There’s a lot to love about the literature here.

Los Angeles has a wellspring of talented young authors, a history with scores of classic writers and an unusually rich noir culture, so it’s easy to see why the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (moved two years ago from UCLA to USC) now draws upward of 100,000 visitors to sample new work and hear famous authors speak.

Oddly enough, despite the heady cocktail of sunshine, celebrity and the American Dream that is the Los Angeles of our imagination, most of the classic literature about the city is negative.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote that Los Angeles was the loneliest and most brutal of American cities. Norman Mailer famously called the city a “constellation of plastic.” Famous quips rendered by this formidable clique of writers, including the likes of Dorothy Parker and Christopher Hitchens, have allowed those who had not yet formed opinions about Los Angeles to latch onto that negativity quickly; instead of forming their own perspectives, some readers believe that the city’s intellectual capacity should be caricaturized because their favorite author said something funny about it.

Still, for those who don’t mind reading cynical depictions of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski’s literature offers a well-written, if pessimistic, perspective of the city. Dubbed the “Poet Laureate of Skid Row,” the L.A. native wrote a staggering anthology about the City of Angels that warrants a read from even a regular city-dweller. Still, you can learn from his writing, even if you don’t like it. Ham on Rye, which follows a cynical protagonist through adolescence in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, is a great introduction to the darker side of Los Angeles.

If you’re one of those people who insists poetry is more intellectual, try reading So Now?, To The Whore Who Took My Poems or Melancholia. You’ll get a feel for certain key parts of the city, even with the  ennui that will nag at you when you’re done.

Still, despite the success of these particular works of literature, there’s no reason to believe that the best literature about Los Angeles is unflattering. Several artists embraced Los Angeles’ eccentricities and relished the perspective that came with the city’s apparent indifference to the human soul.

Andy Warhol said the people were plastic, but that was fine by him. The stories in Gerald Goldberg’s 126 Days of Continuous Sunshine contain characters that thrived on the chaos just as others were defeated by it. Read around and decide for yourself how the city makes you feel.

If you’re in search of L.A. literature with a humorous touch, reach for The Tortilla Curtain by former USC professor T.C. Boyle. Los Angeles has a nearly unparalleled dichotomy between its rich and its poor, and this novel is one of the best ways to look at both. Boyle places the story of an undocumented couple from Mexico surviving on dumpster scraps alongside the story of a comfortably wealthy white couple. The two plots weave together when both sets of characters are involved in the same car accident.

It would be remiss to talk about L.A. literature without mentioning Joan Didion. If you haven’t read The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s Pulitzer Prize-winning recollection of death and ill-health in her family (don’t be put off by the plot), do so immediately. Many of her essays from Slouching Towards Bethlehem are also provocative if you really want to get into the guts of L.A. culture — the politics, the drugs, the naivete, the wealth, everything.

Still, despite Didion’s meticulous literary style, less-structured novels can provide great reads. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine provides something more applicable to your life in and out of Los Angeles. Maybe you already read it in high school, but it’s really a classic for you to enjoy, not parse.

For a more condensed take on L.A. literature, check out 2002’s Writing Los Angeles collection. The authors selected for the compilation give a cutting, even humiliating impression of the city, for which the best antidote is Scott Timberg’s The Misread City.

Nevertheless, despite whatever you choose to read, such a variety of perspectives are sure to grab your attention and help you develop your own way of defining the city.

Welcome to Los Angeles.