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.