known for its proximity to Golden Gate Park (the neighborhood skirts the northern edge of the park), its dense fog, and its Russian heritage. The park ends at the Pacific Ocean, and many of the homes in the Richmond have views of the sea.

It’s a pleasure unique to San Francisco to watch the fog rolling in from the ocean, advancing up the avenues. One of the things I love about the neighborhood is that the air smells better out here, and when the fog burns off in the late afternoons we have brilliant sun. At nighttime, one can often hear a symphony of fog horns wailing out in the Bay, which sounds a bit like prehistoric creatures marching upon the city.

The Outer Richmond is also home to my favorite independent movie house in the city, the Balboa. For more about the Outer Richmond, visit my other blog, Sans Serif, where I do a series called Richmond in the Richmond.