Angelenos, like most Westerners, are a self-selecting lot; only people who have the nerve and the imagination to uproot themselves and start again choose to take the gamble to come here, and stay here. Don’t let the gentle sunshine fool you — California is a tough place to make it, and Californians are a tough lot. But we manage to enjoy ourselves in an irresistibly quirky city whose variety is the product of the manifold imaginations of the people who live here.

So, welcome to my world.

What to do if you only have one day in LA: Watts Towers, of course. The Bradbury Building, Los Angeles Central Library, Griffith Park Observatory. Philippe’s for carnivores and the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga Canyon for vegetarians.

Favorite haunts: Literally! Besides the Central Library downtown, Evergreen Cemetery in east LA — lots of LA pioneers — and Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Favorite drive: Two of them: The Angeles Crest Highway, and the Pasadena Freeway, of whose 50th anniversary I wrote: “Drive it the way you would dance. Curve, glide, turn; clutch, shift, accelerate. In the morning, it moves through alternate flickerings of shadow and light, cast by the lift and dip of the hills alongside. In the evening, it hurries through the black shade of green trees.”

Favorite street scene: The amazing, varied, gorgeous Carroll Avenue neighborhood just west of downtown.

Best morning: Breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car — the eggs on spinach and artichoke hearts with hollandaise, of course — and then walk it all off at the Flower Market, where you get an armload of posies for twenty bucks.

Art exploration: The Neon Museum downtown, Museum of Contemporary Art, The new Gehry/Disney Hall, and the Bra Museum in Hollywood, one place the looters hit in the LA riots.

Daily Reads: www.debka.com, an international intelligence briefing. Of course, I read Romenesko's media news, Rough and Tumble and The Los Angeles Times.

I like howstuffworks.com, The Political Hotline, dailynewspaper.co.uk (British news) and opensecrets.org, about money in politics.

Favorite bookstores: Vroman’s in Pasadena, Skylight books in Los Feliz, Dutton’s in Brentwood and North Hollywood. For used books, Brand Books in Glendale.

Recommended LA reading:

•  Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams

•  The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

•  After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley

•  Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

•  City of Quartz by Mike Davis

•  City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's by Otto Friedrich.

•  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Other books I like: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond; Lamb by Christopher Moore; Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather; and Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot.

Favorite authors: Tom Wolfe, Joseph Mitchell, Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Literacy works: Rolling Readers USA, volunteer group reads aloud to kids, and collects and distributes books, too. Also: I’m a fan of California’s public libraries and the LA Central Library’s lecture series.

Hot-button California issues: Water! Population! Coastal access!

Pet causes: The Lange Foundation and the Bill Foundation, two of my favorite dog rescue groups. Downtown Dog Rescue does great work. Also: www.rescueguide.com, provides spay, neuter and humane info, and www.thepetpress-la.com, a Los Angeles group.

Guilty pleasures: The vegetarian burger at Wolfe Burgers on Lake in Pasadena, followed by the chocolate cake at Hamburger Hamlet just down the street.