Column: Riled about Gaza, not $600k payout to ex-city manager

At the City Council meeting Monday in Pomona, 15 people demanded the council take a stand about Gaza. Only one person brought up the local issue. Nevertheless, I delve into the payout to the former city manager. Also, I make my triumphant (?) return to a Pomona council meeting after four years away. That’s my slightly nostalgic Wednesday column.

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Books read, 2023

Welcome to my annual post looking back at my year in reading! At the bottom is a list of the books I read in 2023, in chronological order. Up top is a photo of them all in one place. After this group photo, most were returned to my shelves and about one-fourth went into a “sell” box. (For comparison, here’s my 2022 list of books read.)

The year’s total was 63 books: 33 fiction, 30 nonfiction. That is, if we count Homer and Dante as fiction, but other poetry as nonfiction, which seems fair to me. A scant 10 of the 63 were written or co-written by women. This is, I think, largely a function of my backlog, which is primarily made up of pre-21st century books.

2023 was a pretty good year, one in which I kept chipping away at my fabled backlog. To use the pandemic as a diving line, and it’s an obvious marker for us all, I began the year with 58 books purchased before the pandemic and ended the year with only 18.

By the end of 2024 I fully expect to have read those remaining 18, all received from 2009 through 2019. (A few of them are quite long — hello, “Middlemarch” and “Big Book of Adventure Stories,” each nearly 1,000 pages! — so it’s no slam dunk. But at one or two per month, it’s doable.)

Finishing those will definitely be progress as that relatively modest effort will catch me up on 11 years of past purchases and bring my reading into the pandemic era (and what an era it was, eh?). Note that only one of the 18, “Middlemarch,” is by a woman.

Women are better represented in the pandemic era: I have 52 unread books acquired from 2020 through 2023 on my shelves and 21 are by women. It’ll probably take me through 2025, or slightly beyond, to read all those books and whatever else is acquired, by purchase or gift, by then.

Almost one-third of those 52 are local history books about the Inland Empire or California, by the way, some of which I will be reading in 2024. They may get their own month or two to keep them from piling up further. They were acquired for work purposes and they should be helping me out now, not later.

In 2024 I also expect to read a little of everything else: more Ballantine Best of books of various old-time SF authors, some general fiction, some nonfiction. And almost certainly I will read the final three Travis McGee mysteries. I read three in 2023, so surely I can read three in 2024. I don’t own the last one yet, not having seen a copy, but also not having needed to seek it out. eBay, here I come.

How was your own year in reading? What are your reading goals for 2024? Comment below if you like.

  1. “The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere.,” James Spooner;
  2. “The Ballad of Bob Dylan,” Daniel Mark Epstein;
  3. “Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down,” Tom Dardis;
  4. “Woe is I,” Patricia O’Conner;
  5. “Baseline Road,” Orlando Davidson;
  6. “The Season to be Wary,” Rod Serling;
  7. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Quentin Tarantino;
  8. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories,” Washington Irving;
  9. “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour,” Scott Skelton and Jim Benson;
  10. “Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery,” Robert Arthur, ed.;
  11. “A Ghost at Noon,” Alberto Moravia;
  12. “Night Gallery,” Rod Serling;
  13. “Night Gallery 2,” Rod Serling;
  14. “Klara and the Sun,” Kazuo Ishiguro;
  15. “The Adventures of Solar Pons: Regarding Sherlock Holmes #1,” August Derleth;
  16. “The Naked Sun,” Isaac Asimov;
  17. “The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Travis McGee No. 16),” John D. MacDonald;
  18. “Buster Keaton Remembered,” Eleanor Keaton and Jeffrey Vance;
  19. “Get Back,” John Harris, ed.;
  20. “An Ordinary Life: Poems,” B.H. Fairchild;
  21. “Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins,” Mark Twain;
  22. “When Teddy Came to Riverside,” Glenn Wenzel
  23. “The Best of Frederik Pohl”;
  24. “The Best of Keith Laumer”;
  25. “Slow Learner,” Thomas Pynchon;
  26. “He Kept His Day Job: Fanfare for the Common Musician,” Dan Bernstein;
  27. “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom,” Carl Bernstein
  28. “Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World,” Mark Twain;
  29. “A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad,” Richard T. Rodriguez;
  30. “The Empty Copper Sea (Travis McGee No. 17),” John D. MacDonald;
  31. “Waste Tide,” Chen Qiufan;
  32. “Looking to Get Lost,” Peter Guralnick;
  33. “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” Stephen Greenblatt;
  34. “Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories,” Frederik Pohl;
  35. “The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley,” Robert Sheckley;
  36. “The Broken Bubble,” Philip K. Dick;
  37. “Myth & Mirage,” Riverside Art Museum;
  38. “The Inferno,” Dante Alighieri;
  39. “Purgatorio,” Dante Alighieri;
  40. “Paradiso,” Dante Alighieri;
  41. “Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years,” Laura Skandera Trombley;
  42. “The Imperfectionists,” Tom Rachman;
  43. “Sweet Thursday,” John Steinbeck;
  44. “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf;
  45. “Dickens and Prince,” Nick Hornby;
  46. “A People’s Guide to Orange County,” Elaine Lewinnek, Thuy Vo Dang and Gustavo Arellano;
  47. “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire,” Kevin Waite;
  48. “Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California,” Benjamin T. Jenkins;
  49. “Foucault in California,” Simeon Wade;
  50. “After the Dome Fire,” Ruth Nolan
  51. “The Best of Edmond Hamilton”;
  52. “The Best of Fredric Brown”;
  53. The Best of Henry Kuttner”;
  54. “The Green Ripper (Travis McGee No. 18)” John D. MacDonald;
  55. “Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels,” Paul Pringle;
  56. “Mojave Project Reader Vol. 2,” Kim Stringfellow;
  57. “A Walker in the City,” Alfred Kazin;
  58. “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone,” Olivia Laing
  59. “Tokyo Ueno Station,” Yu Miri;
  60. “The Fiddler in the Subway,” Gene Weingarten;
  61. “Read Me, Los Angeles: Exploring L.A.’s Book Culture,” Katie Orphan;
  62. “Humpty Dumpty in Oakland,” Philip K. Dick
  63. “The Iliad,” Homer
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Column: Motherhood, municipal government mix in Corona

A Corona councilwoman who is mother of a 2-year-old is about to become a mother for the second time. Jacque Casillas talks to me about parenthood and council service for my Sunday column. We spoke in the Council Chambers shortly before the meeting began. I stuck around for the meeting, my first in Corona. Nothing important happened, but the mayor gave a jocular report concerning the kangaroo rat.

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Column: LBJ’s time in SB had its ups and downs

Lyndon Johnson lived in San Bernardino in 1925, working as a law clerk and an elevator operator. This is kind of mind-boggling. In 1964, as president, LBJ made a return visit and gave a speech outside the office building where he’d worked nearly four decades earlier — and also operated the elevator one last time. I tell that story in my Friday column.

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Column: After 62 years, this Shakey’s seems anything but shaky

Returning to the Shakey’s in Montclair for the first time since before the pandemic, I was surprised and delighted to see the entire staff was intact, working away just as I’d remembered them. After a long item about the restaurant and its manager, I throw together more leftovers from 2023 that hadn’t made print about Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and Riverside. That’s my Wednesday column, the first of the new year.

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Column: Desk-clearing items on transit, history, Beach Boys

For my last column of 2023, I present some items that hadn’t made previous columns this year: reader emails, observations and loose-end tying. (None of this was pre-written, alas, just notes or emails.) My theory was that a slow news week, and light readership week, was a good time to slip them into print before moving on. That’s my Sunday column. There will be more on Wednesday. Before then, though: Happy New Year!

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