National Endowment for the Arts announces new Big Read grants

On Tuesday, the National Endowment for the Arts announced its 2012-13 Big Read grants totaling $1 million. The Big Read supports community-based reading of a single book. It provides specially produced supplemental materials including CDs, robust historical context, teachers guides and discussion questions. And, of course, funding.

Nine of the Big Read's 78 grants will go to organizations and municipalities in California. Only New York state will receive as many grants from the Big Read in the coming year.

In San Diego, the organization Write Out Loud will be organizing people to read "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, who died in June at age 91. In Burbank and 400 miles away in Marysville, Calif., readers will dig in to the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The Rural California Broadcasting Corp., located between San Francisco and Santa Rosa, Calif., will be taking on poet Emily Dickinson. Patrons of the Rancho Cucamonga Public Library will be invited to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." The Santa Cruz Public Library will be reading "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, who finished the book nearby at his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Those are all books by classic American writers, as might be expected. But the program also has books from different cultures, including the one that will be the focus of the Big Read as presented by the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. That book is "The Thief and the Dogs" by Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, first published in 1961. The Big Read describes the book this way: Spanning the wealthy suburbs and crowded slums of Cairo, this thrilling crime story combines stream-of-consciousness technique with the hard-boiled style of detective fiction to create a harrowing account of crime and punishment.

Organizations may select from one of 31 individual book titles or authors when applying for a Big Read grant. About two-thirds of them will be part of the Big Read in 2012-13. Grants range from $3,500-$20,000.

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Happy birthday, Naguib Mahfouz

Ray Bradbury and the dime-at-a-time typewriter of "Fahrenheit 451"

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Ray Bradbury in 2000. Credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Happy (day late) Pynchon in Public Day!

On Tuesday, select readers were invited to bring a book by author Thomas Pynchon to a garage on the east side of Los Angeles and, in return, get a free cup of micro-roasted coffee. The garage was marked only by a mailbox adorned with an obscure symbol -- obscure, that is, to those not familiar with Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 49."

A secret location marked only by a mysterious symbol -- the reclusive, conspiracy-narrative-inclined Pynchon should be proud. The concept, and cappuccino, came from Trystero Coffee, a micro-roaster named for the muted post-horn symbol in "The Crying of Lot 49." The coffee is delicious -- it can be found, no symbols necessary, at Demitasse Cafe in downtown Los Angeles.

Rodney King and the L.A. riots: When 20 years can seem like yesterday

One aspect of Los Angeles hasn't changed in the 20 years since the 1992 riots: Traffic tie-ups. Rodney King, whose March 1991 beating by L.A. police officers was the first link in the chain of events that culminated in the 1992 riots, was a half-hour late Saturday for his interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison.

So, in a sense, the session ran in reverse. With Morrison, who also anchors a radio show on KPCC, as the moderator, Angelenos spent a half-hour talking about their own experiences during and after the riots as they awaited King's arrival. The general consensus: The LAPD has changed for the better, but the socio-economic conditions that set the stage for the riots have worsened. And the racial divides are still chasms.

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"I'm surprised at how white we are here," said one white woman, looking around at the crowd of more than 500 people in a basement auditorium at USC's Ronald Tutor Campus Center, about four miles north of where the riots began near South Central's Normandie and Florence Avenues. The woman said she lived in South Central, in a neighborhood in which she is the rare white resident. "The riots can certainly start again, until we have socio-economic changes, and in how we view other people."

King, for his part, arrived out of breath, and spoke of forgiveness for the officers involved in his videotaped beating after a high-speed chase. With his history of substance abuse, he said, he has been in need of some forgiveness. "I am a forgiving man," he said. "That's how I was raised, to be in a forgiving state of mind. I have been forgiven many times. I am only human. Who am I not to forgive someone?"

America's most literate cities and more book news

Central Connecticut State University released its annual list of most literate cities Wednesday; Washington D.C. took the top spot. As in years past, Los Angeles didn't fare well. Why should we? We've only got the largest book festival in the country, vibrant independent booksellers, major univeristies, a fantastic public library system, highly literate public radio shows.... Sigh. We ranked No. 59. Oh well -- New York, the center of publishing, was only No. 22.

The Books are no more! The band, that is.

I had no tickets and I must scream. Author Harlan Ellison appeared at the Los Angeles revival house Cinefamily last week to talk about his career writing for television -- "Star Trek," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E," "The Outer Limits," etc. That would have been special enough, but midway through the onstage interview, the comedian Patton Oswalt interceded and took over. Oswalt added hilarity and upped the literary ante too (not that I'm sore about No. 59 or anything) -- he's the author of "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland," an L.A. Times bestseller, and recently wrote an appreciation of Ellison's story "A Boy and His Dog" for GQ. At least there's video.

Are you reading a book on your iPhone? Let the world know with a $35 literary iPhone case. The only catch: for passers-by to be able to judge your book by your iPhone cover, you have to be reading "The Great Gatsby," "A Clockwork Orange," "Moby-Dick" or "To Kill A Mockingbird."

What did Abraham Lincoln telegraph to his military leaders during the Civil War? People who visit the Huntington Library -- in San Marino, part of the literary metropolis that clocks in at No. 59 -- will discover firsthand this fall when part of a new acquisition, the Thomas T. Eckert archive, go on exhibit. Eckert was head of the military telegraph office of Lincoln's War Department; until recently, his archive had been thought to have been destroyed.

If C is for Cookie, E is for Elmo and e-books. Random House and Sesame Street have extended their licensing deal to include e-books and apps. The e-books "Elmo Says Achoo!" and "Elmo’s Breakfast Bingo" are available now; 17 more are on the way. 

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Kerry Slattery of Los Angeles' Skylight Books in the store's front window in 2008. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

The Reading Life: Thinking about Stephen King

This is part of the occasional series "The Reading Life" by book critic David L. Ulin.

On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, I spent half an hour or so discussing Stephen King with my colleague David Lazarus on Patt Morrison's KPCC-FM radio show. The news peg, such as it was, involved the decision by the New York Times to include King's new novel, "11/22/63," on its list of the 10 best books of 2011. But the bigger question had to do with King's merit as a writer, which, almost 40 years after he began to publish, remains a source of conversation, if no longer quite debate.

For the record, I didn't think much of "11/22/63"; I found it meandering and unfocused -- not to mention far too long. And yet, I also believe that, like many a genre writer, King has gotten a bad rap for much of his career, written off because he appeals to a popular audience, when in fact his work exposes, with real acuity, a lot about who we are.

Think about it: Beyond the mechanics, of plot, of horror, what King offers are domestic interactions, slices of family and civic life. He uncovers our anxieties, our worries, our obsessions -- the inner darkness we all know. That's why, for me, some of his most moving works are the most naturalistic: "The Body," "Misery" or the recent novella "A Good Marriage," which anchors his 2010 collection "Full Dark, No Stars." There, King traces a particularly human bleakness, the bleakness of an empty soul.

This is the key to his writing, that when he's on, no one is better at prying open the ordinary reality of evil, the way our nightmares emerge from our daily experience, from our fears and our frustrations, our envy and our rage. It's true even when he's writing about the supernatural; as he observed when I profiled him for The Times in 1998, "Every monster, every horrific situation, every supernatural situation can be taken in a metaphoric way, if you have an interest in normal human life. Or even abnormal human life."

25 literary resolutions for 2012. What's yours?

When 2012 arrives this weekend, there will be resolutions aplenty. Diets! Exercise! Get organized! Figure out Google+! Quit smoking! Jacket Copy asked writers, editors and publishers what their literary resolutions will be. Join them and tell us yours.

Ben Ehrenreich, author of the novel "Ether" and winner of a 2011 National Magazine Award for his article "The End": That's an easy one: write, write, write and write some more.

Richard Lange, author of the 2013 novel "Gather Darkness" (Mulholland): I'm going to reread "Moby-Dick," "Crime & Punishment," and "The Scarlet Letter." Every time I go back to books that I loved as a kid, I learn more about myself as a writer now.

Dana Spiotta, author of the novel "Stone Arabia": I have many books I want to read this year. For example, I have this inviting stack of Hollywood biographies and memoirs: "Rosebud" by David Thomson, "Frank: The Voice" by James Kaplan, "Run-through" by John Houseman, "Memo" by David O. Selznick, "A Girl Like I" by Anita Loos, and "Vanity Will Get You Somewhere: An Autobiography" by Joseph Cotten.

Antoine Wilson, author of the 2012 novel "Panorama City" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): For 2012, I expect to be doing more interacting with strangers, thanks to the new book coming out, so my resolution is simple: To be able to clearly and concisely answer the following question: "What are you reading?"

Jervey Tervalon, author of "Serving Monster" and founder of Literature for Life: Start working on a new novel that will amuse and consume me; and I will not allow myself, not even for a second, to dwell on the bleakness of the publishing industry.

Elizabeth Crane, author of the 2012 novel "We Only Know So Much" (HarperPerennial): I don't know if this is exactly literary, but the only real resolution I'm considering, which I haven't etched in stone yet, is to give up watching entertainment shows (ET, etc). This might or might not help my writing, if only insofar as it will free up an hour of my life every day, but the hope is that it will help my celebrities-and-celebrity-news-makes-me-want-to-pull-my-hair-out problem.

Rachel Kushner, author "Telex from Cuba," a National Book Award finalist: This year I am inspired by my friend Marisa Silver’s resolution from last year, which was no internet (except e-mail and occasionally facebook). My resolution is exactly that. Perhaps that’s bookish, in that it might create more time in which actual books can be read. I feel better already, sensing the loss of this convenient form of self-sabotage--of time. Time is of a premium. I don’t want to waste any. I have a feeling I will miss out on very little without the internet. Whatever it is, if it’s important enough it will find me.

Marisa Silver, author of the short story collection "Alone With You": Read more poetry. Use fewer commas.

Evan Ratliff, founding editor of the multimedia iPad magazine The Atavist: I'm not a big resolution maker, but I would say on the literary front mine is pretty simple and obvious. It's building on something I started late this year, which is to carve out specific, disconnected, undistracted time to read every day. Sometimes it's sitting outside with a paperback, having left the phone and all other devices back at the office. Sometimes it's actually reading a book on the phone (as you might imagine, I'm a big fan of reading books on the phone!), but having turned off all the phone's connections. It's like exercise, for me: The whole day gets better if I set aside the time for it. And as much as I love reading digital texts, it's not the same if I stop three times in the middle to deal with some seemingly-urgent-but-not-really email.

What the heck is 'social reading'?

There's been talk about it at forward-looking publishing conferences and between idea-filled app developers. Now that more and more people are reading books as e-books, and their e-readers are connected, how can the best of those worlds combine? In today's L.A. Times, we look at the emerging world of social reading.

Look ahead: The presents have been opened, wrapping thrown away, and for a few quiet hours you've been curled up reading the new Steve Jobs biography, a gift from your dad. You find a surprising detail and call to your significant other, "Honey, did you know ...?" but because he is busy making dinner, the idea fizzles away as you turn the page.

Or maybe when you get to that passage, with the swipe of a finger you highlight it and email it to your dad, adding a thanks for his gift. Or you click to add your thoughts to a chorus of readers who found that same passage interesting; or you check to see if there's a link to a video clip; or you find an annotation from the author; or you post it to Twitter or Facebook or Google+, where others can comment on it too.

That's called "social reading," and it's coming to an e-reading app or device near you.

That's just the beginning; read the rest here.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: A screenshot of Subtext, a social reading app. Credit: Subtext

Book recommendations from poets and rock stars at The Millions

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

The Millions is a book-focused blog that has always been open to many voices -- it's called The Millions, after all. It is currently midway through its annual Year in Reading series, in which authors, bloggers, actors, artists, rock stars and poets share what books really sent them this year. This year, those contributing include U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine and Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of The Walkmen (both pictured, above).

One of the things that distinguishes the Millions Year in Reading from other year-end lists -- and geez, there are a lot of year-end lists -- is that it isn't trying to be a best of what was published in the last 12 months. Many times the books that are selected are classics, or are items that might have been published in the last few years and someone just got around to reading, or are somewhere in between: old, in the mix, not-yet-required reading.

It's a potpourri of personal recommendations. Some come from people you already knew were bookish: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann ("Let the Great World Spin"), short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg, bestselling debut novelist Chad Harbach ("The Art of Fielding"), and brilliant cultural critic Geoff Dyer. (Full disclosure: I participated too, as I have every year since 2006).

The books they write about are a literary bunch. McCann picks Fernando Pessoa’s "Book of Disquiet," a Portuguese book first published in the 1980s, more than four decades after Pessoa's death; McCann compares "Book of Disquiet" to James Joyce. Eisenberg writes about a New York Review of Books reprint of "The Radiance of the King" by Camara Laye, a West African writer, first published in English in 1956. Harbach selects Hungarian author Dezso Kosztolányi's "Kornél Esti," published in English for the first time by New Directions, "The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India" by Siddhartha Deb and Philip Connors' memoir "Fire Season." Dyer looks at a recent nonfiction book, "All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence" by Fox Butterfield, an "investigative genealogy" that starts with a prison stabbing and goes all the way back to the Civil War.

Then there are the rock stars. What does The Walkmen's lead singer Hamilton Leithauser recommend? Robert Graves' "I, Claudius," the biography "Frank: The Voice" by James Kaplan, D.C. mystery novel "King Suckerman" by George Pelecanos, and Dexter Filkins' chronicle of Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Forever War." Duff McKagen goes for "Lamb" by Christopher Moore, writing "I knew by the fourth sentence in that Moore would now be one of those 'authors that I really like.'" (File "one of those 'authors I really like'" under Things I Never Thought a Member of Guns N' Roses Would Say).

I would suggest that the books people write about on The Millions show that readers like to read interesting books. At this gift-giving time of year, the Year in Reading sparks inspiration that's both off the beaten path and recommended.

The Millions' Year in Reading continues adding new book picks every day until Dec. 31.

[For the record, Dec. 13, 7:36 a.m.: An earlier version of this post said that Nathan Larson, formerly lead singer of Shudder to Think and now a novelist himself, recommends "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell. It was Nathan Englander, a writer, who made that suggestion.]

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Left, Philip Levine at home in August. Credit: Craig Kohlruss/Fresno Bee/MCT. Right, Hamilton Leithauser, performing with his band The Walkmen in Los Angeles in 2010. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times

This Sunday: Jerusalem and the man who played Mark Twain

Jerusalem, the holy city that has mesmerized conquerors for centuries, takes the featured spot in our book coverage this weekend with a review of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s "Jerusalem: The Biography," an epic history of a city that, as Montefiore notes, has been “the desire and prize of empires” but curiously is “of no strategic value.” Our reviewer, Wendy Smith, a contributing editor to the American Scholar, writes that Montefiore “embraces Jerusalem’s paradoxes in his chronological account” while remaining “even-handed” in laying out the city’s exhaustive history.

Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty examines actor Hal Holbrook’s accounting of his life and career. Holbrook, best-known for his illustrious portrayal of Mark Twain and as Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” recounts his troubled childhood after he was abandoned by his parents at the age of 2, and his discovery of acting in the  book “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.”  McNulty writes that while “Holbrook’s career deserves being memorialized,” the memoir struggles because it lacks intimacy.

Also this Sunday: Carolyn Kellogg checks out the middle novel of Lydia Millet's trilogy that began with “How the Dream Died” in 2008. Kellogg writes of Millet's new book, “Ghost Lights,” that the author has “made it easy for those not familiar with the first book to start with this.” Times columnist Hector Tobar, author of the novel “The Barbarian Nurseries,” reviews Anita Desai’s “The Artist of Disappearance,” a collection of novellas about contemporary India, “where deep-rooted tradition meets the great, cruel engine of unbridled capitalism.” Tobar says Desai “mines this territory artfully, again and again.”

Thanhha Lai’s YA novel-in-verse “Inside Out and Back Again” recently won the National Book Award in the children’s category, and Susan Carpenter says it paints a “much needed portrait” of the author’s harrowing journey from a falling Saigon to life in Alabama.  And deputy book editor Nick Owchar looks at Michael Dirda's “On Conan Doyle: Or the Whole Art of Storytelling,” which first appeared last month in his Siren's Call column. Dirda’s brief volume explores the broad writing career of an author best known for creating Holmes, Watson and Baker Street.

Do you still need some ideas for holiday giving?  Don't forget about our special guide to Holiday Books & Gift Ideas, which offers great suggestions in a variety of genres, ranging from fiction and nonfiction to coffee-table and quirky books (Don't know what to do with the hair shed by your cat? There's a book for it!). In our guide you can also find plenty of tips on tablets, audio books and other accessories for the book lovers in your life. 

Thanks for reading,

-- Jon Thurber, Books Editor

 Photo: The Dome of the Rock Mosque in East Jerusalem, 2007.   Credit: Lefteris Pitarakis / Associated Press

Photo: 2011 Holiday Books and Gift Ideas   Credit: Elvis Swift / For The Times

 

Do you live in the 'Twilight' belt?

Fans of Twilight form an intense slash through the country, according to Goodreads. More than 880,000 Goodreads members have read "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer, and the company parsed its numbers to discover that if you live in South Carolina, you're more likely to run into a fellow "Twilight" reader than if you live in North Carolina.

The map above shows "Twilight" lovers are concentrated in red states. From the top, that's South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, then east to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama, with a hop over to South Carolina.

Pink states are somewhat warm on the book, turquoise states less enthusiastic, and deep blue states decidedly cool on the vampire saga. The proportion of readers to population is fairly consistent, Goodreads says, except for Utah. That's the 34th most populous state, with the sixth-highest total number of "Twilight" readers. Could it be that Stephenie Meyer's Mormon beliefs make her teenage vampire romance appealing to the heavily Mormon state?

One other Goodreads metric that may not be a mystery: "Twilight" is read by12 times as many women as it is by men.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Graphic: Goodreads