As far as books about Los Angeles go, this genuinely FEELS like LA. From the setting to the characters to the situations to the way the sky is often described like paint. Which is noteworthy because it makes an (ultimately) heavy-handed point about how the dream of Hollywood, California, is really quite bleak (I know there are a lot of "LA is actually bleak" stories, just know in this case I don't use the word "bleak" lightly—the 1975 film version is often described as a disguised horror movie.) For LA in the 30s, this too feels accurate: a stage mom boasts about how she's following a raw diet while sucking her adorable child actor son bone dry. Strangely, a lot of it reminded me of life in your twenties, full of unmoored people seeking big dreams but really only finding stunning boredom, a boredom that can somehow teeter into either soulful magnanimity or senseless violence depending on the day. It's really quite a good book. And that's because it's more than about Hollywood, it's really about boredom and how it makes us behave, set in a town built to be the ultimate antidote to American boredom (is the solution also the source of the problem?) It's also well written, it's compelling (in some parts, it's actually too much to handle), it's truthful, it's weird, parts of it had me howling with laughter, and parts of it were horrifying. It really ranks among the best books no one has ever read (Christina Stead is also on that list.) That combination Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust book? You should really pick it up. Sidenote: there's a character in the novel named Homer Simpson. And the reason The Simpsons only contains one reference to this in its 30-odd years is because, in the novel, Homer Simpson murders an 8-year-old child, coldly and cruelly, stomping on their now lifeless body again and again and again and again and again, and then again and again and again, right in front of a huge crowd of people. Four stars.

Does a 50-page novella count as a book? If it does, my god, this one is bleak. Russian literature is (hilariously) stereotyped as bleak but within the first three pages of this one we're already exposed to depression, helplessness, Christ, sickness, abortion, suicide, mental disability, and rape—I don't recall Chekhov ever overloading his first act gun in quite the same way. The novella is also a weird, jittery comedy (how West achieves this is nothing short of a miracle.) This is the premise: A New York newspaper advice columnist receives daily pleas for help from desperately lost people with very serious problems; the combination of being exposed to the worst of humanity along with the fact that "Miss Lonelyhearts" (a stepping-stone gig taken by an ambitious, and very flawed, 26-year-old reporter) is viewed as a sort of unerring savior by the entire city completely batters his ill-equipped, genuinely empathetic/genuinely violent psyche. Hilarity ensues. (There's actually a lot of similarity to a pitch-black Joe Orton farce; maybe West was an inspiration.) Four stars.