You don’t need to live here long to know that Los Angeles is massive and complex. There is a lot to understand about the city and the greater county, and how it works.
To help you get a clearer picture of the place, might we suggest a book?
How to LA spoke to eight local independent booksellers to get a few recommendations of the best books to read about this place.
Here are their picks:
Co-owner and author Luis J. Rodriguez (also a former poet laureate of L.A.) says L.A. often doesn’t get the credit it deserves for its literary contributions.
"I find L.A. to be a great literary town, a great poetry town, that people don't pay attention to,” Rodriguez says. “San Francisco is known for it, New York is known for it, but L.A. shouldn't be forgotten for the great amount of literature and poetry that comes out of these communities."
Rodriguez’s own books — like his 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. — often appear on lists of best books about Los Angeles, but he offered these picks from authors who’ve inspired him:
Ask the Dust by John Fante
Rodriguez considers it “the seminal L.A. novel.”
Mercurochrome: New Poems by Wanda Coleman (who Rodriguez calls “the quintessential L.A.writer”):
“She’s from Watts and she’s very fierce, she’s very strident. But she’s also — of course like any poet— she’s got a sensitivity to things,” Rodriguez says. “When you read her poetry she pulls you into a world that I don’t think this city appreciates.”
Owner and founder Nikki High offered these two recommendations written by the store’s namesake, author (and Pasadenan) Octavia Butler.
While Butler is often described as a science fiction writer, High says the label doesn’t really fully encompass Butler’s work:
“I think when Octavia Butler started writing these stories they were so different than anything anyone has ever written, no one really knew what to do with her, so they just said ‘Sci-Fi.’”
High’s recommendations:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
While the story is technically set in a fictional Southern California city called “Robledo,” High says there are many clues that it’s meant to be Pasadena.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
In this 1979 novel, the main character Dana lives in Altadena, right next door to Pasadena.
Bookseller Grant Hoskins echoed the importance of novelist and short story writer John Fante, but wanted to also offer some more recent works.
His picks were both published in 2023:
The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow
Set in Burbank, 30 years from today, the novel is about the climate emergency and Hoskins says, “in a lot of ways it mirrors the politics of now,” but it ultimately has a hopeful outlook on the future.
“You could write a book like this to inspire doom and fear,” Hoskins says. “But Doctorow does it in a way that inspires a lot of hope.”
KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell by Robeson Taj Frazier with Ben Caldwell
“A really incredible book” about influential arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell that Hoskins says features a lot of great art: “It’s just a treasure.”
Jazzi McGilbert, the founder and creative director of Reparations Club (or “Rep Club”) also mentioned Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” as well as Paul Beatty’s 2021 novel "The White Boy Shuffle" and “South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s” by Kellie Jones, but she wanted to highlight a local first-time author:
There Goes the Neighborhood by Jade Adia
This young adult novel is a story about gentrification which McGilbert says is something that she herself grapples with every day at the bookstore.
It’s about a group of friends with a “half-baked” idea of starting a fake gang to scare off newcomers to the neighborhood, but McGilbert says that at its heart, the story is about “community and coming of age in Los Angeles.”
Around the holidays, we headed to Chevalier’s Books which has the claim to fame of being the oldest independent bookstore in Los Angeles.
Bookseller Miles Parnegg highlighted these books as ones that would help transplants understand L.A. better and also “conceive of the city as a whole”:
She by Michelle Latiolais
Written by local author Michelle Latiolais, Parnegg describes “She” as one of his favorite books ever. Classified as neither a novel nor a collection of short stories (instead it’s labeled simply as “fiction”), Parnegg says the story “shows us a way of being in this big, sprawling city in a way that is actually reinforcing care and mutual aid.”
Seventy-Two and One Half Miles Across Los Angeles by Mark Ruwedel
A book of photos that Parnegg says “celebrates the complexity and the grittiness of L.A. and also tries to make an argument for getting out of our bubbles — and an argument for walking the city.”
Koreatown Dreaming: Stories and Portraits of Korean Immigrant Life by Emanuel Hahn
"For someone who lives in Koreatown and didn’t know much about it before I moved here, this book has been a revelation,” says Parnegg.
We also got some recommendations for books that help you better understand Los Angeles from Book Soup.
Store manager Jess Amodeo, who is from L.A. and grew up in the Valley, suggested these books, which both feature some great art and photography, and also have the potential to make good gifts:
Ed Ruscha/ Now Then: A Retrospective from MoMA Press
A photo collection of influential artist Ed Ruscha’s works spanning over 65 years that Amodeo says helps you see Los Angeles through Ruscha’s eyes.
The Cobrasnake: Y2Ks Archive by Mark Hunter
Amodeo says that Hunter’s photos encapsulate an era of L.A.’s nightlife scene, before smartphones social media, “when there was this convergence of culture and fashion and all these things just starting to take off.”
Skylight Books’ general manager Mary Williams suggested:
Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles by Rosecrans Baldwin
“It synthesizes so many different ideas in pursuit of his thesis that L.A. is a modern city-state,” Williams says. And it features interviews with several writers that are fixtures of L.A.’s literary community.
“For somebody who’s going for their first book about L.A., I think it’s a great pick because from there you could go down a real rabbit hole of all the different authors that he mentions and people that he interviews.”
Skylight Books also has a large L.A. regional history and culture section and a local travel guide section. From those sections, Williams highlighted:
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology edited by David Ulin
Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018 edited by David Kipen
Lisa Morton, a long-time bookseller at the used bookstore, suggested City of Quartz by Mike Davis, the non-fiction classic about L.A., but because it’s so well known, she also added some of her favorite fiction — leaning toward horror, fantasy and science fiction — about Los Angeles:
Amnesiascope by Steve Erickson
“It actually takes place in an L.A. that is so divided that each little different district has its own different time zone.”
The Dog Park by Dennis Etchison
A horror genre author whose stories are often set in L.A., Etchison’s short story “The Dog Park” is about two people “who meet taking their dogs into a park up in one of the canyons and soon realize there’s something very wrong in that canyon.” Like with “Amnesiascope,” Morton says, “You read it and you’re like ‘Oh, this is almost too close to reality.’”
