Book Expo party challenge

Bruce Bauman (left) and Steve Erickson (right) from Black Clock with Los Angeles magazine's Kit Rachlis.

When Book Expo is in New York, the only thing between you and party-hopping is the number of invites you can score. When it's in L.A., transportation is the issue.

BEA's activities are downtown at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but Friday night the parties were all over the place. The famed Knopf dinner was at Lucques in Beverly Hills. Harper Collins served cocktails in West Hollywood, as did Weinstein Books up the hill at Chateau Marmont. Me, I was all the way out in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station for the Los Angeles Magazine/Black Clock party.

As if writing novels and nonfiction and running the writing program weren't enough, Steve Erickson is also the film critic for Los Angeles magazine. Kit Rachlis is its editor -- years ago, the two worked at LA Weekly together. And CalArts' Black Clock -- which takes its name from an Erickson novel -- is edited by Erickson and Bruce Bauman. Luckily, they were all taking a break from their writing and editing responsibilities to throw this lovely (if extremely Westside) party.

Tonight there is one party right near the Convention Center, at the Figueroa Hotel. Whew!

Carolyn Kellogg

Wings That Work

At 3:05 p.m., it was hard to tell who had the longer line: R.L. Stein or Berkeley Breathed. At the autograph area, a throng of conventioneers queued up for the chance to get books signed by two very distinct authors; one a weaver of juvenile horror and the other a penguin-obsessed, mustachioed cartoonist.

Although Stein's serialized novels -- "Goosebumps," "Fear Street" -- have become nearly an industry of their own and Breathed has settled with aplomb into life after Bloom County, I couldn't help but be the slightest bit enthralled. After all, I cut my teeth on the "Fear Street" series and spent most of high school figuring that Binkley and Milo had the right idea. The authors are themselves potent gateway drugs. Getting ensnared at the right age often leads to indulgence in books by Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, along with a potent sense of whimsy and the tendency to laugh at jokes no one else thinks are funny. At least that was my experience.

But who was in line to get their books signed? Lanyard-dangling name tags ranged in origin from the Santa Monica Public School System to Harper Collins Publishers. It was almost the end of the day and conventioneers stood in patient, bubbly lines, chattering about the day's events and waiting to say hello to their heroes.

George Ducker         

An odyssey through Google Books

Google doesn't have a booth on the sprawling, endless concourse of the BEA. They're just upstairs in the South Hall, past the press room; the last door before an enormous window that peers over an empty corner of the Convention Center. Inside are several tables and a dozen or so Google-folk, waiting for their respective appointments with 'publishing partners.'

The way it's working these days is that Google has three ways of obtaining books. They can go through their system of colleges and public libraries (the New York Public Library being perhaps the largest). Or they have the publishers come to them. Or they can go get the publishers. "We're taking a proactive approach," said Tom Turvey, the director of Google Book Search Partnerships, in regards to Google's attempt to reach out to the publishing world.

Not wanting to be seen as brutish democratizers of authors' material, Google is selling their search engine through keywords like "marketability" and "exposure." The mission is to encourage publishers small and large alike that working with Google, and having said books more easily accessed through their visual cataloging of every page, will be to everyone's benefit: author and seller.

As it stands, there are millions of titles available through Google's book search. A quick scan brings up options as varied as H.G. Wells' "In the Days of the Comet," Martin McDonagh's play "The Cripple of Inishmaan" and McGraw-Hill's GED Study Program. And there they are. You can read them as fast as your internet connection will allow. Sound like a good thing? It probably is.

And of course, there are many more titles to come. Last week's decision by Microsoft to kill further development of their book search engine has left the gates wide open for the colorfully lettered internet giant, whose slogan, now quoted less often, is "Don't be evil."

George Ducker

Audio books, by my troth, are faring well

Book publishing may be struggling, but there’s one area that seems to be managing fine under the circumstances: audiobooks. There’s a reason for it, as Nicolas Soames of Naxos AudioBooks explains. “People have less time to read but the desire is still there,” he says, “which is why they turn to us.”

That makes sense. With BEA this year in Los Angeles, the kingdom of commuters, it makes even more sense to see Naxos AudioBooks and similar companies here--and that they're doing reasonably well. As Soames notes, a worthy portion of their customer base, along with public libraries, consists of commuters.

Soames and his associates are publicizing the release in July of an award-winning production of “Othello” featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen and many others. We would all like to spend our days reading in quiet, of course, if our lives allowed it. But if you don’t have this time, consider this as a consolation: McGregor as the cunning Iago. By Janus, commuting has just gotten better.

Nick Owchar

George Hamilton's book party

The man (with Hefner) back in 2004.  (photo: Carol Kaelson ABC)

It was a crush of crepey cleavage and vintage Hollywood royalty Thursday night at George Hamilton’s book party at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills. We nibbled on porcini ravioli and tiny lambchops from hand-grown, organically fed micro sheep. We swilled house Chianti and watched as vintage 1980s television superstars paraded, air-kissed and lined up for photo ops.

There was leonine Loni Anderson, newly remarried and glowing behind her majestic cheekbones. She spooned chicly shagged and laid-back Stephanie Powers, who cocked a knee beside Linda Gray, still radiant nearly 20 years post-“Dallas.”  Plumped lips curled into super-pro camera smiles all around. New York publishing lackeys watched in awe; this is why it’s good to hold Book Expo America in L.A.: star power, baby.

Suddenly the crowd parted and there was Hamilton himself, radiant in a bespoke suit and his signature 500-watt smile. His hair was shellacked to perfection, his teeth adazzle, skin burnished to the sheen of a fine, old wallet. The man, on the brink of 70, is still a total chick magnet. Women of all ages flocked to him, pulling wee cameras from tiny evening bags and jockeying for a photo, letting their hands linger in his as he smiled down at them.

It was an anticipatory party for his October book, “Don’t Mind If I Do,” an intimate look at behind-the-scenes Hollywood, and if his ghostwriter (William Stadiem) did his job right, it should be a pip. Hamilton was at the "Cleopatra" wrap party where Richard Burton declared his love for Elizabeth Taylor in front of Eddie Fisher; he witnessed one of Judy Garland’s suicide attempts and, apparently, skinny-dipped with JFK (giving new meaning to the phrase “I knew John F. Kennedy and you’re no John F. Kennedy").

“I came on the scene in the '50s, and I didn’t want to be stuck in that plastic era,” Hamilton told me as I tried to stay focused on his words and not be hypnotized by his animal magnetism. “I wanted to write about what really happened.” He was inspired by David Niven’s books “The Moon’s a Balloon” and “Bring on the Empty Horses,” which brought the insider Hollywood memoir to a giddy new level in the 1970s.

There’s hope for similar fun from "Don't Mind If I Do" because Hamilton clearly knows everyone -- and is in on the joke about himself. The promotional goody bag was an assemblage of personalized M&Ms, sunglasses and exotic tanning products.  The book's cover photo has him posed in a leopard-skin chair, in ascot, nonchalantly gesturing toward the camera. He has a reality show in the works, also called “Don’t Mind if I Do,” in which he freeloads his way around the world on his charm and good looks without ever having to touch money.

In this new age of the stubbled, rude and tattooed, Hamilton is old guard Hollywood. Back in the 1950s, Hamilton told me, his idols were Rudolph Valentino and the Duke of Windsor. “I was 30 years out of date back then!”

Erika Schickel

Books are heavy; Kindles are not

At the Amazon Kindle booth in the L.A. Convention Center, there are just two Kindles, which is not quite enough. People don't give them up easily, no matter how closely other Book Expo attendees gather. Scrums of conventioneers form. Everyone wants to hold it, to "turn" the "pages" of the electronic books within.

Kathy Schalk-Greene (above), a librarian from New Jersey, had seen the Kindle -- an electronic reader that can download and hold 200 books -- before, but this was the first one she'd gotten to hold. "It's very cool," she says. "I can really see the advantage of having that much content in that small space." Better than a bag of books, I suppose.

But Shalk-Greene sees this as just one more reading tool, one good for "convenience and mobility," rather than something that would replace books. Like so many book lovers, she has a fondness for the physicality of the books themselves.

Yesterday I heard a new term for these lovers of books with pages and binding: "Ink Sniffers." Add "Paper Caressers" and count me in.

Carolyn Kellogg

BEA begins with the buzz

On day one Book Expo kicked off with a panel called Editors' Buzz. Six editors each lauded one upcoming title. When they were done, the audience streamed past and picked up galleys of the books, stacked head-high by the door. (Note: that's head-high for me; I'm about five-foot-two.)

Notable was the omission of titles by such heavyweights as Stephen King or James Patterson -- his new book is being advertised on a massive banner outside the L.A. Convention Center. Instead, the five novels featured were by newcomers. (The sixth book, a nonfiction title, was a follow-up to a bestseller.) One seasoned attendee seemed to find this disturbing -- no names, no bigshots -- but I found it kind of exciting.

For publishers to push new novelists, to find something exciting about new voices -- that, to me as a reader, is good news. It's evidence of a kind of vivacity in the field if publishers focus on good, perhaps risky new works, in lieu of a proven writer. Although booksellers might be happier with another Harry Potter.

Grabbing the swag after the buzz panel.

Carolyn Kellogg

Scott McClellan: Bogart or Paul Henreid?

Scott McClellan's memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," which officially debuts next week, has gone to #1 at Amazon and caused consternation among high-ranking Republicans who are speaking out publicly against the book.

Some say they are "puzzled" and "sad" about the former White House press secretary's claims, which others say are "patently false." Publishers Weekly compares this to "Casablanca," in which a fully-aware Captain Renault (Claude Raines) makes a show of being "shocked, shocked!" at the goings-on at Rick's; Publishers Weekly suggests that Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, Dana Perino and Ari Fleischer are simultaneously performing the role.

So what does that make Scott McClellan? Is he Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), the Resistance fighter, putting everything on the line to fight for justice? Is he Humphrey Bogart in the role of Rick Blaine, keeping his head down and taking no sides, deciding belatedly to stand up to the authoritarian regime?

Or could he be the lovely Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), torn between two very different men, finally compelled to go with her conscience instead of her heart?

Carolyn Kellogg

The girl in the story is me

I can't tell you the name of Daphne Gottlieb's new book — it's too anatomical — but I can link to it right here. It's a collection featuring nearly 30 stories that imagine the San Francisco performance poet and provocatrix in a variety of, er, compromising positions, written by a pretty good crew of West Coast underground literati, including Stephen Elliott, Ariel Gore, Bucky Sinister and Justin Chin.

There's no denying that Gottlieb's on to something with this project — a postmodern mash-up of truth and illusion that seeks to eclipse the line between how others see us and the way we see ourselves. The book had its genesis when she began to realize that some of her acquaintances were writing dirty stories about her (one appeared in Best American Erotica) that featured "[e]verything about me, it seems, except my underwear and my modesty." Eventually, Gottlieb put out a call for submissions; the result is this book.

I love the blurriness of this idea, the way fantasy and reality blend together until we don't know what's fiction or fact. Yet I'd be lying if I didn't admit to some discomfort — not because of the sex but because of the narcissism.

Here we have an almost perfect metaphor for the conundrum of contemporary culture, with its look-at-me self-absorption, its sense that the artist is more important than the art.

In the end, that too is what Gottlieb's book speaks to, whatever her intentions are.

David L. Ulin

Ben Ehrenreich's travel books

L.A.-based writer Ben Ehrenreich is a novelist and journalist. "The Suitors," his first novel, is loosely based on "The Odyssey," so we thought he might know something about journeys. With books.

Jacket Copy: Assuming you bring books with you when you travel, go on vacation, how do you determine how many? Is it a careful calculation or something less scientific?

Ben Ehrenreich: Mainly I cram books into every available space in my bags, take half of them out, then sneak half of those back in. I live under the hopeful illusion that I will have far more time to read than I ever end up having.

JC: Have you ever been stranded with nothing to read?

BE: Yes. Most memorably, I had been reporting in Afghanistan, had a stopover in Dubai on the way home. I realized as I stepped onto the plane back to Los Angeles that I had not only packed my sleeping pills in my checked bags, but all my books. I spent the next 20-some hours awake, staring at the seatback in front of me.   

Read Ben's reading list after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg