Library Booklist Reveals Palisadian Soul

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

We are all Angelenos, but Palisadians differ from our city neighbors: Palisadians dress like Midwesterners, fight against unwanted developments like New Yorkers and read like Europeans.

At least, that is what the latest survey of our literary tastes from Palisades Branch Library suggests.

Across Los Angeles last year, according to the latest citywide analysis of borrowings, the most popular authors remain former LA Times crime writer Michael Connelly, former lawyer John Grisham and the Florida master of the extremely brief paragraph, James Patterson.

But in the Palisades, according to Senior Librarian Mary Hopf, there is more international curiosity.

The most popular book was Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow,” a love story set in a grand hotel in the 1920s, overflowing with spies, revolutionaries and an aristocrat held hostage in its gilded hallway both by Lenin and his own out-of-time courtliness.

“The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane” by Lisa See, a Parisian-born Los Angeles city commissioner who has also served as grand marshal of the LA Chinatown New Year parade, is an exploration of outsiders in Han-dominated China: the Akha people in Yunnan province. There is also tea.

“Homegoing,” a 300-year family epic, opens in West Africa as the British develop the Gold Coast slave trade: Author Yaa Gyasi makes the painful point this was not just a white man’s crime. It may be “Roots” for a new generation, but carried down the maternal line.

By contrast the other three top titles of 2017 bring us home to America, but an America far from Pacific Palisades.

“Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng, which looks at race, privilege and parenting, and the magical realism of “Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward both explore tangled family dynamics under pressure in Ohio and Mississippi, respectively.

And the one book that is proving beloved both in the Palisades and across the city is George Saunder’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” an unsettling novel set in a magical hour (the bardo of the title) as a grief-stricken President Lincoln cradles the body of his lost son Willie.

And the hottest book of 2018 so far? The one Palisadians are lining up to read? It’s Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” about a very different kind of Republican president.

If our cultural tastes reflect our town, what do our choices say about us? We are curious, literary, but not so experimental that it gets in the way of a good tale, and we like stories spun by women.

And when we are finished, we can sigh and say, “It’s good to be home.”