Los Angeles: Three Great Books

This week we introduce a new weblog feature, Three Great Books, which highlights a few must-reads for a particular city or region or country. We’re talking about books worth picking up before a trip to that particular place, or to read purely for pleasure. These could be travel narratives, but also memoirs, novels, histories, perhaps even a book of poetry from time to time—anything that evokes a place or speaks to its essence. We begin with Los Angeles. The city might be best known as a movie town, but Los Angeles is far more than that. It has a proud literary history that includes the likes of Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, John Fante, Carey McWilliams and Walter Mosley. Three great books:

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is a towering figure in Los Angeles’ literary landscape. He wrote classic works of hardboiled detective fiction set in the Los Angeles of yore, recalling for today’s readers a time when the city was still young. This 1939 novel debuted Chandler’s private-eye protagonist Philip Marlowe. It opens evoking fall in L.A.: “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.”

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis. Davis is a sharp, lefty intellectual with a keen eye and a penchant for a parsing the nuances of history and place. Here he examines the ethnic and class struggles central to L.A.‘s history. It’s not always pretty, but it’s an in-depth look at the city you’ll find few other places. If you don’t mind Davis’ sometimes dense, scholarly prose, also consider checking out his intriguing Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City. It’s a fascinating, sympathetic look at the changing face of American cities, including Los Angeles.

The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. Boyle is one of America’s finest contemporary novelists, and here he offers an entertaining bit of insight into L.A. sociology. The novel follows the lives of a well-heeled couple who live in a Topanga Canyon gated community—the man is a hack nature writer—and a couple of undocumented Mexican immigrants who literally live in the canyon, camping out by a creek. Their lives cross paths—collide, one might say—and therein lies the story. 

Passages like this one, about the couple from Mexico living in the canyon, evoke a very different kind of life in Los Angeles:

They’d been living in the canyon three weeks now—there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L.A. or even Van Nuys—and though they didn’t have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he’d felt happy for the first time since they’d left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetcorner for work, the reek of the place, the roaches and the nits. Down here was different. Down here they were safe from all the filth and sickness of the streets, from la chota—the police—and the Immigration.

Do you have any favorite Los Angeles books?

 

 

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