MORE THAN THREE DECADES ago, the novelist Carolyn See sat in her Topanga Canyon home and made a prediction to the writer David Ulin about the literary landscape of Los Angeles: In the year 2020, she said, or at least “in that decade, Los Angeles will be to the world what Paris was in the 1920s.” Maybe? We do have great croissants here. And our river, like the Seine, is not as clean as we would like, but it’s getting better. And, of course, we are a city of readers and writers.