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Trailer: ONE DAY

Last summer, I reviewed David Nicholls’s book, One Day, which follows the relationship between friends Dexter and Emma by dropping in on them on the same date every year, from the time they meet on their college graduation day to twenty years later.

The trailer for the movie, starring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, was released this week. I think the lead actors are good choices for Dex and Em, and a movie can only be enhanced by having Patricia Clarkson in it.

One Day fans, what do you think? If you haven’t read the book, does this make you want to?

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L.A.TIMES Festival of Books Report, Pt. 2

A little blurry due to low lighting...

The second panel I attended last Saturday after “Organized Crime” was Robert Crais’s interview by NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates. I got in line an hour before it began because the panel was sold out and I was taking no chances of getting a sucky seat in back with a big-haired person right in front of me. Luckily, the Craisie crew and I got nice center seats, taking up almost a whole row. Following are highlights from the session.

Bates asked Crais to talk about how he started writing mysteries in case there were people in the audience who didn’t know who he was. His response: “It’s not possible.” But he obliged and discussed his beginnings as a TV writer before he became a novelist. I won’t recap his early history because you can find those details at his website here.

Bates then asked Crais to tell the audience about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. “Why won’t you sell them to Hollywood?”

“A book requires a human being to read it. At that moment, we are collaborating,” Crais said. He added that for each person, the collaboration is unique and he wants to preserve that.

Asked what his two protagonists look like, he said, “I’ve never seen Elvis and Joe, I’ve never seen their faces. I’m not sure why; I’m very visual as a writer. I can see the wood in the floor of [Elvis’s] house…I can see his shoes, the wrinkles in his pants. But as it gets higher, it goes into silhouette.”

Bates asked if Elvis and Joe see the world the same way.

“Elvis is more a black-letter-law type of guy. He wants to believe in the system. Joe has no belief in it,” Crais answered.

“The theory,” Bates said, “is that neither will ever be able to have a romantic relationship because of their relationship with each other. Talk about that cost.”

Crais said someone asked on his Facebook page, “Is [The Sentry] the book where Elvis and Joe are finally going to kiss?” He then discussed slash fiction involving Elvis and Joe—stories fans write about them in which they get, ah, really friendly. “I tried reading some of it. It grossed me out,” he said.

Bates then brought up everyone’s favorite polarizing character, Lucy Chenier, the woman for whom Elvis pines. Crais shared an anecdote about a woman at a signing in La Jolla, CA, who said, “I came all the way from Hawaii to say one thing: Kill Lucy.” At this point, Crais polled the audience to see if the majority liked or hated Lucy. By my estimation (being a shortie, though, I couldn’t see over everyone’s heads), more people were pro- than anti-Lucy.

“Elvis still loves Lucy,” Crais said.

“What’s he gonna do about it?” Bates asked.

“You’ll have to wait and see.”

Bates asked about Joe Pike’s love life. “He sees women…but you’re not going to see him standing in line to see Rio,” Crais said.

“Does Elvis meet all his emotional needs?”

“He does have needs beyond Elvis. He doesn’t know how to fill those needs. He feels something’s lacking in him,” that he wouldn’t be able to give a woman what she needs.

“Would he ever do therapy?”

“What would he say?” Crais said. “He knows he’s a hidden man. His whole M.O. is to give away nothing. He’s learned to be that way to survive but he knows it’s not right. He’d like to be more like Elvis but doesn’t know how to do it.”

“Talk about L.A. What is it about it that keeps you placing your characters here?”

“The canvas is spectacular,” Crais answered. He said Los Angeles is a destination for hope, where people come to reinvent themselves, chasing hopes and dreams. “When you have that many people risking so much…it’s true grit for me, fantastic stuff to work with.”

Bates said that some authors, when setting their books in L.A., get their details wrong. But Crais, she pointed out, makes his neighborhoods recognizable. How does he do it?

Crais said he keeps weird hours, getting up at 3 a.m., driving around, sometimes “hanging out at donut shops in South Central talking to people.” He looks for the little things to drop into a scene, asking himself, “What makes it real to me?”

“Talk about your writing schedule. Do you write every day?”

“My work year is only about ten months” because two months are taken up by promotional work and touring. “I’m lazy for about the first third of the book. Then I slam up against deadline hell and then I obsess.” He said when he’s near the finish line, he does 12-14 hours, 7 days a week.

Bates asked Crais what will happen to Elvis and Joe, if he’ll allow them to grow old.

“There’s a heavy action component in my books. If I allow my guys to age in real time, after a while, they won’t be able to do it.” He says he does “a time-slip thing,” putting them in their “gray, foggy 40s” by keeping time references vague. In his early novels, for example, he said the two were in the Vietnam War; now it’s just “the war.”

He continued, “I used to know what the last two books are. The second to last, Elvis gets murdered. In the last one, Joe makes them pay. But I’ll never write them.” He said he hopes he never gets tired of writing Elvis and Joe books “but never say never.”

When Bates asked about his standalone characters, Crais said he would like to see them again. “The question is [whether] to bring them back in their own books or bring them into Elvis Cole’s L.A.”

“What was the hardest book to finish?”

Much clearer here

L.A. Requiem made me sick to my stomach,” Crais said. He thought his publisher would cancel his contract. It ended up being his first novel to hit the bestseller list. “It got fantastic reviews but it was so different. It had first- and third-person POVs and flashbacks. I was terrified people would reject it. I wasn’t sure if I’d pulled it off.”

At that point, people from the audience started asking questions. The first person asked Crais how many drafts he writes of each novel.

“I revise endlessly…until the publisher says, ‘Crais, you can’t. We’re publishing tomorrow.’ Another weakness is I can’t read my previous books because I want to change stuff. I can’t stand it.”

A bunch more people asked questions but my wrist started flashing the carpal tunnel alert so it was pencil down for me. Hope you enjoyed the report!

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The Edit Ninja

I’ve been prowling the streets at night as my other secret identity but Brett Battles busted me recently and unmasks me over at Murderati today. Hope you’ll join me there as I obsess over grammar and general nerdiness!

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L.A. TIMES Festival of Books Report, Part 1

This past weekend was another fun and enlightening experience at the annual festival of books. This was the first year since its inception that the festival was held at USC instead of UCLA. It’s a smaller campus so I didn’t have to walk as far to go everywhere but the layout was a little confusing and I got lost a lot. I did manage to find a student lounge where I could rest between panels and enjoy the air conditioning and free McDonald’s iced coffee. I don’t know why I never sneaked into student lounges at UCLA.

I only attended on Saturday but it was a full day. Besides meeting bloggers Danielle from There’s a Book and Rachel from Scientist Gone Wordy for the first time, I got to hang out with my old pal, Paulette, an original gangsta Craisie; and the le0pard man himself, Michael from It Rains…You Get Wet, and his awesome family. True story: They gave me lemonade and chips. Jealous?

I started the day by going into “Organized Crime”—the panel, that is. (I got no skills for making fake Coach bags.) The panelists were T. Jefferson Parker, Attica Locke and Stuart Neville with moderator April Smith. The authors have all written novels in which organized crime plays a major role, and they told fascinating tales about their research process and how their lives are affected by the things they write about. The following are some highlights from the discussion.

Smith started by saying, “It’s a shadow market that cycles drugs, people, merchandise…a $2-trillion industry that’s transnational. Organizations that you all have probably heard of—the Yakuza, the Mafia, Mexican cartels, Eastern European groups.” Then she asked, “How do you make a book out of that?”

Parker, a three-time Edgar winner who writes about Mexican drug cartels in his Charlie Hood series, said, “We put faces on things.” He said drug-related deaths in the last five years number 40,000. “I just take one of those deaths and write about it.” And then he said imagine that one story multiplied 40,000 times.

Neville continued along these lines by saying, “Death can very well just be a number, a statistic.” He said in his writing, he tries to turn the number into a person—someone’s mother, father, friend, etc.

Attica Locke signing for a fan

Smith guided the authors towards a discussion of bureaucracy in our government and in crime cartels. Locke, whose Edgar-nominated Black Water Rising is about the Texas oil industry in 1981, said, “Bureaucracies are fighting shadows of themselves because there’s just as much organization in drug cartels as in any government building.”

Neville, who won an L.A. Times Book Prize last year for his The Ghosts of Belfast and lives in Ireland, said it’s been taboo there for the last ten years for Catholics to join the police force. Less than two weeks ago, a Catholic police officer was killed by a car bomb “by someone from his own background.” The protagonist in his latest novel, Collusion, is a Catholic policeman. “There are crimes that shouldn’t be investigated too closely. It might unearth something worse than the crime,” he says.

Locke added, “We all know there are things in our government that’s absolute bullshit…But if we dig it up, it’d turn everything upside down. It hurts too much to acknowledge they don’t give a shit” so we go along with it and look the other way.

Parker said that counterfeit goods is a huge criminal industry and guess who buys most of it? The U.S. “Organized crime leads to Gucci,” he says.

Smith asked the panelists, “How do you know all this stuff?” She then talks about her own research process for her June novel, White Shotgun, which is set in Siena, Italy. She’s been working with the FBI since her first novel, North of Montana (the protag is Special Agent Ana Grey) so she talked to them in Rome and the police in Siena.

Locke said she found the “oil stuff” really challenging because she didn’t know anything about it. She has a young daughter and couldn’t travel around for research so much of it was done at the library.

Neville told an anecdote about how he traveled to New York and took pictures of buildings for research. While writing Ghosts, he realized he really needed an alley behind a particular structure but the real building didn’t have one. When he tweeted about his dilemma, “someone said very helpfully, ‘Make it up.'”

Locke said her lead character, Jay Porter, is based on her father. He would tell her stories from his experiences as a criminal defense attorney but at one point she had to ask him to stop because she wanted it to be her story, not her dad’s.

With Jeff Parker

Parker pointed out “there are books that are fastidiously researched and deathly dull.” For his part, he takes research trips for the atmosphere, “for the feel.” He said you can see a picture of Veracruz’s City Hall on the Internet but when you go there, you see pigeons gathered out front and putting them in the description makes it more real.

Locke asked her fellow panelists, “Anybody afraid that what you put down on paper might get you in trouble?”

Smith said, “Yeah, animal rights with [her last novel] Judas Horse. I don’t know about the Mafia [for Shotgun]…”

Neville said simply, “I have concerns.” To me, these were the most unsettling three words spoken during the panel.

Parker lightened the mood by saying, “Even when I write about cartel guys doing horrible things, I write them with respect…I think the henchmen might actually like my books and not want to kill me because they’re proud of their exploits.”

Smith added, “Maybe when our publishers go out of business, we can work for the cartels!”

Smith then opened up the floor to questions from the audience. At this point, I stopped taking notes because my hand got crampy.

Check back later this week for my report from the other panel I attended—Robert Crais being interviewed by NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates.

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Exciting News

I hope you’ll excuse my being a little immodest today because I want to share something exciting with you. I’m going to be a published author! Are you sitting there thinking, “Wha?” like I did when I first found out? Are you dumbfounded like my friend who just stared blankly at me when I told him?

Let me clarify I wrote a short story that will be published, not a novel. I entered it in Buddhapuss Ink’s Mystery Times Ten YA Short Story Competition, which awards nifty prizes (including a Kindle) to the top three winners, and publication in an anthology for the top ten. I didn’t win the Kindle or any of the cash but my top ten placement, out of over 200 entries, is still beyond my expectations.

Back in January, I decided to enter the competition only four or five days before the submission deadline. I was doing a play at the time, which required rehearsals six days a week with a long commute. I also had deadlines on a couple of reviews for a magazine and needed to finish reading the books I was covering. I was exhausted.

But then I heard about this competition, thought, “Oooh, free Kindle!” and decided to go for it. It was a ridiculous decision in many ways—I’d never written short fiction, I’m not versed in YA, I had no idea if I could write in a young person’s voice, and, oh yeah, I was already overwhelmed with other obligations. But here’s the thing: If I start thinking I can’t do something and coming up with a bunch of excuses for not doing it, that’s when I know I have to do it. Otherwise, I’d have to accept I’m a loser before I even try.

So I wrote for four nights straight until three or four in the morning, sometimes falling asleep over my keyboard. Two days before deadline, I junked most of the story and started again from square two. I wanted to stop, wondering why I was abusing myself. But then the sadistic part of my brain called me a wimp so I kept going.

I submitted my story at 5 p.m. on deadline day. Even with sleep deprivation, I felt elated that I managed to finish it and on time to boot. I had beaten down that internal voice calling me a sissy; I could hear the Rocky theme in my head after I hit “send.” I expected nothing else from the experience because I felt I’d already won.

That’s why the news that I scored high enough to get published is astonishing to me. With this kind of luck, I should head straight to the nearby retirement home and challenge everyone to a game of Bingo. I’m deeply thankful to Buddhapuss for hosting the competition and all the judges who found my story not awful. This encourages me to not only continue writing, but to keep taking on challenges that look scary and daunting. Unless it involves stuffing a turkey, which I know I will never master.

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Royal Wedding Recap

Why am I up at 3 a.m. watching the royal wedding? Because these are difficult times in the world and I want to witness something that’s uplifting. As I sit here in my pajamas, I imagine I’m coming together with billions of other people to celebrate a beautiful thing, regardless of race, age, politics or social status. I don’t care about the guest list or what’s on the menu. I just want to see something on the news that’s not depressing for a change.

I didn’t wake up early enough to watch all the coverage leading up to the ceremony; I barely threw on my glasses in time to turn on BBC America right as it’s starting. Here’s my attempt at live-blogging the event. (Times are approximate since I paused the DVR a couple of times to guzzle coffee.)

3:00 a.m. PST Whoa, it’s starting exactly on time. The black Rolls Royce is pulling up to Westminster Abbey with Mr. Middleton and Kate inside.

3:01 The BBC commentator is saying it might take Kate awhile to climb out of the car since the dress has a huge train but Kate climbs right out, with the help of her sister, Pippa, who’s wearing a fabulous bias-cut ivory column dress.

Kate’s dress resembles Grace Kelly’s on her wedding day, with long chantilly lace sleeves and fitted bodice but the neck isn’t as high as Kelly’s. Her veil is held in place by a small tiara made in 1936 lent by the Queen. Her hair is down in soft curls and looks how it usually looks. Sometimes brides get carried away on their wedding day and go for complicated hairdos they’ve never worn and end up resembling the Bride of Frankenstein more than themselves. Kate looks beautiful and timeless; fifty years from now she’ll still be stylish in photos. The commentator says Sarah Burton from Alexander McQueen has been confirmed as the dress’s designer.

3:02 Closeup of Kate inside the abbey. Ooh, nice drop earrings. Very pretty and the perfect size, not too big or gaudy. She looks happy, very smiley and composed. Aww, that’s how every bride should look, regardless of whether her every move is being scrutinized by billions of people on her wedding day.

3:06 Princes William and Harry come out before the bride’s procession up the aisle. William looks sharp but nervous in his red Irish Guards tunic with the blue sash and medals. Harry looks dapper, too, in his Blues and Royals military uniform.

3:07 Kate starts up the loooong aisle, still smiling.

3:09 She gets to the altar. William looks over and they chat briefly about something. They just look like two kids getting married, not a future king and queen. He looked nervous when he first came out but seems much better now that Kate is standing beside him.

3:11 Singing commences. Look, there’s Elton John.

3:12 And the queen in her yellow coat dress and hat. The camera showed Elton before the queen?

3:14 “Dearly beloved…”

3:18 They’re saying their vows. I didn’t know or never paid attention to the fact Prince William’s full name is William Arthur Phillip Louis. Kate does not flub it.

3:20 He slips the ring on her finger. Not surprisingly, it’s a simple band. Kate (I’m not used to Catherine yet) doesn’t seem capable of anything flashy.

3:21 They’re pronounced man and wife.

3:26 Kate’s brother, James, is reading from the Bible, Romans 12: 1, 2, 9-18. I like this passage: ”Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.” Good advice for all of us, I think.

3:41 Closeup of three little choir boys, all wearing glasses. Nerds rule!

3:54 Trumpets blare for “God Save the Queen.”

3:55 William and Kate have to go into the inner sanctum of the abbey, the Shrine of St. Edward, to sign three different marriage registers. More singing ensues while we wait. Look, there’s another little nerd boy in glasses—an Asian one!

4:07 William and Kate emerge, walk back down the aisle, heading for the exit.

4:10 They’re greeted by enthusiastic crowds as they step out the front door. Church bells are ringing. Magnificent.

4:11 William puts on his forage cap and white gloves before helping Kate into the open carriage. It’s all very gallant.

4:13 They’re on the move, headed back to Buckingham Palace. She gives her first waves as the Duchess of Cambridge and William gives military salutes. Sharp.

4:22 Whoa, the queen has a HUGE grin as she rides in her carriage. We don’t see her that happy that often; it’s the equivalent of the rest of us busting a gut. It’s nice. I don’t remember her looking like that when Charles and Diana got married.

4:29 The wedding party arrives at the palace and go inside. There’s a break here for about an hour before they’re scheduled to re-emerge for their iconic balcony moment. I can’t decide if I should nap or forage for snacks. Snacks win.

5:17 The anticipation in the crowd builds as William and Kate are due to reappear any minute now on the balcony. A woman wearing a hat with cardboard cutouts of W & K mounted on top is being interviewed and she says she came out “for Diana.” I wish William’s mother were here to see this.

5:25 The wedding party steps out on the balcony. William and Kate kiss. He looks shy and blushes a little afterward. How cute!

5:36 Wow, one of the flower girls looks grumpy. I think she just decided she’s had enough fun for the day.

5:38 While waiting for fighter jets to fly over the palace as a symbol of the British resistance during World War II, William and Kate kiss again. The crowd goes wild.

5:40 The jets do their flight pass and the queen starts heading inside, indicating the balcony appearance is over.

This was a nice ceremony—classy, traditional, full of pomp but not pompousness. I was really impressed by how composed Kate looked through the whole affair. She seems sure of who she is—I heard she was determined to do her own makeup though she could have had top professionals do it—and graceful enough to be a queen.

Did you wake up early to watch? What did you think?

Photos: AP & Getty

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Movie Review: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

It’s always hard for me to write a review for something that I neither loved nor loathed. Such is the case for the movie adaptation of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (which I haven’t read), starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz. It has talented actors, nice production values, and beautiful costumes but for some reason doesn’t connect emotionally.

Set during the Depression, it’s the story of Young Jacob (Pattinson), a Cornell veterinary science student who joins the circus as the vet after a family tragedy leaves him homeless. He falls for the star attraction, Marlena (Witherspoon), who’s married to the evil Machiavellian boss, August (Waltz). Jacob struggles between his need for a job and the horror he feels when he sees August mistreat the animals. In the end, Jacob has to decide what kind of life he wants and whether he can give Marlena the one she deserves.

Though the movie has one heartthrob and two Oscar winners in it, Tai the elephant, as Rosie, steals every scene she’s in. She’s more expressive than Pattinson, makes us gasp in wonder, whimper in pain in sympathy, and clap with delight. She has more chemistry with the humans than the leads have with each other, which is ultimately the movie’s downfall.

This is the first time I’ve seen Pattinson play a normal person without any wizardly or vampiric powers and he’s rather…dull. There’s no extra oomph factor that makes an actor truly memorable on screen. Meanwhile, the normally spunky Witherspoon is subdued as the trapped Marlena. They both look great—her slinky gowns are to die for—but there’s absolutely no heat between them. When you can’t feel the love in a love story, it’s a problem.

Waltz’s performance as the capricious August is masterful; the actor made me tense from bracing for the violence that might erupt from his character at any time without warning. I can’t think of many actors who could’ve played this part as well as he did. But it’s similar to what Waltz did in Inglorious Basterds and therefore didn’t feel as fresh.

Since I’ve never seen a live circus, I did enjoy the few glimpses of the show under the big top. I marveled at the acrobats and Rosie doing her tricks. But once the lights in the theater came up, the movie left me with an empty feeling, as if the circus had moved on and left me wanting more.

Nerd verdict: Elephants lacks emotional weight

Photos: David James

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Book Review: THE INFORMATIONIST by Taylor Stevens

One of the reasons I love to read is to educate myself. There are books that entertain and examine the human condition and tell great stories but sometimes I’m attracted to something simply because it sounds foreign to me.

That’s partly why I wanted to read Taylor Stevens‘s debut novel, The Informationist. It takes place in African regions I don’t often hear about and has characters talking in a language I’d never heard of (Fang, anyone?). It also has an interesting lead character in Vanessa Michael Munroe, someone who’s expert at extracting information from anywhere anytime. She sometimes disguises herself as a man—hence the middle name.

She’s hired by Texas billionaire Richard Burbank to locate his daughter, Emily, who went missing four years ago while traveling in Africa, where Munroe grew up. She returns there with Miles Bradford, both a bodyguard and babysitter assigned by Burbank, to find answers but also to confront certain ghosts from her wild, violent past.

Munroe has been compared to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander in blurbs and I can see why: she’s good with computers, rides a motorcycle, is antisocial, formidable in a fight, etc. But that’s just PR shorthand because Munroe is her own person and I never felt that Stevens was aping Larsson. If the author was borrowing from anywhere, it seems to be from her own life. As I mentioned in this earlier post about authors’ bios, Stevens had a peripatetic childhood during which she lived with a cult in two dozen countries (including Equatorial Guinea, where much of the novel’s action takes place) and was denied education after the age of twelve. Munroe is resourceful and resilient in a way that I imagine Stevens had to be when she escaped from the cult. I’m probably projecting but when the novel comes with that kind of backstory, it’s hard not to.

The prose can be a little melodramatic at times but the plot is smart, the action brutal, and the heroine as unconventional as the setting. You’ll gain knowledge about a foreign world and in the end become a bit of an informationist yourself.

Nerd verdict: Savvy Informationist

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Book Review: Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS

Tina Fey’s essays on everything from girlhood rites of passage (such as “men-stru-hating”) to her days at Saturday Night Live and her struggles as a working mom are laugh-out-loud funny, but many of the details also come startlingly close to my own experiences. For example, she talks about trying to kiss a guy in front of the Monroe Hill dorms at the University of Virginia, making him run away from her. I lived at Monroe Hill while attending UVA and made a guy run away just by telling him I liked him. She says her go-to look in college was bicycle shorts with wrestling shoes, while I thought I was cool in bike shorts and jazz shoes. She played with Star Wars action figures, studied at Second City, and did touring shows. Check, check, and check for me, too.

But make no mistake—I am NOT comparing myself to Fey (who can?); I’m simply explaining her appeal to me and many people I know. She comes across like your witty and nerdy best friend, someone who doesn’t make you feel inadequate about how she’s a superwoman and you’re not. And while she’s making you laugh, she’s also slipping in wise nuggets like how the rules of improv can make good life philosophy:

The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun, ” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger…,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt…Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But…at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you…

The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS…If we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here?…” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers. In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person…Instead of saying, “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay, “Here we are in Spain, Dracula” may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads us to the best rule:

THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities.

Fey manages to convey a sense of gratefulness for her life while maintaining it isn’t easy, that she gets stress-induced canker sores just trying to decide if she has time for a second baby because two hundred people on the 30 Rock cast and crew depend on her for employment. (She must have figured it out because she’s now pregnant.) Just like her OB-GYN says to her in the book, “Either way, everything will be fine,” Bossypants makes you feel that way, too.

Nerd verdict: Bossypants rules

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Book Review: Marcia Clark’s GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark acquits herself nicely in her debut novel, Guilt by Association (April 20), which is also the first title out of the gate for Mulholland Books, the new suspense imprint of Little, Brown that has an impressive lineup of writers raring to go.

Guilt centers on L.A. DA Rachel Knight, who catches the rape case of a young girl with a rich, politically connected father while she tries to surreptitiously solve a murder which she has been ordered not to investigate. She has help from a friend who’s an LAPD detective, and the friend’s boss, with whom there’s a spark. Despite all the police connections, Rachel finds herself in more than one harrowing situation before finally getting to the bottom of both cases.

Clark’s protagonist is clearly passionate about her job and getting justice for the victims, whom the author never loses sight of and makes sure we feel the damage done to them. She moves the story along at a steady clip and keeps the reader in the dark about the truths until near the end. And though many mysteries have been set in the City of Angels, I never tire of the descriptions of local haunts. (The ARC I have even comes with color photos of Rachel’s world, some taken by Clark herself.) Rachel lunches at the Pacific Dining Car and lives in the Biltmore Hotel, where she orders room service and hangs out in the bar with her friends. Can I get a deal like that, please?

As nice as Rachel has it, I think too much attention is paid to her clothes. There’s the clingy cobalt-blue sweater and the fab red V-necked one and the starchy white blouse with metal cuff links and charcoal-gray cashmere turtleneck, etc. I love fashion as much as the next girl and have drooled over gorgeous shoes, but in crime fiction I care less about what the protag is wearing and more about the next clue/discovery/plot development. The lavish descriptions used for Lieutenant Graden Hales—“tastefully muscled,” “gold-flecked hazel” eyes, “lazy smile,” “pronounced cheekbones, a strong nose, and a generous mouth”—also feel a little too romance-y for me. But while this book may not be as hardboiled as I’d like it to be, it’s a fast, diverting read that shouldn’t make readers feel guilty for picking it up.

Nerd verdict: Guilt is appealing

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Hot Trailers: COWBOYS & ALIENS, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

In case you weren’t watching the American Idol results show last night, the second Cowboys & Aliens trailer premiered and the movie, opening July 29, continues to look gooood. I can’t embed the video but you can see it here.

The trailer for another big summer movie debuted this week: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco, Freida Pinto, Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), Brian Cox and Andy Serkis. Are you a fan of the previous ape movies? How does this origin story look to you? I can’t decide if it’s must-see for me.

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