Like listening to music, reading is an activity that recharges the spirit. It offers a chance to unplug for an hour to fill your soul and slow down. I like reading after a long day in the city or on a slow weekend morning.
This is my fifth year in a row creating this book list for L.A. TACO, and similar to years before, as Los Angeles-centric as it is, it is also all-California and centered on building bridges in a time where we need all the interconnections we can get.
Below are 38 books, most of which were published in 2024. A few came out in late 2023, and three more were second editions of earlier books with a new foreword for the updated version.
I collect books in a kindred fashion with the bookshelves to prove it. Though I am partial to Los Angeles history, poetry, geography, and crime fiction, I dabble in books about architecture, basketball, creative writing, food, hip hop, jazz, urban studies, social psychology, and comparative religion.
Let’s dive in to the best books of 2024.
The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration ~ Edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung
Bringing together over 60 Japanese American novelists, journalists, and poets, this new anthology published by Penguin Classics “reclaims and reframes the writing produced in response to the actions of the United States government during World War II to forcibly remove and incarcerate 125,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry who shared the same race as the wartime enemy.”
Divided into three main sections, “Before Camp,” “The Camps,” and “After Camp,” there are even a few political cartoons and official government documents to tell the story even more.
Poems by Amy Uyematsu, Janice Mirikitani, Brynn Saito and Traci Kato-Kiriyama get right to the heart of the matter while offering a nice balance to the short stories and memoir-style essays included. The pieces in the text range from 1942 to a few written in the last few years. Four generations of writers are here, including the still alive 100-year-old scribe Mitsuye Yamada.
1000 Words ~ By Jami Attenberg
In 2018, the award-winning novelist Jami Attenberg was under pressure to finish a draft of a big project. Faced with a looming contract and the fear of missing her deadline, Attenberg and a friend decided to use the boot camp model in order to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. They opened up the practice to other writers via the hashtag—#1000wordsofsummer—and the concept quickly went viral, with a few thousand writers joining in.
The model was so successful that Attenberg has done it every summer since 2018. She even does other #1000wordsaday week-long segments a few times annually. I saw Lynell George tweet about it during the pandemic and I did the practice a few days myself. This book summarizes the concept through short essays by Attenberg and 54 other writers like Roxane Gay, R.O. Kwon, Ada Limon, and Celeste Ng. There’s a lot of inspiration here for writers who want to stay creative, focused, and productive all year.
Incantations: Love Poems for Battle Sites ~ By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
The impetus for these poems began when Bermejo was awarded a poetry fellowship and short residence at the Gettysburg National Military Park through the National Parks Arts Foundation in 2017. The poems in this collection go from battlegrounds in Gettysburg to South El Monte to Compton to Clovis, California, to Tijuana and Pasadena while engaging with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
She sets the record straight in poem after poem, reminding readers that America means many different things and that she “is not your torta.” The San Gabriel poet Bermejo is the founder of Woman Who Submit, an organization that empowers women writers to get their work published through gatherings where women writers meet to send their work out to magazines and literary journals for publications. Blending urgent social commentary with musical sarcasm, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is an essential Angelena poet who weaves the personal and political as well as anyone anywhere.
“To speak the truth is upkeep,” she writes, “I welcome others to sit under trees, to bring their blankets and their poems.”
Unexplained Presence ~ By Tisa Bryant
“Black figures in Eurocentric literature, film and visual art,” writes Tisa Bryant, “are rarely presented without being given a distinct, racialized function, the import of which often goes largely undisputed, if not wholly unacknowledged, simply because the power of saying, of naming and describing it has been withheld.”
Bryant’s collection of essays picks up the thread started by Toni Morrison’s 1992 landmark work, Playing In the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by deconstructing the racialized narratives of paintings, film, and literature. Bryant taught for several years at CalArts and is now at the University of Iowa. Margo Jefferson calls Bryant “an auteur, a cultural anthropologist, and a spirit guide.” Bryant’s writing prowess is on full display in these essays.
SFV or Die Foo’ ~ By Soledad Con Carne
“The heart of the Valley / beats in Panorama / cycling between third world and developed nation,” declares Soledad Con Carne in the opening poem of this collection. With poems meditating on Van Nuys Boulevard and anecdotes from throwing punk shows at Cal State Northridge, Soledad Con Carne is the closest thing to San Fernando Valley’s Poet Laureate writing today. These pieces are their manifesto shining a light on “a bowl that’s at risk of flooding / with every failed dream that Hollywood gaslights into being—suffocating / the wants from the means. Holding hostage visions and dreams / i can’t wait for what the Valley will bring me next. / what a masochist finds surreal / is only useful as writing material.” Soledad Con Carne is the real deal, reflecting an eternal heartache from 818 to the world.
The Coit Tower Murals ~ By Robert W. Cherny
Painted in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were America’s first federally funded public works of art. Located on the top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the Coit Tower murals were inspired by Diego Rivera, and most of them were executed in buon fresco, the palette and style Rivera helped popularize. Aside from the mural’s obvious beauty, some of the symbolism was perceived as communist, and a decade-long controversy ensued where a few of the murals were censored and had minor changes made.
90 years later, public art is all over the U.S. and similar controversies continue to this day. Cherny shows how the arguments about New Deal public art in the Great Depression are more relevant than ever now as some monuments are being reconsidered and removed across America. Censoring art is a Pandora’s box and this book shows the first example of American public art and the ongoing public debate it caused.
It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me ~ By Rex Chapman
In the late 1980s, Rex Chapman was a superstar basketball player for the University of Kentucky. Considered by many to be the greatest player to ever come out of that state, he ended up playing 12 seasons in the NBA with a solid career, but never quite as successful as his early promise hinted at. By the end of his NBA run, he developed an addiction to Vicodin and OxyContin, along with a gambling problem, which ultimately cost him the nearly $40 million dollars he made in his professional career.
His memoir follows his entire life story, from his early success to his eventual arrest for shoplifting in 2014, which gradually leads to him becoming sober and getting his life back together.
In recent years, Chapman has become popular as an activist and anti-racist influencer on social media. In this memoir, he tells it all, showing how he recovered. At his lowest point, he was even living in his car. Chapman is doing much better now, but this book shows his courage and how fragile life can be, even for someone who seemingly has it all.
Sky Songs ~ By Chiwan Choi
“I’m coming back to LA / across the storm of the century / through the jet black nights of Utah / and the dragons hiding among the ruin,” writes Chiwan Choi in this heartbreaking collection of poems.
Choi declares in his afterword that these poems are “messy and repetitive and maybe the worst of (his) five books, but (he) loves it,” because it feels like the first book he’s truly written for himself. These poems are “a direct line to (his) emotions and confusions, fears and anxieties. The messy stuff.”
The book is broken up into four albums: “somewhere murmur,” “ugly,” “our holy places” and “exile.” Some are response poems to Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. Choi encourages us “to spend the time you have left / climbing to heaven on your own.”
My Body is Paper ~ By Gil Cuadros
Though the East Los Angeles-born writer Gil Cuadros died of AIDS in 1996, his legacy and work are now more popular than ever. 1994’s “City of God” is considered an essential Los Angeles text. This new book is an unpublished collection he worked on just before he passed. When City Lights Publishers heard a few years ago that there was enough work for one more book from Cuadros, they eagerly agreed to publish.
Cuadros writes about not only East L.A. but Montebello, Pico Rivera, Atlantic Boulevard, and what it was like to be a gay Chicano in the early 1990s. Meditating on sex, family, religion, and betrayal, he offers, “A part of us will survive after we’re gone.”
The UCLA English Professor and poet Justin Torres writes in the foreword that when he heard there was one more Cuadros book on the horizon, he “felt a kind of ecstasy akin to the convert’s anticipation of the second coming.”
Dead Cities ~ By Mike Davis
“Dead Cities,” writes Rebecca Solnit, in the book’s new foreword, “is the third book in an urbanist trilogy that began with City of Quartz, the 1990 book that made Mike’s reputation as a prophet—but its subtle was Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, an argument that you get to the future through a deep dive into the past.”
Initially published in 2002, this new edition from Haymarket Books includes the foreword by Solnit. She shows how Dead Cities continues the thread from Ecology of Fear, the second book in the trilogy. There are landmark essays here like “Who Killed L.A.?: A Political Autopsy,” “Fear and Loathing in Compton,” and “Las Vegas Versus Nature.”
Dead Cities meditates on the dichotomy between nature and the city while presenting not only accounts about Los Angeles but essays about New York, Utah, Berlin, and the Great Basin. Solnit reminds us in the foreword that Mike Davis was an urban prophet who showed us that, “remembering that we sowed the wind helps us know that we will reap the whirlwind.”
Moreover Solnit continues, “the essays in this book are ferocious. Ferocious but far from hopeless.” Dead Cities presents both a call to action and a chronicle of how we got here.
Sonnets for a Missing Key ~ By Percival Everett
Percival Everett is the author of over 30 books and one of the most decorated fiction writers of the last three decades. Nonetheless, from time to time, he writes poetry, and this book of sonnets channels Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum.
“Pour this garden into a glass,” he writes, “while / explaining to me the difference between a creek / and a stream, an ocean and a sea.” Comprising playful questions, ambiguous aphorisms, and witty wordplay, these sonnets are catchy and even reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues or Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets. This is a fun, quick read that seems simple but holds much more meaning with each re-reading.
The Chronicles of Doom ~ By S.H. Fernando Jr.
If you’ve ever wanted to know the backstory of MF DOOM and how he created so much music in his 49 years, this is one for you. Covering the entire trajectory of DOOM from the time he was in KMD to working with Madlib, Dangermouse, Cartoon Network, and the many different personas DOOM was known by, this is a definitive biography that does a great job of explicating the music.
The narrative includes a quick history of East Coast rap while dissecting the personas, projects, beats, and lyrics for which DOOM was famous for. The masked M.C., born in London as Daniel Dumile Jr., deserves to be recognized as an all-time hip-hop great, and this biography goes a long way to show why he is. Though DOOM will always remain an underground icon, this biography shows why he’s one of the most prolific artists in hip-hop history.
In Case of Flood Stand On This Book It’s Dry English ~ By Michael C. Ford
With the possible exception of Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman, no other poet may have written more poems about Los Angeles than Michael C. Ford. Born in 1939, Ford is a pioneering poet, spoken word recording artist, playwright, and teacher who attended UCLA with Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek from The Doors. In later years, he wrote liner notes for the punk band, The Minutemen.
This new book collects over 50 years of Ford’s mostly unpublished writings. The dude’s at his best riffing on geography, film history, jazz, and Los Angeles. As he writes in the piece, “Closing Prayer,”: Forgive Los Angeles, as we forgive / those who Los Angeles against us; / and lead us not into Los Angeles, / but deliver us from Los Angeles.”
Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California ~ Edited by Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzman, and Samine Joudat
This new anthology from Angel City Press aims to tell new stories about California from over a dozen emerging voices like Wendy Cheng, Brynn Saito, George Sanchez-Tello, Kenji Liu, Cassandra Lane, Peter Chesney, Ruth Nolan, Ramon Garcia, and Jenise Miller. The collection covers forgotten pockets like the Central Valley, the Antelope Valley, the Coachella Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, and even Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.
The book’s genesis came from when the editors ran Boom California, where they published their “Postcard” series, partially inspired by Sesshu Foster’s experimental prose. Susan Straight writes in the foreword that “this collection finds new breezes and winds flowing through the mountains, valleys, cities, and suburbs, through the deserts high and low, through the sidewalks, parks, parties, and streets, the cemeteries and fields and rivers of our state–so many new and established voices, so many wonderful tales.”
The Aves ~ By Ryane Nicole Granados
This coming-of-age novella is akin to what it might be like if The House on Mango Street was transposed to the late 1980s or early 90s in the Crenshaw District or Inglewood. Each short vignette is filled with Black girlhood, rites of passage, and Los Angeles anecdotes like a summer evening at the park.
“As we walk, the sun settles behind the 405, and the streetlights buzz until they can finally find the strength to burst open with light… You can see so much more when you walk the streets than the portrait revealed from the passenger-seat window… When window-walking, the soul of the world rests between the drawn curtains of Los Angeles.”
The breezy spirit of The Aves is almost reminiscent of early 90s G funk or the ethereal soundscape of Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness.”
Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles ~ By Paul Haddad
Haddad pulls back the curtain on how power brokers like Harry Chandler, Henry Huntington, William Mulholland, Moses Sherman, Phineas Banning, and Harrison Gray Otis took Los Angeles from a dusty, 29-square mile pueblo in the 1870s to a 468-square mile metropolis in 50 years.
Though much of this may already be familiar to students of Los Angeles history, what is new here is the level of depth that Haddad brings to the stories. Dozens of candid anecdotes show how modern Los Angeles came into being. The stories of these moguls are interweaved seamlessly, and as Haddad concludes: “Whether or not these titans created a literal paradise misses the point. Like Shangri-LA, Eden, or even Hollywood, paradise will always exist as long as humankind dreams. For that reason alone, Los Angeles was always destined to be.”
In Praise of Late Wonder ~ By Lee Herrick
Fresno-based Herrick is the first Asian American California Poet Laureate. This new collection of poems is his fourth book. Herrick’s heart is as big as the state he represents. He writes openly about his adoption from Korea and how he found joy despite never meeting his biological parents. “What enters us stays with us, even if only in dreams,” he writes. In poems like “Abecedarian Love Song for Street Food” and “My California,” Herrick melds the virtuosity of Jonathan Gold with the spiritual capacity of Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama.
Read this for a quick taste of his poetic range: “Now, even in this late dying, let us praise the 20,000 / open-hearted vendors in Bangkok and the glorious / pupusas in San Salvador I ate on a bench near a dove. / Quesadilla. Arepa. Tteokbokki. Hallelujah. The banh mi / right on the outskirts of Hue, the chili pepper, the cilantro / songs, praise the Zocalo saints who brought me / to tears with a taco so full of music I almost wept.” Herrick captures 21st century California better than anyone, and these poems hammer the point home.
Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden & Walton ~ By Scott Howard-Cooper
Zooming in on UCLA’s basketball dynasty from 1964 to 1975, when the team won ten national championships in basketball, Scott Howard-Cooper pulls back the curtain on Kareem Abdul Jabber, John Wooden, and Bill Walton. More than just UCLA basketball, this book shows the connection between Kareem, Wooden, and Walton with Muhammad Ali, Richard Nixon, the Grateful Dead, the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, and the Civil Rights Movement.
John Wooden is the most successful coach in college basketball history, and Kareem and Walton are his two greatest players. To add further urgency with why this book matters, Walton died just a few months after this book was published. Wooden ended up living to 99 before passing in 2010. This narrative shows the interconnection between these three giants and the deeper political and social turmoil that brewed behind the scenes as they made history on the basketball court.
The Rent Collectors ~ By Jesse Katz
Jesse Katz spent almost a decade doing the research that culminated in this true story about a bungled gang murder near MacArthur Park in Pico-Union in 2007. The narrative follows the story of Giovanni Macedo, a fledgling member of the Columbia Lil Cycos branch of 18th Street who’s been ordered to kill a street vendor who refuses to pay taxes to the gang. When Giovanni fails in his attempt to kill the vendor, he accidentally kills an adjacent newborn.
The gang’s overlords decide Giovanni needs to pay for his mistake, and they order a hit on him that ends unsuccessfully, leaving Giovanni stranded in the northern Mexican desert. Somehow, Giovanni survives, intent on redeeming his unforgivable crime and taking down the gang that forced him to do it.
Katz interviewed dozens of people, from Giovanni in prison, to gang members, police officers, and even the feds, to tell the violent backstory of L.A.’s invisible economy. The book covers from 2007 to 2022, and as tragic as the story is, there’s a restorative justice element to The Rent Collectors that shows there’s always more than what we see on the news.
The State of Fire ~ By Obi Kaufmann
“The ecosystem not only understands that fire will return,” writes Obi Kaufmann, “but wishes for fires recurrence, in accordance with how things once were and shall be again. Even though, with the advent of so many novel stressors, from invasive grass to climate breakdown, fire’s regular return has been forever altered from its pre-contact regime, evidence abounds for how this place is remembering itself, and fire is the agent of that reset, at once ancient and new.”
Fire is a fact of California and Obi Kaufmann explains why in this book, his 5th one from Heyday Books in his California Field Atlas series.
There may not be a man anywhere in this country who combines art and science as well as he does. This book includes ecological history, hand-painted watercolor maps, regional breakdowns, and a meticulous catalog of all of California’s fire ecologies, from the chaparral to the Douglas fir to live oak forests, the pinyon pine woodlands and a dozen other landscapes where fire moves through our state. Whether explaining the fire return index or painting a detailed map of fires in the northeast Cascade Range, Kaufmann shows us how we can benefit from fire teaching if we pay closer attention.
He’s A Color Until He’s Not ~ By Christian Hanz Lozada
Lozada deconstructs broken cycles in poems about finding his identity while growing up in North Long Beach and Compton. He invites readers to take the hooks out of their mouths and reclaim their lives to heal generations of misunderstanding. He reminds us that “holidays are hurricanes” and that “we internalize it young.” He makes light of his own mixed-race identity in hopes of both building a bridge and even soliciting a laugh or two.
“If both Brown Dad and White Mom knew / there was little holding us together. / If fishing would stick, it was enough,” he confesses. There are poems about 23 and Me and absent white grandfathers and even a glossary of terms on how to read his poems. After reading Lozada, you will see why even Bukowski went transcendental.
Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin ~ Edited by Clint Margrave
A resident of Long Beach for over 50 years, Gerald Locklin (1941-2021) published over 100 books in his lifetime. Requiem for the Toad is the new posthumous collection of selected poems that culls his hundreds of poems into a 240-page volume of his greatest hits.
Whether he’s celebrating his son and daughter, ruminating on Sartre, Hemingway, or Cezanne, or lamenting his lost youth, Locklin’s straight talk and wit made him one of Bukowski’s best friends and the purveyor of a poetic style later to be called Stand Up Poetry. Locklin taught at Long Beach State from 1965 to 2007, mentoring hundreds of writers. This new collection of his work is an excellent introduction for the newly initiated and a treasure trove for those who know.
Criminals ~ By Ben Masaoka
Criminals is a novel that follows the lives of Ruth and Hank Tanazaki, a sister and brother who conflict with their parent’s generation of Japanese Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The narrative shows their respective trajectories into adulthood and beyond. Familiar locations like Centinela Avenue, Ballona Creek, Long Beach, Palos Verdes, and Venice Beach are the setting.
What makes the book even more poignant is that Ben Masaoka (1952-2024) died earlier this year just before Criminals was published. Though he had a few pieces published in the Chicago Review of Books and Catamaran Literary Reader, this is his only book. The plot moves through three-plus decades as we see the protagonist, Hank, grapple with losing his sister. “It happened many years ago,” the author writes, “yet grief visits him unexpectedly. Rising up, receding back into a mysterious place. Love and regret rushing through him in waves out of nowhere.” This is a new essential book for both Los Angeles and the Asian American canon.
High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul ~ By Marcus J. Moore
For those who were there, De La Soul is perennially considered one of the most significant hip-hop groups ever. This new book by Marcus J. Moore tells their three-decade story from their Long Island roots to the tragic passing of their cofounder, Trugoy the Dove, in 2023. The book also serves as a personal memoir as Moore reminisces on his coming of age as it intersects with the trajectory of De La’s tenure. Above all, Moore shows how the group’s integrity never wavered. “I’m reminded,” Moore states, “of the pace at which De La has navigated three decades of prosperity: Make the best art possible, and don’t worry about being seen.
Good attention will come if you move with integrity and create things rooted in sincerity. You won’t have to look for it. You can’t make people recognize or appreciate your talent; put out good work and move on.” De La Soul recently publicly denounced this book. Moore says he liked some of their records more than others, but in the end, the book honors De La as the giants they are.
The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 ~ By Becky Nicolaides
Focusing on Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, this sweeping book examines the social and civic dynamics in these four touchstone Los Angeles suburbs and their respective histories over the last 80-plus years.
“At the heart of this book,” writes the author, “are social histories that explore how social and civic life evolved in suburbs undergoing significant demographic transitions. How did community traditions evolve? What were people’s everyday experiences like? How did diversity affect involvement in clubs, volunteer work, schools, and other local institutions?”
The four case studies presented reveal different truths that any long-term Angeleno will recognize, whether it’s a redeveloped downtown or the economic downturn of the aerospace industry and its effects on the job market. Ultimately, Nicolaides shows how Asians, Latinos, and Black North Americans revitalized aging suburbs, whether “reviving ‘dead malls’’’ or “introducing new cultural traditions.” In some ways, this is a parallel text or even the sociological sequel to DJ Waldie’s Holy Land.
My Chicano Heart ~ By Daniel A. Olivas
Daniel Olivas has quietly been one of Los Angeles’s prolific authors over the last 25 years, moving between fiction and nonfiction. This new collection from the University of Nevada Press collects his best short stories from the last two decades. The thirty-one stories here mix some new ones with a few of his favorites from the past. Interrogating morality, justice, and self-determination while being steeped deep in Chicano culture is his hallmark, along with some insightful California observations. “Sometimes a person’s bias,” he writes, “is as clear as the L.A. sky isn’t, but no question can really get to a person’s hidden agendas.”
Dreaming as One ~ By Kevin Opstedal
“Perched upon the southernmost tip of the Point Reyes Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west and Bolinas lagoon to the east, the town of Bolinas seems like an offshore island,” writes Kevin Opstedal.
Bolinas is just north of San Francisco in Marin County, and its residents are so protective of its privacy that they even pull the “Bolinas” turnout sign off Highway 1. Bolinas is a world of its own that only those who know know. This tome is a history from 1967 to 1980 about the dozens of poets, artists, and musicians who lived in Bolinas, including members of the second generation of the New York School poets like Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, and Beat poets like David Meltzer.
The founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River, Lewis MacAdams, lived in Bolinas for a decade, where an oil spill around 1971-72 got him inspired to become an environmental activist. Even Jim Carroll, the author of The Basketball Diaries and future punk rock icon, lived in Bolinas in the early 1970s. Kevin Opstedal, this book’s author, is a poet originally from Venice who now lives near Santa Cruz and is known for being a progenitor of surf noir. Opstedal’s kaleidoscopic account of this radical time and place is a fascinating portrait of a little-known period of California letters.
Ash Dark as Night ~ By Gary Phillips
Gary Phillips is quietly the Kendrick Lamar of L.A. noir authors. 2024 is another banner year for the South Central-born crime fiction writer. His latest, Ash Dark as Night, is the sequel to 2022’s One-Shot Harry. Set in August 1965 amid the Watts riots, crime photographer Harry Ingram snaps a few shots of the LAPD unleashing batons, dogs, and water hoses on civilians while also shooting an unarmed activist.
After Ingram captures these indiscretions, he ends up on the receiving end of a beating by these same officers. Soon enough, he wakes up in a hospital, missing his camera. Without offering any spoilers, the narrative follows an investigation of bank robberies, burglary rings, crooked cops, and lost cash across the Sunset Strip, West Adams, Boyle Heights, and Watts. Ingam’s photos are published on the front page of the paper, and the action never stops. Phillips is an expert in Los Angeles history, and the plot includes many side stories based on true tales. Historical fiction, Los Angeles lore, social justice, and noir coalesce beautifully.
Violent Spring ~ By Gary Phillips
Set in 1992, right after the Rodney King Uprisings, the Black private eye Ivan Monk is searching for the killer of a Korean liquor store owner who was found at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. When another body turns up, a complicated plot includes the FBI and the Rolling Daltons gang in a narrative as twisted as our city’s criminal justice system was in the early 90s. Initially published in 1994 as Phillips’ debut, this new deluxe edition includes an Introduction by Walter Mosley that properly contextualizes Phillips’ place as a premier L.A. author.
“In this book, Violent Spring,” Mosley writes, “and the many others that come after, we find the DNA that exonerates those we have hated, abandoned, and imprisoned—thirty years too late.” Phillips knows LA better than anybody, and this new version of his first tome cements his legacy as one of the greatest noir authors of all time.
Brutal Companion ~ By Ruben Quesada
Melancholy and family memory mix in this collection of poetry. “My mother is going to die,” Quesada declares. “Her ashes / will be sewn into the ocean, stitched / onto passing angelfish.” Originally from Southeast Los Angeles and now in Chicago, Quesada captures heartbreak well while somehow making it beautiful. “From next door,” he writes, “the jacarandas / have started pushing against the window.”
Hip-Hop is History ~ By Questlove
A sequel to Questlove’s epic, Music is History, this new one runs through 50 years of hip-hop from Kool Herc to Grandmaster Flash to Rakim to LL Cool J to Tyler the Creator to Kendrick Lamar while offering inside stories that only Questlove could know about A Tribe Called Quest, Dilla, Pharcyde, and De La Soul and a dozen other groups. So much is covered here, from obscure samples to hip-hop’s roots in jazz, funk, soul, and other forgotten sources Questlove reveals while dancing between expertise and explanation. There’s an encyclopedic tone coupled with the awe and wonder of a connoisseur who loves the subject he writes about.
“I have written about the way my own listening habits have changed, how I used to put records on heavy rotation multiple times, let them sink in until I heard the nuances of every sample, every breakbeat, every lyrical callback,” he confesses.
Hundreds of hip-hop songs are listed in the appendix that avoid the Captain Obvious selections while still embodying “all the joy and energy and hope and humor and intelligence and attitude and flash” of the genre. This is a source-book for anyone who loves hip-hop.
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins ~ Edited by V.H. Reese
The saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins is still alive at 94. One of the only 20th-century saxophone players that could be mentioned in the same conversation as John Coltrane, Rollins has diligently kept a notebook since the early 1950s. This 152-page edited version collects over 50 years of his entries, beginning in 1959 when he retreated from the public eye for a few years to practice daily on his craft or, in jazz parlance, “woodshed.” Rollins often went out onto the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn to play all night, practicing chords and rehearsing under the stars. His notebooks mix musical insights, chores, routines, and meditations on the music industry, racism, and his inner world. Rollins puts it all together here. One does not need to be a musician to draw inspiration from Sonny Rollins’ Notebook.
Awake For Ever In A Sweet Unrest ~ By Chuck Rosenthal
Taking place in 21st Century Los Angeles, Venice to be exact, at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, this novel merges the magical, historical, and social realms to spotlight the 19th Century Romantic poets but in a contemporary context. With cameos at Topanga Canyon, UCLA, and the Last Bookstore, the narrative follows a group of poets based on the Romantic poets: John Keats, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron as they travel across Venice and in and out of time.
Mary Shelley, the wife of Percy Shelley and author of Frankenstein, even appears. There’s a surrealist element underneath the storyline in the spirit of time traveling. There’s some synthesis of science fiction and literary history here, but Rosenthal wrote the book, he says in the acknowledgements to “revolve around who these people were as characters, how they would act and what they would say when placed in the circumstances that unfold as the story develops.”
Maestra ~ By Angelina Sáenz
The Echo Park poet Angelina Sáenz worked for more than 20 years as a classroom teacher for LAUSD. This collection of poems reveals her compassion, sense of humor, and keen class consciousness captured in short poems that will either tug on your heartstrings or make you laugh at the incredulity of public school teaching.
Centering the voices of barrio children, their parents, and her fellow educators, Sáenz always hits the bullseye. She critiques the so-called experts too with quick, poignant lines: “Students will not learn from you / if you have contempt / for them / their families / their language / their community / and their culture.” Sáenz promotes unconditional positive regard for her students, radiating love in every poem. Teachers reading these lines will feel seen, and those not knowing about the nuances of teaching might learn something.
Between the Night and Its Music ~ By A.B. Spellman
Like Sonny Rollins, A.B. Spellman is one of the last titans still standing. Now 89 years old, the poet, professor, and jazz historian was a pioneering voice of the Black Arts Movement. His 1966 book Four Lives in the Bebop Business is so influential that the National Endowment of the Arts created the A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy.
This book of his new and selected poems is a landmark event for those who have followed his long career. Lauri Scheyer writes in the Introduction that “Spellman reveals poetry’s ability to serve as a cultural and historical record and an aesthetic object of lasting beauty that transcends boundaries of space and time.” There’s a lifetime of experience in these poems and music on the page for days and days and days.
Thank you (Falettinme BE Mice Elf Again) ~ By Sly Stone
Though this book came out at the end of 2023, I read it in January 2024, and its poignant narrative style stuck with me throughout the year. Some even call this memoir a generational event because Sly Stone has spent over the last 35 years out of the public eye after his incredible early career as a pop-rock-funk superstar. Sly tells it all here from his monumental Woodstock appearance, his rise to prominence, and his eventual fall from grace after succumbing to drugs for three decades. The spectrum of highs and lows in his life story is dizzying.
As Questlove says in the foreword, “Sly has lived a hundred lives, and they are all here.” Sly’s direct voice grabs the reader from the first page and never lets go. He does not mince words. As he says near the end: “I’m proud when my music inspires people. It makes me feel like I did something right.” Sly is now over 80 years old, and this book captures it all.
Blue on a Blue Palette ~ By Lynne Thompson
Lynne Thompson was the Los Angeles Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023, and these poems reflect on the condition of women while reflecting on tradition by proposing a new vision. Thompson grew up in the Crenshaw District in the 1960s, and her poetry reflects a true Angelena who understands our city’s people and ecology.
“Some of us turn north onto the 110 and / head for our weekend, so there’s simply no reason for all this horse-power to come to such a hard stop just south of the Arroyo Seco except / that yesterday, minutes fell back into the groover they came from and / today, rush hour finds itself shrouded in the dark so black all we can see in / the early November sky is a Hunter’s Moon, that orange-red gem, that / highwayman gathering up our lost seasons.”
Thompson suggests a new way to look at women, even asking: “Do you want to know about the black dahlia, or do you want the truth about Elizabeth Short?” Read these poems to find out.
Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens ~ By Jose Vadi
“Chipped is my articulation of how skateboarding gave me a new lens through which I could see my world and myself differently,” writes Jose Vadi in this book, which is part memoir and part overarching history of skating as a cultural phenomenon.
Exploring skateboarding’s connection to everything from lowbrow art to the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County to Sun Ra’s music to Thrasher Magazine to hostile architecture, Vadi skillfully weaves his coming-of-age with his three decades of experience as a skater. Originally from Pomona, Vadi attended UC Berkeley and eventually moved to Sacramento while skating the entire time. Beyond just the author’s life story, Chipped connects a lot of culture with anecdotes about John Coltrane, HBO Def Jam Poetry, and even MF Doom while still somehow bridging it all through skating.
Of course, there were many more books I hoped to get to, but this list will get you started. Here’s to taking the time to unplug and recharge while learning something. Always remember to support your local independent bookstore.
Happy holidays and Happy New Year to all of you!
This post was originally published on here
