If there was a patron saint of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, it was probably LeVar Burton.
The line for his panel stretched around the building 30 minutes before the event began. When he appeared on stage with journalist Patt Morrison, there were actual hoots from the audience. The reason was clear: years after his famous PBS show, Reading Rainbow, was cancelled, he is still America’s most prominent evangelist for books. And his zeal has survived the digital revolution.
“People ask me all the time,” he said, “a bound book or digital, for kids? And I say: yes.”
Later, when an attendee asked what he thought about the oft-repeated assertion that print is dead, the affable former Star Trek: the Next Generation star nearly shouted: “I don’t think it’s dead!”
Burton insisted that moving Reading Rainbow to the web, which he had recently begun doing through a successful Kickstarter campaign, was simply chasing children to the place where they lived. In the 1980s, television had been the technology Burton used to create a generation of voracious readers. He sees the web as just the new TV.
Burton’s unshakeable optimism, combined with a certain star quality, was typical of the sessions taking place all over the University of Southern California’s downtown Los Angeles campus. Thousands thronged the plazas, wandering from stage to panel to the long lines of booths peddling books, tote bags and Scientology sessions.
For visitors from the more pessimistic east coast, where the impending death of reading is regularly proclaimed and lamented by publishing professionals, the unqualified love for books displayed here felt surprising. But then LA rarely does anything by halves.
Star power
The huge main stage, for example, hosted a parade of celebrities, starting with Maria Bello and ending with Kate Mulgrew. All had books, of course, but the books, you might say, were the outgrowth of other, more successful careers.
If that meant that the tone was sometimes less than bookish, so be it. The star power on parade yielded other pleasures. Bello, for example, drew some of the most interesting, California-inflected questions I have ever seen at a books talk. She was promoting a book called Whatever … Love is Love: Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves. At one point she was hit up by a self-described supporter of the radical fringe communist Bob Avakian to share her views on police brutality. As only someone with media training can do, Bello expertly deflected the question, talking instead about the passions of activism.
Then she got a nicer question: an older woman wanted her to talk about her now-cancelled show Prime Suspect. Bello very much enjoyed working on it, as it happens.
The charisma quotient was, in other words, pretty high. This is unusual for literary festivals, whose performers are generally pale and malnourished. Here, huge smiles were everywhere. One could not help but smile when wandering by Octavia Spencer reading from her latest children’s book. In the Q&A afterward she charmed the audience with seven simple words: “What I like about writing: having written.” The actor went on to tell them that she had gotten her start in the business as Whoopi Goldberg’s assistant on the 1990 film The Long Walk Home.
Billy Idol also apparently felt he needed to give more than a simple reading from his recent memoir, Dancing With Myself. So after his interviewer left the stage, he called a guitarist on and broke into an impromptu rendition of Rebel Yell. The performance was so expertly delivered that one imagined he does this all the time, perhaps even on command. It’s not the kind of thing one regularly sees at, say, a Brooklyn book reading.
Mind you, not all of the shows people put on were so charming. At one point, Lorraine Bracco, who was reading from her new weight loss memoir To the Fullest, was cringe-inducingly asked to pretend to be Dr Melfi and describe herself.
She replied: “I’ve been resilient. I’m hopeful, and see a good future in front of me.”
Later, she was heard to proclaim loudly: “I didn’t want to – pardon my French – put the shit back in right away!” She was talking about liver toxins, a subject she railed on about for several long minutes.
But then, every good show has its bumpy bits.
