Recently, I’ve reviewed for the LA Times: The Kid by Sapphire, Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter, The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff, Embassytown by China Mieville and State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.

Also at the LA Times: I talked to Simon Pegg about his memoir Nerd Do Well and wrote about The Last Bookstore in its grand new/old digs in downtown LA. I very frequently blog at Jacket Copy.

One of my favorite books of the year is Patrick DeWitt’s

I Tweet here.

I Tumbl here.

I’ll be back soon.

If the events of a certain November 2010 night in New York City hung over LACMA Thursday, they did so not as a dark cloud, but as a punching bag.

The occasion: Steve Martin — actor, director, banjo player, author — in conversation with noted art critic Dave Hickey. The subject: Steve Martin’s book “An Object of Beauty,” and, by extension its subject, art and the art world. The rub: a similar conversation at New York’s 92nd Street Y in November did not go well, to the extent that a note was delivered to Martin’s interlocutor on stage asking, essentially, that they stop talking about art so much.

“It made New Yorkers look really bad,” said Jillian Spence, sitting in the front row at LACMA before Thursday’s conversation began. She’d come to get a copy of Martin’s book signed for her father, a big fan who is very ill; when she was a child, they listened to his comedy records together. A New Yorker herself with a tangible accent, she is a member of the 92nd Street Y — “an active, embarrassed member” who said people should expect Martin to talk about his book — “or you shouldn’t be here.”

The sold-out audience at LACMA knew what to expect, and included comedic luminaries Martin Mull, Ricky Jay, Eric Idle and Carl Reiner. The event, part of the 15-year-old peripatetic Writers Bloc author conversation series, was introduced by the organization’s Andrea Grossman. “We in Los Angeles want to hear Steve Martin talk about art!” she said to a round of applause.

There’s more here. I even cornered the oh-my-god-so-cool Carl Reiner and asked him what he thought.

The traveler at the center of Damon Galgut’s new novel “In a Strange Room,” a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, is walking down a remote road in Greece when he sees a stranger in the distance. As the road dips and bends, the two draw closer, mirror images of one another. They meet, then continue in opposite directions, but will meet again.

The stranger, dressed all in black, is a handsome German named Reiner. As easy as it is to get a handle on him — self-possessed, focused, a little vain — the first traveler is harder to pin down. We don’t know his history, nor even his name — just that he’s a young man who’s been to a half-dozen countries in half as many months, “traveling around,” he says, “just looking.”

This is his story, and the story bears a resemblance to the author’s. Galgut eventually reveals that his character, like him, is named Damon and from South Africa; more interestingly, he occasionally moves from the distancing “he” to the personal “I,” quietly seeding his fiction with (what seems like) his truth. Early on, he writes, “He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”

This shifting point of view, the overlap of the Damon in the book with the Damon we are meant to understand is the author, gives the book an interesting, Geoff Dyer-like resonance. This paired with the novel’s stripped-down language make me understand why it was a finalist for the Booker. It’s far better than the Washington Post would have you believe.

The authors seek to answer two questions. First: How can consumers decide which news sources to trust in the current media landscape? And second: What is the role of the traditional press now, and in the future? What they deliver instead is a comprehensive overview of journalism history, with an eye toward technological evolution, along with contemporary guidelines for reporters and editors.

We spent so much time with their family that no one ever thought to take pictures. A different era.

I don’t have a single picture of Big John, which is what we called him to distinguish him from John, his son. Although we didn’t call him that to his face, my sister reminds me: for years, when speaking to him, we addressed him as Mr. Long.

I took this pic on a special occasion in 1978, when Little John and Patti took 3rd place — admittedly, out of 4 — in a local canoe race. It’s a reminder that Little John actually was once little.

I remember when Big John’s father passed away. I was eavesdropping, I must have been, poised on the stairs from the kitchen down to the rec room. Now that his father had died, Big John said, he wasn’t John Vincent Long Jr. anymore; he was John Vincent Long II — there was no longer anyone to be Junior to. I couldn’t imagine him being junior to anyone.

R.I.P., John Vincent Long II.

The picture above isn’t from that week: it’s from the LA Archives Bazaar, which was held Saturday morning at USC. Close to 80 local archives (!) had tables set up in the Doheny Library reading room. There were also panels and discussions, but I was covering the Beverly Hills Literary Escape most of the weekend, and didn’t have time to linger. Instead, I gathered up flyers from places like the Metro Dorothy Peyton Gray Library & Archive (transportation research) and for events like the Sixth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade – Bankruptcy and the Eighteenth Century Book Trade, a lecture at the Willam Andrews Clark Memorial Library (I’m SO going to that. I’m not kidding).

It was nice to see the reading room buzzing again. A zillion years ago, when I went to USC — and when I was a dropout who haunted the library — I’d read there sometimes. Last year, though, I was on campus and stuck my head in, and it was cavernously empty. It made me wonder how well the space gets used, now that students can do so much research (not all!) on the internet. Doheny is beautiful, though — if the students don’t want to use it, this alumna would be happy to take up a corner reading.

The day before that, I wrote about the Man Booker Prize for the LA Times.

Now, I’m out of coffee. Why do these things start so early?

Somewhere, David Sedaris is giggling.

His new collection of short stories — of mice and chipmunks and dogs, of cats and chickens — appear to be fables, but they’re not exactly. Because, he says, fables have morals; what he’s created is a “modest bestiary,” where lessons might not be learned, and a critter meeting a bloody end might not deserve such a cruel fate. And there’s Ian Falconer, creator of the bestselling Olivia books for children, drawing pictures of it all.

These cute woodland creatures, rendered so Olivia-like, with chance and disaster and ill intentions lurking in the margins – well, it could be a bit unsettling. Or just as easily, it’s wickedly funny.