Amid the fusillade of horrible headlines this 12 months, one pierced my nerdy coronary heart.
“Having fun with this headline? You’re a rarity: Studying for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a narrative by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure studying amongst American adults fell greater than 40% in 20 years — a continuation of a pattern going again to the Forties.
I get it. We don’t need to learn for enjoyable after we’re making an attempt to wade via the sewer of knowledge we discover on-line and make sense of our horrible political instances. However as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Recreation of Thrones” collection, mentioned, “A thoughts wants books as a sword wants a whetstone, whether it is to maintain its edge.”
So for my annual vacation columna recommending nice books about Southern California, I’m sticking to codecs that lend themselves to simpler studying — bite-size jewels of mind, if you’ll. Via essays, brief tales, poems and footage, every of my ideas will carry solace via the great thing about the place we stay and supply inspiration about the best way to double down on resisting the unhealthy guys.
“California Southern: Writing From the Highway, 1992-2025” by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
(Gustavo Arellano / Los Angeles Occasions)
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s heat voice has knowledgeable Angelenos about arts, politics and training for 25 years on what was lengthy known as KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners won’t know is that the Mexico Metropolis native first earned acclaim as a founding father of Taco Store Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a metropolis that didn’t appear to take care of them.
Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that historical past within the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Highway, 1992-2025.” Studying the brief anthology, it rapidly turns into clear why his audio dispatches have at all times had a prose-like high quality typically missing amongst public radio reporters, whose supply tends to be as dry as Demise Valley.
In largely English however typically Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., using the kind of lyrical financial institution pictures solely a poet can get away with. I particularly cherished his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” One other spotlight is contained in “Vans,” the place Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from world wide who come to L.A. and title their companies after their hometowns.
“Say these names to reward the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to doc the passage. Say these names to recollect the trek.”
Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings lately with Lisa Alvarez, who revealed her first e book, “Some Closing Magnificence and Different Tales,” after a long time of instructing English — together with to my spouse again within the Nineteen Nineties! — at Irvine Valley School.
The L.A. native did the unattainable for somebody who not often delves into made-up tales as a result of the actual world is fantastical sufficient: She made me not simply learn fiction however take pleasure in it.
Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied assortment centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for somebody who fought throughout the Spanish Civil Battle and a resident of O.C.’s canyon nation tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation within the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
Writer, activist and Irvine Valley School professor Lisa Alvarez holds a replica of her brief story assortment “Some Closing Magnificence and Different Tales.”
(Don Leach / Each day Pilot)
A lot of the protagonists are ladies, delivered to life via Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Reminiscences play a key position — folks cherished and misplaced, locations missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving within the Navy in World Battle II. An L.A. mayor who looks like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the artful and funky voice of 1 who sees his previous and future by way of chapters in a best-selling e book” as he tries to persuade a light film star to return down from a tree throughout a protest.
To paraphrase William Faulkner concerning the South, the previous is rarely useless in Southern California — it isn’t even previous.
Whereas Alvarez is a first-time writer, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned vital essays about L.A. historical past and geography for many years, has gathered a few of his current efforts in “Parts of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fireplace.”
A whole lot of his topics — L.A.’s mom tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the primary Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. However few of us can flip a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The dual cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … might appear to be incommensurate locations to the unhearing, however the borders of the 2 cities are porous. Sound travels.”
Man, I want I might have written that.
“Parts of Los Angeles” is definitely worth the buy, if solely to learn “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam catastrophe that killed at the very least 431 folks — largely Latinos — and destroyed the profession of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The writer’s gradual burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s well-known “There it’s. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the town’s thirst, to how L.A. rapidly forgot the catastrophe, compounds hubris upon hubris.
However then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido concerning the catastrophe: “Pals, I go away you/with this unhappy music/and with a plea to heaven/For these taken by the flood.”
The final word victims, Waldie argues, usually are not the useless from the St. Francis Dam however all Angelenos for getting into the deadly folly of Mullholland’s L.A.
“Parts of Los Angeles” was revealed by Angel Metropolis Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that additionally launched “Cruising J-City: Japanese American Automotive Tradition in Los Angeles.”
Cal State Lengthy Seashore sociology professor Oliver Wang provides a powerhouse of a espresso desk e book by taking what might have simply offered as a scrapbook of cool pictures and grounding it within the historical past of a group that has seen the promise and ache of Southern California like few others.
We see Japanese Individuals posing in entrance of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the Sixties, standing in entrance of a automotive at a World Battle II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening vehicles at a time once they dominated the landscaping trade.
“One can learn complete histories of American automotive tradition and discover no point out of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — however that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-City” will get.
The remainder is a delight that zooms by like the remainder of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to learn all of them and change into a greater Southern Californian within the course of. Take pleasure in!
