Staff writer Susan Orlean has been in Los Angeles some of the summer and offers a blog entry on The New Yorker website about the week of fires. Excerpt:

All the blessings and plagues exist side by side in Los Angeles. The twinkling ocean, the looming mountains, the spill of desert, the bounty of vegetation, and the creased and verdant hills are here—and so are the floods and the mudslides and the earthquakes and the wildfires. Southern California seems constantly pitched back and forth between heaven and hell. This week, hell won out.

She sends readers to a reprise of John McPhee's great 1988 series titled "Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains." Read that to understand much about the physical and social topography of Southern California, and to see why some writers became writers in the first place.