BOOKPATHS

Lake Tahoe, California

As a frequent visitor to Lake Tahoe, it’s only recently that I finally picked up the first in Todd Borg’s mystery series, followed by the second, third, fourth, and fifth novels -- and I’m still reading. Who can resist Own McKenna, a Dalmatian owning, art loving, detective whose beautiful girlfriend, Street Casey, just happens to be an entomologist often called in to help solve homicides. The Owen McKenna Mystery Thrillers will keep you guessing, and reading, while also taking you on a tour of Tahoe and the surrounding region, including Emerald Bay, Maggie’s Peak, Mt. Tallac, Zephyr Cove, Evans, Red Hut, and on and on. Tahoe Hijack! is the most recent in the series. For other titles and information, visit Todd Borg’s website.

San Francisco (and, of course, Paris)

There are a number of excellent exhibitions at Northern California museums currently, including The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. You can easily visit one museum in the morning, stop for lunch, and then walk a couple of blocks to the other museum in the afternoon. While the SFMOMA exhibition is broader in scope, focusing not only on Gertrude Stein, but on her brothers and fellow collectors, Leo and Michael, along with the artists they championed during “the birth of modern art;” the Contemporary Jewish Museum focuses primarily on Gertrude Stein, following her “life from the end of World War I through World War II,“ “illuminating her pivotal role in art during the 20th century.” By day’s end, you’ll feel both exhilarated by the masterpieces you’ve seen and awed by the foresight, intelligence, and creativity of the Stein family. These are exhibitions you’ll carry with you.

Whether you are able to attend the exhibitions or not, both catalogs are well worth their hefty prices.

Los Angeles, California

Read Carolyn Kellogg's July 17th birthday tribute to Raymond Chandler, "one of Los Angeles' greatest writers."

Chandler is known for his novels, all featuring hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe saw a city full of both beauty and betrayal, and to survive he followed his own moral code: He lied to cops, took beatings from bad guys and regularly got and/or rejected the most beautiful woman in the room. Chandler wrote with the bitterness of a brokenhearted romantic: tough yet ready to fall in love again. His prose was indelible.

California

Inspired by a list compiled by the Los Angeles' Zamorano Club in 1945, Stephen K. Tollefson chooses his "own non-definitive list of 'sort of lost novels about California.'"

These are not books just set in California -- California is a character in each.  And for the most part, they delve into history rather than our present, although I think our past tells us a great deal about where we are today.

For the Zamarono 80 list, visit http://www.zamoranoclubla.org/zam80/.

Glen Ellen, California

Timothy Egan questions the proposed closure of Jack London State Historic Park.

It belongs to you and me — the ranch, the cottage, the pond, the stone scraps of an old winery — an inheritance that is now being dismantled. California created the state park idea with Yosemite in 1864, before it was a federal reserve; it is destroying it in 2011 with a plan to permanently close one-fourth of its parks.

 

Claremont, California

Carolyn Kellogg talks with Jonathan Lethem, who’s just exchanged the “New York literary scene for a teaching gig at Pomona College.”

‘Apart from being very happy in Claremont, I'm excited to be in Southern California, such a charged, allegorical place for me,’ Lethem says. While he hasn't been here long enough to develop, as he puts it, ‘a personal myth of my relationship to the place,’ he has to admit, ‘I've been thinking about it at a distance for a long time.’

Small World Books, Venice, California

The Los Angeles Times chooses Small World Books as its “bookstore of the week.”

Today the spray paint is gone; graffiti offerings can be found instead among the art books. The bookstore, which is about 2,000 square feet, has a good selection of contemporary fiction and nonfiction, as well as travel books, cultural studies, mysteries, science fiction, young adult and art books. Last year the store moved some bookshelves to create space to hang art; it's now one of the anchors of the Venice Art Crawl, which happens on the third Thursday of every month.

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California

This is the last weekend for the exhibition, “Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge.”

...The Huntington presents a much-anticipated exhibition on the life and works of Charles Bukowski, drawn from the archive of his papers donated to The Huntington by his wife, Linda Lee Bukowski, in 2006.

Montecito, California

T. C. Boyle “finds inspiration at the doorstep of his Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house” in Montecito.

So right here, right out the window, is a kind of nature preserve all in itself, and if I want a bit more adventure with our fellow species, I can drive up over the San Marcos Pass and hike along the Santa Ynez River in the Los Padres National Forest or take the passenger boat out to Santa Cruz Island, which lies about 25 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Book'em Mysteries, South Pasadena, California

The Los Angeles Times' "bookstore of the week" is Book'em Mysteries in South Pasadena.

Book'em Mysteries has an extensive stock of colorful paperbacks, including all kinds of mysteries, from cozies to noir.  'We really wanted this bookstore to be for readers, not collectors,' Riley says.  'People that buy books because they want to read them, then might give them to a library or a friend.'