David L. Ulin's 6 favorite books

The Los Angeles Times book critic's personal literary tastes range from Salinger to St. Augustine

Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin says it's not about categorizing books into fiction or not, it's about "good writing."
(Image credit: Noah Ulin)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14). Reporting from the front lines of the 1960s, Didion highlights fragmentation and the loss of narrative, which, 40 years later, remain our prevailing cultural dislocations. Cogent, piercing, ruthless, the essays in this book are models of the form.

The Confessions of St. Augustine (Dover, $4). Featuring the first self-conscious first-person narrator in literature, Augustine’s account of his spiritual journey from dissolution to transcendence radiates with humanity. Living 1,700 years ago, he faced the same issues of evanescence and meaning that we confront today, and describes them here with astonishing honesty and grace.

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