Short, beautiful Southern California reads for our doomscrolling times

This year, amid the deluge of terrible headlines, one pierced my nerdy heart.

“Enjoying this title? You are a rarity: reading for pleasure is declining…” was the top the story of my colleague Hayley Branson-Potts in August. Reading enjoyment among American adults has fallen by more than 40% in two decades, continuing a trend that began in the 1940s.

I understand. We don't want to read for fun when we're trying to get through channeling the information we find on the Internet and figure it out our terrible political times. But how Tyrion LannisterThe wily hero of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones said, “The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.”

So for my annual leave column When recommending great books about Southern California, I stick to formats that make for easy reading—tiny gems of intelligence, if you will. Each of my suggestions in essays, stories, poems and pictures will bring comfort through the beauty of where we live and inspire us on how to redouble our efforts to resist the bad guys.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez's warm voice has kept Los Angeles residents informed about the arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long known as KPCC and LAist 89.3 is currently running. Most listeners may not know that the Mexico City native first earned recognition as the founder of Taco Shop Poetsan influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn't seem to care about them.

Guzman-Lopez allows others to delve deeper into this history in the introduction and following of Southern California: Road Notes, 1992–2025. Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio reports have always had a matter-of-fact quality that is often lacking in public radio reporters, whose speech is usually as dry as Death Valley.

Mostly in English, but occasionally in Spanish and Spanish, Guzmán-López takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to Los Angeles using the type of lyrical footage that only a poet could get away with. I especially liked his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets / from Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight comes in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to Los Angeles and name their businesses after their hometowns.

“Name these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to commemorate this passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”

Guzman-Lopez recently gave readings with Lisa Alvarezwho published her first book, Some Recent Beauties and Other Stories, after decades of teaching English, including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.

The Los Angeles native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into fictional stories because the real world is so fantastical: she made me not just read fiction, but enjoy it.

Alvarez's debut is a loosely knit collection dedicated to progressive activists in Southern California, including seismic send-offs of a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War and an O.C. Canyon Country woman who tipped off the FBI about her neighbor's involvement in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

Most of the main characters are women, brought to life by Alvarez's tense and brilliant lines. Memories play a key role – people loved and lost, places missed and desecrated. A nephew recalls how his uncle got involved in an FBI subversion case after attending a Paul Robeson performance in South Los Angeles shortly after serving in the Navy during World War II. Los Angeles mayor who looks like a deputy Antonio Villaraigoiza considers himself “the cunning and cool voice of a man who sees his past and future in the form of chapters of a best-selling book” while trying to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.

To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past never dies in Southern California—it's not even the past.

Although this is Alvarez's first time writing, DJ Waldie has written many books. Leavy, of Lakewood, who has written important essays on the history and geography of Los Angeles for decades, has collected some of his recent work in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”

Many of his subjects—the mother tree of Los Angeles, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, Hass's first avocado—are proven territory for Southern California writers. But few of us can say a phrase like Waldie. Of legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Harrin, he writes: “The sister cities of L.A. and L.A., called [their] voices… may seem disparate places to the deaf, but the borders of the two cities are permeable. Sound travels.”

Damn, I wish I could write this.

The Elements of Los Angeles is worth buying just to read “Caught in the Flood,” Waldie's story about 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster. who killed at least 431 people – mostly Hispanic – and destroyed careers Water Godfather of Los Angeles William Mulholland. The author slowly burns through the tragic chronology from Mulholland's famous novel.Here it is. Take this“quote when he released the water from Owens Valley in 1913 to quench the city's thirst, and the way Los Angeles quickly forgot about the disaster adds to arrogance after arrogance.

But then Waldie concludes by quoting a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you / with this sad song / and a plea to heaven / For those who were taken by the flood.”

The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not those who died at St. Francis Dam, but all the Angelenos who bought into the fatal stupidity of Mulholland's Los Angeles.

Elements of Los Angeles was published by Angel City Press, an imprint of the Los Angeles Public Library, which also published Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.

Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerful coffee table book by taking what could easily be sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the story of a community that saw the promise and pain of Southern California, like some others.

We see Japanese Americans posing in front of imported goods, enjoying the 1960s SoCal cultural scene, standing in front of a car in a World War II prison camp, and simultaneously loading their gardening trucks. when they dominated the landscaping industry.

“You could read the entire history of American car culture and not find a single mention of Japanese or Asian American participation,” Wang writes—but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.

The rest is a pleasure that flies by, like the rest of my records. Stop scrolling for the day, take the time to read them all, and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!