Commentary: Short, beautiful Southern California reads for our doomscrolling times
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Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining ...” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August.Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.I was excited to see so many voices, new and familiar, dominate the 2024 nonfiction releases, showing that Latinas have played important roles in the Southern California story and deserve far more recognition.I get it.
We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times.But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R.
Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — 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.Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s 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.
What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes...