Reading Books on California

Quantifying art is odious, but we have to say the greatest California novels were written by John Steinbeck. Oh, c’mon, the man won the Nobel Prize for Literature — that has to count for something. Start with The Grapes of Wrath, as the Joad family flees the defeat of Dust Bowl Oklahoma only to find bitter disillusionment in the not-so-Golden State. Then visit with his oddly happy crew of lowlifes who hang around Monterey Bay’s Cannery Row.
Upton Sinclair didn’t get a Nobel Prize (despite the efforts of his admirer, George Bernard Shaw), but his Oil! is considered the great novel of 1920s Southern California. Hollywood Noir simply wouldn’t be the same without Philip Marlowe, the private-eye protagonist of Raymond Chandler’s detective novels such as The Big Sleep. His Northern California counterpart Dashiell Hammett brought the world Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (Spade worked in San Francisco). What does it say about the state when its most famous romantic figures are troubled loners? Anyone wanting to try his luck in Hollywood should be required to read Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locusts (because it rips the glitter off Tinseltown and shows the savagery beneath) and Bud Shulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (featuring everyone’s favorite amoral, desperate agent Sammy Glick, role model for too many ambitious, if not particularly self-aware, Young Turks). Following in these footsteps is Michael Tolkein’s The Player, equally unsentimental about This Town and The Industry, to say the least. (At least Sammy Glick never killed anyone —that we know of.) If you ask him, however, Tolkein would say the best novel about Los Angeles is John Fante’s 1939 Ask The Dust, wherein yet another young writer gets his hopes and dreams crushed.
And while we are recommending downer (if brilliant) books, follow Los Angeles’s turbulent history and speculate on its future via Mark Davis’s City of Quartz. Relive some of the state’s most infamous (and brutal) moments with Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (the best version of the Manson murders and the book most responsible for childhood nightmares among a generation), or one of the many books about San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer, L.A.’s Hillside Strangler, and, of course, O.J. One of the more famous and beloved pieces of modern fiction based in San Francisco is Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. If you’ve seen the miniseries, and especially if you haven’t, this is a must read for a leisurely afternoon — Maupin is a Dickens for his time. His 1970s soap opera covers the residents of 28 Barbary Lane (Macondry Lane on Russian Hill was the inspiration), melding sex, drugs, and growing selfawareness with enormous warmth and humor. A work of fiction featuring San Francisco during the Gold Rush is Daughter of Fortune by acclaimed novelist and Marin resident Isabel Allende. The tale begins in Chile and follows the life of Eliza, an orphan adopted by a proper English spinster and her brother. In love with a boy who has sailed for the gold fields, a pregnant Eliza runs away from home to search for the lad and is befriended by a Chinese doctor. Allende’s vivid depiction of life in California during the mid–19th century is one of the novel’s strengths.