Hometown Glory highlights the backgrounds of your favorite booksellers through the literature they love. For this series, we have selected books which represent our histories and remind us of home. This is Bex. who hails from California.

The longer I have lived outside of southern California, the more I have realized just how much I am a Californian. Sometimes it’s the accent. I lower my jaw, elongate my vowels, set my timbre to fry. Other times it’s my obsession with directions, measuring distance in minutes instead of miles. In summer I listen to the Beach Boys, but in winter I exclusively listen to the Beach Boys, because I don’t want to pay for Vitamin D. And, of course (of course!) it’s about the drought. I abstain from almonds. I finish all the water at the table at restaurants. My showers are never more than five minutes long. I love living in New York, but I love being a Californian. I am always trying to go back. But that’s expensive, and planes are not good for droughts. Luckily, these books help me to get as close as I can.

The White Album by Joan Didion

This list was always going to start with Joan. Tell me I’m wrong! You can’t. It’s my list. The White Album is a collection of essays that focuses on the cowabunga of it all. It also contains one of the most culturally significant sentences in California (and my personal) history: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.” Oh, the drought! The drought. How I miss your dehydrated cult.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

Have you ever read a book and are like, this feels like my hometown, and then realize it literally is your hometown? Clearly, I have. In Goodbye, Vitamin, Khong effortlessly captures the stucco suburbs, the pizza arcades, the crowded parking lots, and the not-drought resistant sweet gum trees showering cars with their prickly seed pods. Her descriptions of the Inland Empire endear this work to me completely, just as her protagonist does in the opening pages, just as every character does in this small rapture of a book. I hold this novel to my chest each Christmas and bask in our hometown’s dry, dry heat.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

I know, I know, the town of Robledo isn’t real. It fictionally exists 20 miles outside of Los Angeles, but those twenty miles are everything. They give Los Angeles just the right amount of lore, shrouding the sprawl city in a mythic glimmer. Robledo, in truth, is every town 20 miles outside of Los Angeles. It epitomizes that feeling of being so near the stars, while actually existing an entire apocalypse away.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

This is a trans book about trans kids who go around performing rituals and learning about family and being so, so gay. You can cut the sexual tension between the two protagonists with a knife, except you can’t, because one of them is a ghost. I adore this book. An ode to East Los Angeles, to Latinx love, and to protecting and celebrating trans youth.

I Love Dick, Chris Kraus

The only place this book was ever going to make sense was San Bernadino County. It’s the largest county in the US, and is home to mountains, lakes, deserts, cowboys, wannabe cowboys, and Republicans. It made complete sense to me that San Bernardino is where a couple would write unsent letters and faxes to a man named Dick. It made sense to me that they had nothing better to do in those dark mountains than participate in this not-affair-turned-affair-turned-erasure. And it all made sense because this book, just like the landscape, is absolutely unhinged.