The Books canon

Sourced and shelved.

Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.

Case Study Houses

Elizabeth A. T. Smith
2002 · 440 pages

A Los Angeles magazine asked architects how postwar America should live, and Eames, Koenig, and Neutra answered in steel and glass on hillsides. Julius Shulman's photographs sold California modernism to the world.

★ 4.3

Snow Crash

1992 · 440 pages

Stephenson coined the word Metaverse in these pages, and Facebook renamed itself after the idea. His sword-carrying hacker delivers pizza for the Mafia and fights a virus that infects minds through language.

★ 4.8

Mildred Pierce

1941 · 298 pages

Abandoned in Depression-era Glendale, Mildred bakes pies and builds a restaurant chain, spending every dollar on the gifted, glacial daughter who despises her for working. Cain needs no corpse to write noir.

★ 5.1

City of Quartz

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
1990 · 512 pages

Los Angeles read as a machine for excluding people: Davis strips the sunshine myth to find speculators, bum-proof benches, and a police force patrolling from helicopters. Two years later the city burned.

★ 5.3

Ask the Dust

1939 · 165 pages

Arturo Bandini starves in a Bunker Hill hotel in Depression Los Angeles, wanting to be a great writer and loving a Mexican waitress he cannot stop insulting. Bukowski called Fante his god.

★ 6.2

The Big Sleep

1939 · 231 pages

A dying general among his orchids hires Philip Marlowe to settle a blackmail debt, and the job opens into pornography, missing husbands, and Los Angeles money. Chandler's sentences became an American standard.

★ 6.9