Discussions in another thread have me curious about the novel L.A. Confidential. I see that it's part of the "L.A. Quartet." Does that mean I should read them in order? How much do they depend on each other? Can I just read LAC (the 3rd of the quartet) without the others?

Looks like they’re for the most part sequential. And there was a book before the Quartet that introduced a lot of the characters and now there’s two books in the second quartet already released.

Thanks Joe. You’ve pretty much kicked off my 2022 reading list!

Looks like they’re for the most part sequential. And there was a book before the Quartet that introduced a lot of the characters and now there’s two books in the second quartet already released.

Thanks Joe. You’ve pretty much kicked off my 2022 reading list!

Reading up on this a bit, it seems like the book that "introduces" some of the characters comes chronologically after some of the L.A. Quartet? Seems like the characters reference The Black Dahlia case? Maybe I'm reading that wrong. I'm trying not to read too many spoilers.

why those years?

what are some short fiction collections that you’ve liked?


i haven’t kept up with new short fiction in a decade, so i don’t really know. but, THE COMPLETE GARY LUTZ came out in 2019, which for our purposes is near enough to your period, and he’s one of my favorite writers

hey all, gonna crowdsource this.

are there any fans of short story/essay collections, and if so, what are some you'd recommend that came out in 2020/21?

thanks in advance.

Two suggestions:

I really enjoyed "Orange World and Other Stories" by Karen Russell; if you've heard of one of her books before, it was probably "Swamplandia!" which I also liked. Traditional short stories, always a little odd, fun stuff.

Another that's not really a short story collection per se is "Because She Never Asked" by Enrique Vila-Matas, but it does open with a short story, which is followed by a short story about writing the short story, which is then followed by another story about writing the story about writing the first story. Sort of. These layers continue to shift and it's tough to keep track of them. I liked it a lot, and it's a nice intro to Vila-Matas if you've never read him.

Two suggestions:

I really enjoyed "Orange World and Other Stories" by Karen Russell; if you've heard of one of her books before, it was probably "Swamplandia!" which I also liked. Traditional short stories, always a little odd, fun stuff.

Another that's not really a short story collection per se is "Because She Never Asked" by Enrique Vila-Matas, but it does open with a short story, which is followed by a short story about writing the short story, which is then followed by another story about writing the story about writing the first story. Sort of. These layers continue to shift and it's tough to keep track of them. I liked it a lot, and it's a nice intro to Vila-Matas if you've never read him.

Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr

It is the condition in which one is the least capable of being just; narrow-minded, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, one is a little vortex of life in a dead sea of darkness and oblivion: and yet this condition — unhistorical, anti-historical through and through — is the womb not only of the unjust but of every just deed too; and no painter will paint his picture, no general achieve his victory, no people attain its freedom without having first desired and striven for it in an unhis­torical condition such as that described. As he who acts is, in Goethe’s words, always without a conscience, so is he also always without knowledge; he forgets most things so as to do one thing, he is unjust towards what lies behind him, and he recognizes the rights only of that which is now to come into being and no other rights whatever. Thus he who acts loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved: and the finest deeds take place in such a superabundance of love that, even if their worth were incalculable in other respects, they must still be unworthy of this love.

If, on the other hand, you acquire a living knowledge of the history of great men, you will learn from it a supreme commandment: to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age which sees its advantage in preventing your growth so as to rule and exploit you to the full while you are still immature. And if you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend ‘So-and-So and his age’, but those upon whose title-page there would stand ‘a fighter against his age’. Satiate your soul with Plutarch and when you believe in his heroes dare at the same time to believe in yourself. With a hundred such men — raised in this unmodern way, that is to say, become mature and accustomed to the heroic — the whole noisy sham-culture of our age could now be silenced forever.

Objectivity sucks!