I get it. We don\u2019t want to read for fun when we\u2019re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online<\/a> and make sense of our terrible political times<\/a>. But as Tyrion Lannister<\/a>, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin\u2019s \u201cA Game of Thrones\u201d series, said, \u201cA mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.\u201d<\/p>\n So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I\u2019m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading \u2014 bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.<\/p>\n \u201cCalifornia Southern: Writing From the Road, 1992-2025\u201d by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.<\/p>\n (Gustavo Arellano \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Adolfo Guzman-Lopez\u2019s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3<\/a>. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets<\/a>, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn\u2019t seem to care for them. <\/p>\n Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to \u201cCalifornia Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.\u201d Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.<\/p>\n In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as \u201ctwo tax brackets away\/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.\u201d Another highlight is contained in \u201cTrucks,\u201d where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.<\/p>\n \u201cSay these names to praise the soil,\u201d he writes. \u201cSay these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.\u201d<\/p>\n Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez<\/a>, who published her first book, \u201cSome Final Beauty and Other Stories,\u201d after decades of teaching English \u2014 including to my wife back in the 1990s! \u2014 at Irvine Valley College. <\/p>\n The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it. <\/p>\n Alvarez\u2019s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.\u2019s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor\u2019s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.<\/p>\n Author, activist and Irvine Valley College professor Lisa Alvarez holds a copy of her short story collection \u201cSome Final Beauty and Other Stories.\u201d<\/p>\n (Don Leach \/ Daily Pilot)<\/p>\n Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez\u2019s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role \u2014 people loved and lost, places 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 in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa<\/a> considers himself \u201cthe crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book\u201d as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.<\/p>\n To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California \u2014 it isn\u2019t even past.<\/p>\n While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in \u201cElements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n A lot of his subjects \u2014 L.A.\u2019s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado \u2014 are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarr\u00edn, he writes, \u201cThe twin cities of Los Angeles and Los \u00c1ngeles, evoked by [their] voices \u2026 may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.\u201d<\/p>\n Man, I wish I would have written that.<\/p>\n \u201cElements of Los Angeles\u201d is worth the purchase, if only to read \u201cTaken by the Flood,\u201d Waldie\u2019s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster<\/a> that killed at least 431 people \u2014 mostly Latinos \u2014 and destroyed the career of L.A.\u2019s water godfather, William Mulholland<\/a>. The author\u2019s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland\u2019s famous \u201cThere it is. Take it<\/a>\u201d quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley<\/a> in 1913 to slake the city\u2019s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.<\/p>\n But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: \u201cFriends, I leave you\/with this sad song\/and with a plea to heaven\/For those taken by the flood.\u201d<\/p>\n The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland\u2019s L.A.<\/p>\n \u201cElements of Los Angeles\u201d was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released \u201cCruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.\u201d <\/p>\n Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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