Public Eye

There might have been an ultra-competitive time in the misty past when I would have felt gloaty about the L.A. Times eliminating its book section, folding the reviews instead into the rest of its Sunday arts coverage.

That time is long gone. We're in this together: All newspaper people, all newspaper readers, are diminished when we lose anything.

Times Book Editor David Ulin spoke to a group of scholars and journalists gathered at Bill Deverell 's and Kim Matsunaga's regular Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West brown-bag table Tuesday about the changes, about what a good review should be and about Southern California's place in literature.

He said the perfect succinct thing about the critic's main job: "Is this book worth five, eight, 15 hours of my time, at which point I will be that much closer to dying?"
It's not just that, of course. Many of us read the criticism for itself: "Whether or not I ever go out and buy the book, I should be somehow enriched by the time I spent with the review."

Book reviews are highly available online, or in other periodicals, noted Dr. Stephen Kanter, the Pasadena M.D. who is now a reader at the Huntington. True, replied Ulin: "But a newspaper is still a serendipitous collection delivered to millions every day."

That's exactly the point of many of us who lament the loss, particularly among the young, of the daily newspaper-reading habit. It's not about staying in your own, safe, self-selected world, perusing only your Web favorites. The reading experience of allowing your eyes and mind to wander over something about which someone else is saying, "Here: This is important. You might find this interesting" is irreplaceable in a broad intellectual life.

Is there still an East Coast bias against the hinterlands? You betcha. Ulin came from New York City in the early '90s. Back home on a visit as he edited his "Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology," he was asked by a friend, "So, what is that about -- maybe three writers?"

To the contrary, Ulin saw how pleasantly horizontal was the So Cal writing world compared with the vertical Manhattan one. Back there, he said, you were either a poet, or a novelist, or a journalist. "Here, I met poets who were journalists who were writing screenplays," he said. With interesting circles: "I was never going to go to Carrie Fisher's birthday party, but it was fun to hang out with people who did."

Ulin admits "a profound anger" about losing the standalone section, which could be edited as if it were itself a book with a narrative flow each Sunday. Instead of about 1,000 reviews a year, he now has room for about 900. One possible upside: "that we might possibly infect the uninfected" who didn't always pick up the section but who at least leaf through the broadsheet pages.

Sure, there's all kinds of room on the Internet for news about books. Still, "I'm an old print guy," Ulin said. "I like the Web. But I worry about the noise factor, about the connection between reader and writer."