Anyone have any recommendations for books about Los Angeles?

>>9595344
I thought this was pretty vacuous, which is disappointing because I love her nonfic. It's a caricature of the "ennui novel" and its particular ironic tone sets it up to be exactly the thing it's trying to criticize. BEE and Nathaniel West did it better.

File: james-dean-at-griffith-observatory.jpg (78KB, 1365x583px) Image search: [Google]

78KB, 1365x583px

>>9595344
Nathaniel West's "Day of the Locust" and Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep" are essential LA-core.

>>9595465
Fair criticism. Less Than Zero is complete fucking garbage tho.

>>9595510
I don't think it's an amazing work, but I like the things it does well. It does a very good job of de-mythologizing the sex and drugs aesthetic and presenting it in a detached and mechanical way. The drug use is pulled away from the sexy-cool image, the sexy-destructive image, and from the destructive nightmare image. As a result it takes the structure of a very up-its-own-ass kind of novel and pulls it out said ass and as a result the novel is a completely different take on something familiar. A shame BEE himself can't dislodge himself from his own ass.

>>9595553
I agree that the de-mythologizing is done well, but I think the "sexiness" removed from the sex and drugs just becomes the "sexiness" of detachment.

>>9595632
probably right, yes