Books like City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

This has to be the most painfully frenetic, confusingly concocted book I've ever read. The writer interrupts himself with parentheticals almost every other sentence; he drops names and factoids without ever describing their significance; worst of all, instead of referring to things in plain English, he makes use of an unending stream of unexplained, mixed, and half-hearted metaphors, as though he were undecided about whether this should be a history book or something more "poetic." It's obvious he's too close to his subject: he writes as though for himself, as if he expects that all his readers have invested the last thirty years of their lives pondering microfiche articles at university libraries. Newsflash: we haven't, and even if we had, we don't want to read seven hundred pages of annoyingly cryptic jargon and senile ramblings. Please try again.