Reading Road Trip...California

There is no one California when it comes to literary depictions of the state. The San Joaquin Valley was immortalized by John Steinbeck's books, including his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath) but Jack Finney's The Body-Snatchers was also set there, as was T. Jefferson Parker's Summer of Fear, and John Lescroart's Hard Evidence, and James Patterson's Third Degree.

Los Angeles is the city that spawned hard-boiled detective fiction, a sub-genre that's alive and well with writers like James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) and others who inhreited the mantle from Raymond Chandler. Further south, you find Don Winslow's Dawn Patrol, and om Wolfe's The Pump House Gang, and Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. The first truly "Califonia" book I ever read was Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, and then later, her books of essays about the place, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Boook suggestions

I love book lists. And I especially love book lists that hav a theme. Now that everyone from the Seattle Seahawks to Emma Watson (and Emma Stone) to Cory Booker are sponsoring book clubs, there's never a lack of suggestions for my next read. Today this list "20 Books to Take You Around the World" popped up on The Modern Mrs. Darcy blog.  Since I love travel as much as I love reading, it felt like a Monday morning Christmas present. (And bonus points for Mrs. Darcy, one of the recommended books was NOT Eat, Pray, Love, which continues to irritate me.)

I was delighted to see one of my old favorites, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America on the list. It's a lovely book, and intriguing to compare the America of Steinbeck's time to today's nation. It's an eclectic list that includes Tana French's Into the Woods, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, and All the Light We Cannot See.  Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow piqued my interest the most but I marked down several for my TBR pile.

Picnic by the Lake of Time...out next week!

I have been playing around with a time travel idea for a while, and this novelette is going to be my first in the series. Hare is the opening:

The fifties were not my first choice as a time to seek refuge and 1955 was not my first choice of year, but as I did my research and exercised my due diligence, it became obvious that 1955 was probably the best place to lie low. For one thing, though I needed to hide somewhen fairly low-tech, I didn’t want to go so far into the past that I had to grow my own food and build my own house.

I also needed to pick a year where I could blend in without too much explanation.

The fifties were perfect for that. The decade had telephones and television and indoor plumbing and air conditioning but it didn’t have facial recognition software or stoplight cameras or laws requiring you to prove your citizenship when looking for a job. You might get asked to show your social security card, but it was easy enough to forge one of those with a totally meaningless SSN because in the days before computer databases, what were they going to do, make a long-distance call to another state to check a birth certificate?