Coffee Bean Bookshelf

Only got halfway through and had to return it - so I've requested it again to finish it! So far, this is one of my favorite books of 2008!

Update: Yep, this is definitely one of my favorite books I've read this year. I was completely engrossed in this one, I just loved everything about it. It starts out with random stories about people who are in LA, moving to LA - some of them he wraps up so you know they're not going to be recurring characters, and others he just lets the subject drop and goes onto something else. Between chapters there are little blurbs of facts about LA from it's founding right up until the 1990's. The first half of the book is more like short stories with some random facts thrown in. The middle of the book are chapters of random facts about all sorts of things in LA, with a bit of stories of the recurring characters in there. Then towards the end we're brought back to the characters that he's decided to tell us about all through the book, more random facts and a handful more short stories about people who have lived/moved to LA. I just found the whole thing SO interesting, I can't even explain why.
I liked the style of his writing...it was blunt, there wasn't proper punctuation, he repeated himself a lot. It just worked in this novel (other novels I've hated for the same reasons).
My only complaint about the whole book, which I decided didn't merit a whole star being taken off, was that he would randomly decide to start saying the "F" word and would say it 10 or more times in about 5 sentences, then lay off it again for several more chapters. Where he inserted it, it wasn't really necessary. I found that annoying, like he'd realized he hadn't sworn enough in the last 10 chapters, so he threw a whole bunch in to fill his quota and then continued on.