17 best coffee-table books for Angelenos
The City of Angels, La La Land, Tinseltown, the Big Orange — whatever you call this city and however you’ve made a life in it, you probably have an obsession or three about Los Angeles and our great state. We’ve put together a lush array of coffee-table books covering at least some of those interests, making your year-end gifting as easy as a trip to your favorite bookstore. And hey, books are easy to wrap!
In these 2024 selections, you can consider the lemon and its versatility. Celebrate Pride and its Hollywood community. Cook with the flavors and techniques of Mexico, Africa, Latin America and Vietnam, homages to the melting pot that Southern California has long been. Visit laid-back mansions or an icon’s personal gallery, or marvel at the region’s natural landscapes and glamorous history.
A word of caution: If you head out to buy one or more of these titles for people on your list, you might just wind up buying some for yourself. After all, there’s a lot to love.
If you make a purchase using some of our links, the L.A. Times may be compensated.
The Gourmand’s Lemon: A Collection of Stories and Recipes
Pucker up, buttercup: The team behind the London journal the Gourmand has partnered with uber-luxe Taschen on a 272-page book about the humble yet versatile lemon, offering history, design, anecdotes and even recipes, all with citrus vibes. Try your hand at a tart sorbet, a creamy (and surprisingly easy) curd or a rich tagine garnished with preserved fruit; you’ll come away with a renewed appreciation for the lemons languishing in your fridge. The Gourmand also has a Taschen tome on the egg. Watch for others soon.
$50 from Taschen
Barbie: The World Tour
When the movie “Barbie” was released last year, not even the doll’s creator Ruth Handler could have predicted the subsequent fashion fervor. Star Margot Robbie collaborated with her stylist Andrew Mukamal to recreate some of the Barbie doll’s best looks over the decades for last summer’s hit film. Spreads in their 160-page book show some outfits knolled from hat to scarf to shoes to handbag, alongside sketches from the Mattel archives and drawings by the film’s costume designers. Don’t miss the Hervé Léger “bandage dress” version of Barbie’s first black-and-white-striped dress from 1959.
$55 from Rizzoli
City of Dreams: Los Angeles Interiors
If, after flipping through this gorgeous tome you find yourself ready to sell everything you own and start from scratch as a high-end minimalist, who could blame you? Author Annie Kelly and photographer Tim Street-Porter have chosen homes featuring both high design and high livability. In this 256-page book, you’ll find an abalone-shell chandelier, an all-orange bedroom, and Art Deco and Arts & Crafts elements. You’ll also peek into Sir Elton John’s apartment and Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s Brody House in Holmby Hills and travel from Laguna Beach to Silver Lake.
$65 from Rizzoli
Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film
Esteemed film critic Alonso Duralde’s cover has Tab Hunter, Divine, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Laverne Cox ablaze with a rainbow spotlight that emphasizes the importance of LGBTQ+ actors from different eras — but in this 336-page book, the author also includes stories and photos of queer writers, directors, producers, choreographers and more. Their work, expertise and talents so often led to box-office brilliance while personal lives were forced into the shadows, often at great cost. They blazed trails for new generations that now, we hope, can hold their heads — and Pride flags — high.
$40 from Running Press
Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier
While shooting the 1973 movie “The Sting,” Robert Redford and Paul Newman would toss a football around on the Santa Monica Pier, which led Redford to write an introduction to this 176-page tribute by James Harris, the official pier historian; there’s also an afterword from Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose affinity for the pier dates back to his strongman days at Muscle Beach. With more than 100 images of everything from the carousel to the coaster to cafes, this book will charm any Angeleno who has ever walked, surfed, swam, eaten, flirted or gazed at the pier. As Redford writes: “The pier reminds me of our youth, our innocence. Such places are hard to find.”
$30 from Angel City Press
The Making of Modern Los Angeles
This is a personal take on the city’s zoning and infrastructure from Nick Patsaouras, a Greek immigrant who gave years of service to Los Angeles institutions in various capacities, including board president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District and president of the Board of Water and Power. His 624-page book, full of stunning photographs, documents five decades of urban change that included the restoration of the Angels Flight Railway, the construction of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
$30 from Oro Editions
A Year in the Vineyard
Recently the movie “Widow Clicquot” included cinematography of Champagne vines to illustrate how climate affects each year’s output. Authors Sophie Menin and Bob Chaplin go further, showing that vintners’ observation of annual and seasonal weather shifts can teach everyone to pay more attention. Chaplin’s vivid yet restrained photos (from vineyards in Napa Valley, France’s Burgundy region, Lebanon and elsewhere) pair with Menin’s clear explanations about how and why wine grapes respond to climate changes. Even if this book doesn’t inspire a trip north to California wine country or get you to attend the next Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic, its 160 pages will definitely up your game when it comes to small talk over wine.
$60 from Cultureshock
Life: Hollywood
This sumptuous two-volume set, totaling 708 pages, from Taschen (with an introduction from photography critic Lucy Sante and captions from film historian Justin Humphreys) has an Old Hollywood look and feel, given its heft and cover-image wrap of a packed drive-in movie — but that’s just the Life magazine flavor, appropriate given the publication’s mid-20th-century heyday. The first book, covering 1936 to 1950 or so, showcases glamorous stars as well as the work that went into keeping their glamour mysterious; the second book focuses on the 1950s through 1972, when cultural shifts heralded more independence and diversity. Can we hope for another two-volume set to follow?
$250 from Taschen
Di An: The Salty, Sour, Sweet and Spicy Flavors of Vietnamese Cooking With TwayDaBae
Tue Nguyen, a.k.a. TwayDaBae, learned English by watching “SpongeBob SquarePants” and Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and learned how to cook because she missed her mother’s food. Now her social-media videos garner hundreds of thousands of views as she prepares Vietnamese egg coffee, pandan-flavored desserts and spicy clam curry. Eat before reading this 256-page book, as your mouth will start watering the minute you see the glorious photos of this chef’s work, which you can make at home — because that’s where she makes them, too.
$35 from Simon Element
AfriCali: Recipes From My Jikoni
Kenyan-Nigerian American chef Kiano Moju uses the Swahili word jikoni, or kitchen, to celebrate her origins in Oakland and Africa. But while she has plenty of recipes in this 272-page book that are purely African, such as Kenyan chapatis (flatbread) and sukuma wiki (sautéed collard greens), Moju includes lots of fusion ideas, too, such as jollof risotto with suya-spiced shrimp or coriander katsu with cherry tomato kachumbari (tomato and onion salad). The irrepressible chef even offers Buffalo chicken totchos (tater tot nachos).
$35 from Simon Element
Convivir: Modern Mexican Cuisine in California’s Wine Country
Chef Rogelio Garcia runs the Michelin-starred Auro restaurant in Napa Valley; he’s been shortlisted for a James Beard Award. This cookbook’s title means “to live together,” and it refers not just to a melding of cuisines but also to a melding of ingredients. Garcia takes Mexican standards including tacos, carnitas and sopes and reinvents them with local produce as well as flavors from other cultures, such as pesto, pate sucrée and hazelnuts. Experienced cooks will delight in the new combinations in Garcia and Andréa Lawson Gray's 288-page book, which was beautifully photographed by John Troxell.
$50 from Abrams Books
Barbra
The one-time Funny Girl whose golden voice has made standards of songs like “Woman in Love” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” takes her proper center stage in this collection of photographs by Lawrence Schiller and Steve Schapiro, who have had her in their sights since the 1960s. Some images are as beloved as Barbra Streisand’s song catalog, but half of the photos in this 336-page book haven’t been widely seen before, documenting Streisand's importance as an actor, singer, director, writer and dancer who has worked with the best in the business while maintaining her own sensibility and standards. (The book is co-authored by Lawrence Grobel and Patt Morrison, a journalist at The Times.)
$70 from Taschen
Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures
The idea behind the 2020 book “Accidentally Wes Anderson” was to highlight places around the world that look as if they could appear in one of the iconic movies by the acclaimed director, even though he hasn’t used any of those places in his films. The 2024 follow-up by Wally and Amanda Koval (with a forward by Anderson) continues this eccentric endeavor in its 368 pages, sharing scores of buildings, rooms, vehicles, walls, gardens, shops, lighthouses, museums, libraries, restaurants, vistas and festivals that capture Anderson’s whimsical, colorful, retro aesthetic. Even Anderson himself wants to visit a few.
$45 from Voracious
The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories from This Marvelous Lifetime
She’s held hands with the Dalai Lama, won a Kennedy Center Honor and adores her brother, Warren Beatty. Elizabeth Taylor was her best friend. Shirley MacLaine, a longtime star in the movie-world firmament, opens up her personal photo gallery to the world. Many of these pictures in this 272-page book have graced her “Wall of Life” arrangements in her various homes, including snapshots with Frank Sinatra, Bill Clinton (with whom she took a “long, long beach walk”), Indira Gandhi and her beloveds: daughter Sachi, Sachi’s husband and their children.
$35 from Crown
Moxie: The Daring Women of Classic Hollywood
Ira M. Resnick, founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery, and Raissa Bretaña, a historian specializing in film fashion, take close-up looks at a few dozen of the dames whose self-possession and hard work helped them develop the “moxie” to succeed in an industry dominated by men and iron-clad contracts that seldom allowed for individuality and artistic growth. But as the authors show in this 240-page book, women like Louise Brooks, Ida Lupino and Katharine Hepburn blew through the celluloid ceiling and lifted up generations of women in the movies.
$49.95 from Abbeville Press
The Official Bridgerton Cookbook
When it comes to "Bridgerton," the immensely popular Netflix series, you know that the Bridgertons are named in alphabetical order. You know that gadfly Lady Whistledown’s voice is none other than that of Dame Julie Andrews. But you might not know the recipe for the perfect citrus libation to keep you sated as you cue up the next episode — and that’s where this 256-page official recipe guide by Regula Ysewijn comes in. Savory or sweet, spicy or safe, these delicious and terribly tempting treats will give you delicious ideas … just like the show does.
$35 from Random House Worlds
My Mexican Kitchen: 100 Recipes Rich With Tradition, Flavor, and Spice
Actor, director and entrepreneur Eva Longoria has pursued cookbook writing for nearly 15 years, and along the way also earned a master’s degree in Chicano studies and political science. Her latest compilation derives from her CNN show “Searching for Mexico,” so although it’s about the dishes she still cooks at home, the recipes in this 256-page book reflect Mexico’s many regions and specialties. Tacos and taquitos and tamales, yes; but also Yucatán-based fish and seafood, urban cocktails and snacks, and longtime family favorites.
$35 from Clarkson Potter
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
