Smith and Berg Property Group knows LA: its neighborhoods, architecture, history. The vibe of each at a particular hour. That knowledge doesn't just come from years in the business. It comes from the writers, photographers, and storytellers who loved this city enough to put it into words and snaps. This list includes some of our favorite books that help explain why LA is unlike anywhere else, and why we never tire of it.
A note on where to buy: LA's independent bookstores are as much a part of this city as anything on this list. Zibby’s on Montana, Diesel at the Brentwood Country Mart, Pages in Manhattan Beach, Book Soup on Sunset, The Last Bookstore downtown — these are the places that have been hand-selling great books to Angelenos for years. Support them when you can (they'll probably recommend something even better than what's on this list!).
Novels & Essays
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
If you haven't read this one yet, this is your summer. Reid has become the definitive novelist of old Hollywood, and this one is her masterpiece — a sweeping, addictive story of a fictional Cuban-American actress and the life she built (and carefully hid) over decades in this city. It's about ambition, identity, and the price of reinvention, all set against a version of LA that feels both glamorous and painfully real. Oh, and it’s coming to Netflix, so give it a read before it hits the screen.
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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Bleak, beautiful, and completely unforgettable. Didion wrote this in 1970 and somehow captured something about LA that still feels true today — the freeways, the industry, the particular kind of slow unraveling that can happen when a city asks too much of you. It's a short book, but it hits hard, and the writing is so precise it almost doesn't seem fair. The kind of novel you finish and immediately want to press into someone else's hands.
Ask the Dust by John Fante
This one’s a classic. Set in LA’s Bunker Hill in the 1930s, Fante's semi-autobiographical novel follows a young writer scraping by and chasing his dreams in a city that doesn't much care. It's tender and funny and quietly devastating, and it captures the specific hunger of someone who came to LA because they had no other ideas. Charles Bukowski called it one of the best novels ever written. He wasn't wrong. This one stays with you long after you've forgotten the plot.
⭐ SBP Notable Sale in Hancock Park: 62 Fremont Place
This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum
A newer addition to the LA canon and a perfect summer read — propulsive, emotionally smart, and deeply rooted in the textures of the city. Crum writes contemporary LA with the kind of specificity that makes you feel like you're actually there, navigating the same streets and the same impossible decisions as her characters. A great pick if you want something that feels very much of this moment.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Philip Marlowe, 1939, and an LA that technically no longer exists but somehow very much still does. Chandler invented the template for every noir story that came after — the atmosphere, the moral ambiguity, the sense that the city itself is the real antagonist — and this is where it all starts. The prose is as good as it gets. If you've never read it, you owe yourself that pleasure. Required homework after: watch the iconic Humphrey Bogart film.
⭐ SBP Notable Sale in Hollywood Hills (Outpost Estates): 2307 Castilian Drive
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
Nobody wrote LA like Eve Babitz, and nobody ever will again. She was in the rooms, at the parties, tangled up in the scene — and she rendered it all in these gorgeous, loose, funny, deeply perceptive essays about life in the city during its wildest years. This book will make you want to drive with the windows down at 9pm with no particular destination. It's the most LA thing ever written, which is saying something.
⭐ SBP Notable Sale in Bel Air: 850 Linda Flora Drive
Coffee Table Books
Los Angeles: Portrait of a City
A massive, meticulously curated archive of LA photography spanning more than a century. You'll find images in here that reframe parts of the city you thought you knew — early downtown, the beach communities, the neighborhoods that don't exist anymore. The kind of book you open for five minutes and look up an hour later.
Case Study Houses
The definitive volume on the postwar modernist homes that put LA architecture on the world map. If you've ever slowed down to stare at a glass wall in the hills and wondered about the story behind it, this book is the answer. Essential reading for anyone who cares about how design and landscape come together — which, around here, is most of us.
⭐ SBP Notable Sale in Brentwood’s Crestwood Hills: 1438 North Kenter Avenue
Cereal City Guide: Los Angeles
Beautifully photographed, thoughtfully edited, and genuinely useful as both a reference and an object. Cereal's city guides have a strong editorial point of view, and their LA edition captures the city with a clarity that even longtime residents will appreciate. The kind of guide that actually makes you want to go somewhere new this weekend.
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