The Reading Life: Notes from underground

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

I don't have much use for driving. Growing up in Manhattan, I wasn't raised with it, and even after 20 years in Southern California, I view it as a necessary evil, one of the compromises I've had to make with where I live. It's not that I'm uncomfortable behind the wheel; in fact, I tend to be more uncomfortable when someone else is behind the wheel. No, for me, the issue is that I have to pay attention, which (paradoxically, I suppose) feels like a distraction, pulling me away from things I'd rather do, like read.

I've been thinking about that this week since I've been in New York, where I travel everywhere with a book. It's like a dream: Get on the 4 or 6 or E train and read for half an hour, and then (miraculously) you are there. Such an experience is available in L.A. also -- but I don't commute by Metrolink, and the Metro doesn't extend to where I live. For me, then, the art of subway reading remains particular to the first city I ever lived in, and when I'm here, I re-experience it with a mixture of nostalgia and glee.

This week, I was reading a book about New York in the 1970s. Its touchstones were scenes that resonated for me -- the fiscal crisis, the early punk days, the sense of the city as a broken landscape, not so much apocalyptic as shattered, to borrow an image from the Rolling Stones song ("bite the Big Apple / don't mind the maggots") of the same name.

Thirty-plus years later, New York is very different, an urban theme park, Times Square like the Grove on steroids -- although, as of this spring anyway, there were still bedbugs uptown. But reading this book as I subwayed back and forth beneath Manhattan's pavement brought back my earliest experience of the city as public space, with a force that I can only describe as visceral.

Festival of Books: A new world order of maps (Google and MapQuest) changes how we engage with cities

So you’re off to the Festival of Books. New place this year at USC, requiring a new route from your house. Do you grab an atlas off the bookshelf to figure it out? Unfold a paper map of Los Angeles? No. You go to the computer and hit Google Maps or MapQuest, Or you just go to the car and tell your GPS where you want to go.

It’s a subtle shift in how we engage our own cities, and the lives around us, which made for a fascinating hour at Saturday’s "Maps: Defining a City," where authors Rebecca Solnit, Glen Creason and Denis Wood dissected how and why maps are more than just a way to find out how to get to the corner of Figueroa and Jefferson.

In fact, Solnit argued, there are infinite ways to map a city -- a city like San Francisco, where she lives, and which is the focus of her "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas." Each way of mapping is a different way of understanding it; streets tell us one thing, public transit lines another, the sites of natural waterways overlaid by a city yet another. Similarly, each of us has a myriad of memory maps of our own cities, both present and past.

Father Boyle makes good on the bestseller list

Two new inspirational tales enter the hardcover nonfiction list this week, including local hero Father Gregory Boyle's "Tattoos on the Heart" at  No. 8. The Jesuit priest is the founder of Homeboy Industries, the gang intervention and jobs organization. Boyle tells of his decades-long commitment to saving the lives of at-risk youth through job training, tattoo removal and employment, helping them to become contributing members of the community. Their Homegirl Salsas can even be found on the shelves of Ralphs grocery stores.

A bit of divine intervention also helps with diet tactics as  “Women Food and God” (No. 6)  explores the connection between women’s eating habits and their belief systems.

"Food Rules" had the No. 1 spot for paperback nonfiction. Michael Pollan's sensible eating manual knocked "Lost City of Z" out of the top spot. Food seems to be on many minds these days, with First Lady Michelle Obama's initiative to fight childhood obesity and British chef Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" debut on ABC.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" remains at No. 1 on the paperback fiction list while  “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” makes it mark on both hardbacks (No. 8) and recently released paperback (No. 9). Readers now have more opportunities to acquaint themselves with the adventures of heroine Lisbeth Salander in time for the release of the third and final volume in Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” due in late May.

It pays to be a wimpy kid these days; author Jeff Kinney has three titles on the bestsellers list. The companion handbook, "The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary" (No. 14) offers a glimpse behind the scenes of making the film of the first book in the series, and his "Do It Yourself" journal (No. 11) holds steady in hardcover nonfiction.

Coming up: "A Captain's Story," by Charles Philips, due out Tuesday. Phillips, captain of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, was held captive for five days by pirates on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's coast last summer.

-- Liesl Bradner

Photo: Father Gregory Boyle. Credit: Maury Phillios / Free Press

Deconstructing Eric Owen Moss' 'Construction Manual'

For the last few weeks, I've been working my way through Eric Owen Moss' "Construction Manual" (Aadcu: 1,560 pp., $124), an archival record of the architect's projects from 1988 to 2008. Moss, for the uninitiated, is the director of Sci-Arc, the experimental architecture school in downtown Los Angeles, and head of the eponymous Culver City-based Eric Owen Moss Architects.

"Construction Manual" is designed to look like a reference book: red leatherette cover with gold block lettering, alphabetical dictionary tags. That's both a put-on and not a put-on, for at its most basic level, a reference is what it provides. Tracking 40 projects, built and un-built, it takes us through the layers of production, from design (beginning in many cases with raw sketches) through the building process. Each stage is lavishly illustrated, in color and black and white, with blueprints, computer simulations, models and photographs.

The buildings here include professional and domestic spaces: the UC Irvine Central Housing Office, several remodeled industrial structures in Culver City, Brentwood's Lawson-Westen House. And yet, to think about "Construction Manual" purely as a compendium of these efforts is to miss at least half the point.

Moss, after all, is an architect in the way that, say, Dave Eggers is a writer: All his work feeds back into a larger core. Talking to Scott Timberg last August for a piece in The Times, he discussed his desire to "do for L.A. urbanism in the 21st century what we did for L.A. architecture in the 20th" -- to think, in other words, not about particular buildings but how they add up to a more organic cityscape, one in which architecture and infrastructure might, finally and fundamentally, go hand in hand.

This is the subtext of "Construction Manual," which seeks to reveal its own underpinnings, even as it connects them to a more expansive whole.

"We learn as we go," Moss writes in a brief introductory statement. "And the results of that learning process are in evidence in the final result. ...

"No durable signature is my signature.

"My signature is never dry."

-- David L. Ulin

Photo: A Culver City building designed by Eric Owen Moss. Credit: Naquib Hossain via Flickr.