Most of us don’t think much about where we live. Outside the shops or stops in our orbit, the towns and cities we live in are just the background to where we really reside—the streets we travel; the stores where we shop; the offices where we work; the bars or coffee shops where we socialize.

But in Cool Gray City of Love, lifelong Bay Area resident Gary Kamiya spends 360 pages thinking about San Francisco. After decades living and working and biking there, Kamiya decided to be more intentional about his exploration of his city. He broke it into 49 square-mile chunks and began immersing himself in them, one by one, getting to know every corner of every neighborhood and mapping these new perspectives onto the city he’d known his entire life.

His resulting work is a collection of 49 vignettes about San Francisco, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, and observations from his exploration. And, like the city it celebrates, this book is unlike anything else of its ilk. Some of the chapters explore the history of the neighborhoods on which they focus (and, through that, the history of the city as a whole). Others are reflections on what it’s like to be in those neighborhoods, or what kind of character they have. A few are just excuses to talk about more general iconic aspects of the city—its old bohemian spirit, or its capricious and untamable weather. Kamiya is poetic in his odes to the magic of the city, and he is also unflinching in baring its darker corners and sometimes sordid past. Underlying all of it is a kind of tenderness; Cool Gray City of Love is, above all else, a love letter to San Francisco.

It’s an easy and hard city to love. It’s no secret that San Francisco has fallen on tough times in the past decade, and the news stories about San Francisco—that it is full of violent crime, surrounded by rampant forest fires, littered with human waste on the street, and stalked by speculation about the overdue Big One—have well-earned it the descriptor “apocalyptic.” In their wake, it sometimes feels like all anyone can see are the scars and blotches on its surface. But there’s something in the water in San Francisco, and despite its (many, many) flaws, you’ll fall in love with it if you open yourself to its magic—I’ve seen it happen to most people I know here, and I felt it happen in myself. Reading Cool Gray City of Love is like watching this enchantment happen to Kamiya, while seeing the effects of that transformation at the same time, mingling with his own memories and history in this place.

In a chapter on one of San Francisco’s lost waterways, at Sixth and Channel Streets, Kamiya writes about the vanished waters of San Francisco, now only peeking through in places like Mission Bay, where just outside Giant’s stadium you’ll find a four-block stretch of water that is all that’s left of Mission Creek. He notes that “cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were.”

He writes about his own neighborhood, Nob Hill, which he describes as a place where “everything essential to the city is jammed together, the rich and the poor, the sublime and the ridiculous, the ethereal and the raunchy. It’s where the city’s tectonic plates meet.” He tells a story about the history of his own house, situated between the battered back building, turned into a cramped tenement, and the modernist $2.5 million condo across the street. This historical chapter feels different from the ones on the Gold Rush or the AIDS crisis, offering a window into a part of the city’s history (and present) that isn’t captured by the books—that is only really seen by the locals.