People think of Los Angeles as a city without a past. But as a native Angeleno, I stumble upon the relics of its history all the time: the rails of our long-ago vanished street cars embedded in the asphalt, for example, and the mostly vacant towers of stone in our Old Banking District.

There are many novels that can give their readers a sense of what it was like to live in that old L.A., a city of men in fedoras and women in broad-shouldered dresses. But it’s John Fante, largely forgotten outside Los Angeles, who best brings the passion, the possibility and the hurt of that glamorous city to life, specifically with his 1939 novel Ask the Dust.

More at the link.

Books are a tremendous presence and inspiration around here — we’ve previously explored how they’ve been made from the Middle Ages to today, what the future might have in store for them, and why analog books still enchant us. In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books.

1. The Sea Is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac
2. The Third Reich, by Roberto Rolaño
3. The Pursued, by C.S. Forester
4. The Watsons, by Jane Austen
5. Ah Pook Is Here, by William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill
6. The Narrative of John Smith, by Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Inheritance, by Louisa May Alcott
8. Paris in the Twentieth Century, by Jules Verne
9. The Cocktail Waitress, by James M. Cain
10. Mr. Tumpy’s Caravan, by Enid Blyton

Details about each book, and links to further information about them, is here.

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

– George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism