Nevermind...

City Lights bookstore (of the Beat poets) saved me with its idiosyncratic inventory. It's got the standard fiction, non-fiction categories...along with a separate room for Latin American and Asian literature..and downstairs it's got the groovy categories you can find nowhere else (at least not at Borders): "Political Theory and Practice," (which is where I found several tomes by my hero, Subcommandante Marcos), "Commodity Aesthetics," and "People's Histories," etc. No New York Times bestsellers for my hippie friends. Anyway, not that anyone's the least bit interested, but I settled on a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, "Conversation in the Cathedral," and Matthew Restall's "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" (in which the ethnohistorian rips pervasive myths about the conquest of the Americas (e.g., "The Myth of Superiority" — the belief that the success of the Spanish conquest was due to technological superiority of the Spaniards or inherent cultural superiority)). Power to the people. And truth. I feel better now.