I’m enjoying a brand new book called I FEEL EARTHQUAKES MORE OFTEN THAN THEY HAPPEN by Amy Wilentz (Hello, Community Books, can you order Amy Wilentz’s new book).

Full disclosure: I ordered the book because it was written by a friend from high school’s wife, who happens to be a stellar journalist/memoirist. She’s won a ton of prizes for her first book, "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier" and was bureau chief of the New Yorker’s Jerusalem bureau. She also writes for the Nation, Vogue, and other magazines.

Credentials a go go.

A true New Yorker, Wilentz was less than thrilled about moving out to LA. But it did provide her with one hell of a socio/historic/personal topic for a memoir – so she can’t be too pissed off.

The subject matter: New Yorker moves to California holds great interest for me since we nearly moved out to Northern California a few years ago and we go out there twice a year.

Wilentz and family moved out to LA soon after 9/11 and just before the Governator became governor. So the sub-title of the book is: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger.

She moves to California hoping to escape New York post 9/11, a landscape layered in grief and imminent disaster. Arriving in LA, she realizes she has escaped terrorist catastrophe for natural disaster—earthquakes, mudslides and heavy rains—and political tumult.

"I had arrived in L.A. hoping to avoid catastrophe, only to find that I was living in its capital. My new friends advised me: Cash and water in your car (Tampax too). Full tank, always. Slippers or flip-flops next to each bed (for walking on the inevitable broken glass). Flashlights everywhere, especially in night tables; make sure the batteries are live. Emergency lights. Hand-cranked radio. This all was beginning to sound too familiar. And don’t forget: The safest spot is still in a door frame or under a sturdy table; outside is dangerous until the shaking has stopped; door frames without doors are better because doors can swing and knock you out. Bolt all your bookcases to the walls."

The book is written in a speedy, funny, hyper-verbal, visual, ultra-smart style full of great observations about life in LA and loads of research, including initiations to lots of high-end parties with notable LA democrats and celebrities.

She is one smart writer this Wilentz and I look forward to reading her first book, "The Rainy Season" about two years she spent in Haiti.

I especially enjoyed the passage where she compares LA’s Bel Air with Haiti’s Bel Air:

Still I miss the streets of my old Bel Air as I drive, in a sort of a criminal’s crouch down Bellagio across Copa de Oro to Saint Pierre. It seems sad to live in a place so bereft of life, so immune to real life’s little inroads, so regally, resolutely detached. Money will do that to you. Here there is no stench of sewage to remind you of the human condition, no neighbor to make a meal for your sick mother if you have to go away, no grandmother living in the lean-to or the other room, if there is another room, no humble straw pallet on the floor for the cousins, no clicking of the dominoes to fall asleep to, no storyteller on a roof going on and on toward midnight for the benefit of the whole neighborhood, no cockfights in the secret arena back behind your brother’s House, no radio blasting merengue, no drummer practicing down the street out in back, no friends popping in unannounced at the any time of day or night, no babies sitting on the sidewalk with their big sisters, no one fixing tires with tar on the street corner or rewiring the electricity with paper clips; just the hired help serving you day in and day out, the cook and the nanny, and the charming Vietnamese Au pair, the driver, brunches at the Hotel Bel-Air in the pretty open air dining room above the pond…