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New to the list are Amy Tan’s San Francisco classic, “The Joy Luck Club,” and John Steinbeck’s early novel “Tortilla Flat,” a portrait of life in Monterey after World War I. Another popular suggestion readers sent in was “Men to Match My Mountains” by Irving Stone, a gripping history of westward expansion and the settling of California that was published in 1956.

Others might say Tortilla Flat, about a group of unemployed paisanos living from one small party to another.

If you drive 13 miles northeast on Arizona 88, you’ll find Tortilla Flat, an old stagecoach stop that’s now a saloon that uses saddles for its bar-stool seats.

The long-awaited “mid-engine” Corvette easily outruns its formidable predecessor, as I learned during a time-warping desert drive near Tortilla Flat, Ariz. The eighth-generation “C8” Corvette is earning rapturous reviews and dominating industry awards, as a car that can take on European exotics that cost $200,000 and more, but at a $59,995 base price that reads like a misprint.

He became known as Portagee Joe, a slur adopted from a Portuguese character in John Steinbeck’s 1935 novel “Tortilla Flat.”