This is a hybrid event. Registration is required for Zoom attendance. In-person attendance does not require registration; seats available first come, first served.

San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, and few know it better than Bonnie Tsui, who surfs and swims in the bay when she’s not writing beautifully about it. Her book, Why We Swim, discusses our love affair with water and includes fascinating stories including her parents’ own meeting at a Hong Kong swimming pool.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Knight and pop culture critic Hartlaub, founders of the Chronicle’s Total SF, are celebrating San Francisco through the pages with their second Total SF Book Club. Together, they curate a quarterly event with local authors and books celebrating San Francisco. They include a wide array of genres —fiction, nonfiction, history, YA and even graphic novels—focused on the City they love. Follow their Total SF podcast to hear upcoming episodes featuring interviews with the authors.

Total SF, explores and celebrates the wonder and whimsy of San Francisco, with the Total SF podcast, events, spotlights on small businesses and more adventures.

Bonnie Tsui lives, swims and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her new book, Why We Swim, was published by Algonquin Books in April 2020; it received praise from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Booklist, Kirkus and more, and is one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. It is currently being translated into eight languages. Tsui’s first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was just published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers/Macmillan in May 2021.

She also hopes, as Oliver Sacks writes in “Water Babies,” to “swim till I die.”

Connect

Bonnie Tsui - Website | Bonnie Tsui - Instagram | Bonnie Tsui - Twitter

Heather Knight - SF Chronicle | Heather Knight - Instagram | Heather Knight - Twitter                         
Peter Hartlaub - SF Chronicle | Peter Hartlaub - Instagram | Peter Hartlaub - Twitter

Watch on YouTube.