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In "Ramona," her 1884 novel of Southern California, Helen Hunt Jackson did more than tell the story of the illicit romance between a mestizo orphan and an Indian sheepherder. Caught in the pages of her famous melodrama is a picture of the land that is perhaps more timeless than the tale itself.
"The billowy hills on either side of the valley were covered with verdure and bloom…. Father Salvierderra paused many times to gaze at the beautiful picture…. The fairer this beautiful land, the sadder to know it lost to the Church…."
FOR THE RECORD:
Book title:—In the commemorative Home section published Sunday, a story on Los Angeles' literary landscape listed an incorrect title for a book by Reyner Banham. The correct title is "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies."
Jackson's lyrical descriptions capture a reverence for the Western sky, for the gardens and orchards of the region, for the open fields of wild mustard — and an implicit understanding that this world has played a role in shaping her characters.
Writers since Jackson have consciously — or unconsciously — tumbled to similar truths. Whether the backdrop is bucolic or sprawling, nostalgic or postmodern, the drama of Southern California is often caught up in the topography or the development of this urban environment. Fiction writers portray it, nonfictions writers explain it, and between the two is a rich body of literature.
No list of these books is complete, but these 20 titles are a good starting point.
Non-Fiction
An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles
By David Gebhard and Robert Winter
Once known as the "Blue Brick" (for its size and format) but recently updated and redesigned, it is now simply the bible. Gebhard and Winter's collaboration — informing and entertaining — is as indispensable as a Thomas Guide (and sits as easily under the seat of your car). In their mapping of the region and their identification of its notable buildings, the authors never forget that the architecture of L.A. is the best repository of our historic and cultural identity.
Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story
By Don Normark
In 1949, professional photographer Normark discovered Chávez Ravine, a Mexican American community lost in time, surrounded by the emerging metropolis. Wandering the steep hillsides with his camera, he documented this "poor man's Shangri-la," not knowing that its residents would be gone within a decade. His account of this forgotten neighborhood, told in pictures and interviews, is lovingly redemptive.
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
By Mike Davis
When "City of Quartz" detonated over Los Angeles in 1990, Davis' critique was notably different from either the high-minded criticism or the facile observations of this city that come and go with each season. Drawn through his own working-class experience, his view is so visceral, and his catalog of our collective failures so impassioned, that you might believe that at one time he loved the city and its possibilities. Whether we agree with Davis or not, we are often the wiser for what he demands of us.
The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory
By Norman M. Klein
Klein, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, writes a new — and inherently Southern Californian — kind of history, in which what we have abandoned is as important as what we have maintained. For Klein, Los Angeles' past continues to linger in traces — from those ghostly stairways leading nowhere to the images captured by old motion pictures — in which L.A. is both preserved and overshadowed, a city photographed and forgotten all at once.
"The billowy hills on either side of the valley were covered with verdure and bloom…. Father Salvierderra paused many times to gaze at the beautiful picture…. The fairer this beautiful land, the sadder to know it lost to the Church…."
FOR THE RECORD:
Book title:—In the commemorative Home section published Sunday, a story on Los Angeles' literary landscape listed an incorrect title for a book by Reyner Banham. The correct title is "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies."
Jackson's lyrical descriptions capture a reverence for the Western sky, for the gardens and orchards of the region, for the open fields of wild mustard — and an implicit understanding that this world has played a role in shaping her characters.
Writers since Jackson have consciously — or unconsciously — tumbled to similar truths. Whether the backdrop is bucolic or sprawling, nostalgic or postmodern, the drama of Southern California is often caught up in the topography or the development of this urban environment. Fiction writers portray it, nonfictions writers explain it, and between the two is a rich body of literature.
No list of these books is complete, but these 20 titles are a good starting point.
Non-Fiction
An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles
By David Gebhard and Robert Winter
Once known as the "Blue Brick" (for its size and format) but recently updated and redesigned, it is now simply the bible. Gebhard and Winter's collaboration — informing and entertaining — is as indispensable as a Thomas Guide (and sits as easily under the seat of your car). In their mapping of the region and their identification of its notable buildings, the authors never forget that the architecture of L.A. is the best repository of our historic and cultural identity.
Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story
By Don Normark
In 1949, professional photographer Normark discovered Chávez Ravine, a Mexican American community lost in time, surrounded by the emerging metropolis. Wandering the steep hillsides with his camera, he documented this "poor man's Shangri-la," not knowing that its residents would be gone within a decade. His account of this forgotten neighborhood, told in pictures and interviews, is lovingly redemptive.
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
By Mike Davis
When "City of Quartz" detonated over Los Angeles in 1990, Davis' critique was notably different from either the high-minded criticism or the facile observations of this city that come and go with each season. Drawn through his own working-class experience, his view is so visceral, and his catalog of our collective failures so impassioned, that you might believe that at one time he loved the city and its possibilities. Whether we agree with Davis or not, we are often the wiser for what he demands of us.
The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory
By Norman M. Klein
Klein, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, writes a new — and inherently Southern Californian — kind of history, in which what we have abandoned is as important as what we have maintained. For Klein, Los Angeles' past continues to linger in traces — from those ghostly stairways leading nowhere to the images captured by old motion pictures — in which L.A. is both preserved and overshadowed, a city photographed and forgotten all at once.
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