Reading Tales of the City in Order Actually Matters
The book series by Armistead Maupin Tales Of The City is not a single novel. It is a sprawling serial fiction that started as a newspaper column and grew into nine main books plus a few companions. If you pick it up expecting a neat beginning and ending, you will be confused. The characters stay in San Francisco, they age slowly, they drift in and out, and the books were published roughly in the real-time order of their events. I learned this the hard way when someone told me "just read the first one" and I ended up laughing at references to events I had no context for. The first book, Tales of the City, was serialized in the San Francisco Reader in 1976 before being published as a novel. It follows Mary Ann Singleton, a young woman who moves to San Francisco and finds herself living at 28 Barbary Lane. From there it branches out to ten tenants, lovers, and misfits whose lives intertwine.
Armistead Maupin Tales Of The City Reading Guide
The core sequence in publication order runs like this: Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980),Further Tales of the City (1982), Babylon Steps (1984), Mrs. Polder's Boys (1985), Little Sisters of the Holy Cross (1987), Still Tales of the City (1989), Further Tales of the City (1991), and Sure of You (1997). There are also companion volumes like Further Tales of the City, which some people double-count because the titles overlap between the BBC radio versions and the printed books. The BBC miniseries adaptations are another thing entirely. They are excellent, but they compress and rearrange events. The three TV movies from 1993, 1998, and 2001 cover different stretches of the narrative. I watch them after finishing the books, not before, because the show makes choices that simplify character motivations. For example, the show glosses over how long some relationships actually take to develop across the books. Here is where most people mess up. They start with the PBS miniseries and think they know the story. The TV version combines characters and skips entire arcs. You will miss the subplot about Michael Dowd's son Orlando, who appears much later in the book series. You will also miss the entire later-life storyline that happens in the 1990s books, which deal with the aftermath of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. That shift in tone is important. The early books are lighter and funnier. The later books deal with loss in a way that requires you to have been following these people for twenty years of reading.
If you want to read straight through, plan for about forty to fifty hours across all the books. They are not thick individually, but there are nine of them. I usually recommend reading one book while a new miniseries episode drops, if you are doing both. That way the books fill in the gaps the show leaves open. There is also a practical issue with obtaining the books. They went out of print for a stretch and then came back in paperback and ebook formats. The older editions have slightly different introductions and minor text variations. The current Harper Paperbacks edition is the standard text. Any ebook retailer will have it. If you are hunting for first editions or the original Bantam editions, you will pay more than the content is worth. The stories are the same. One counter-intuitive thing about reading the series: you do not need to read every single book to understand the plot. The later books assume you have been paying attention to the characters, but the narrative is character-driven, not plot-driven. The big events in the later books matter less than the fact that you care about these people. If you skip Babylon Steps and jump to Little Sisters of the Holy Cross, you will still follow along. You will just feel like you missed someone at a family dinner where everyone is talking about something you were not part of.
Get the Full Details
The series also has a specific San Francisco geography that you need to learn. Barbary Lane is the anchor. It is a real street, or at least it was treated as one during the serialization. The books walk you through the Castro, Noe Valley, Pacific Heights, and North Beach. If you live in San Francisco, you will find yourself stopping at bars and corners that Maupin describes. It ruins normal life there. I walked down Barbary Lane once expecting to see the actual building from the books. It is a regular apartment building with regular people living in it. Nothing special about it. That is kind of the point, but it still feels anticlimactic. Another thing nobody warns you about: the later books contain scenes that are difficult to get through because of how realistic they are. The depiction of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s books is not dramatized or sensationalized. It is just plain and quiet and devastating. People you have spent forty hours with die. If you are reading them in one sitting, stop after book six. Give yourself a break. The series does not pace itself for a binge. If you want to discuss the books with other people, the fan communities are scattered across Reddit, Letterboxd, and a few dedicated forums. The discussions tend to get intense about ordering and adaptation choices. Some people argue the PBS version is superior. Some people think the original column format was better because Maupin could rewrite scenes based on reader feedback. Both sides have valid points. The column format allowed real-time interaction with the audience in a way that the novel format does not.
The series is available as an ebook bundle on Amazon, Apple Books, and Kindle. Individual books are also sold separately. The audiobook versions are narrated by the cast of the PBS series, which is a nice touch if you want to hear familiar voices. I found the audiobooks useful during my commute because the books are long and the narration keeps you moving forward. The narration speed matters more than you would think. At normal speed it drags. At 1.2x it clicks. The only thing I would change about the experience of reading the series is the waiting period between books. They were written over twenty years. You can buy them all at once, but you might also want to pace yourself to match the original reading rhythm. Read one, then wait a few weeks. Let the characters settle in your head before moving to the next book. Otherwise you will blur the timeline and forget which relationship happened in which year.
