Some years ago, I was on a book reviewing panel when someone in the audience asked what we, the panelists, thought of "The Bridges of Madison County," which was then a fixture on bestseller lists. We hemmed and hawed, tried to talk around the question, until our moderator acknowledged that, most likely, none of us had read the book.

This led to a discussion of the difference between critics and readers. How, if the book was selling so widely, could we not have read it? What did that say about us?

I kept thinking about that conversation as I slogged through Dan Brown's latest Robert Langdon...

Senators were charmed by that modesty and impressed by Roberts' undeniable brilliance, but his chief justiceship has hardly been a model of restraint.

The Roberts court has aggressively recalibrated the nation's laws in the areas of...

Roberto Bolaño has made quite a name for himself in the United States over the past decade. Two New York houses have published 18 of his books in English—and a 19th is due out later this year. He has become, arguably, the contemporary Latin American writer most revered by the literati of North America. And all this fame has come to him as a dead man — he succumbed to congenital liver disease in 2003.

This week, the departed Chilean-born novelist and poet was celebrated in an eventat the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD series. His biographer, one of his U.S. publishers, and one...

But not all evil is so easily dispatched, in life or in DI Caffery and his colleague Sgt. Flea Marley's universe. As Hayder's skills...

When Carmen Cervantes was growing up in the 1960s in East Los Angeles, it would've been nearly as surprising to find a Spanish-language bookstore in her neighborhood as it would be to unearth an Aztec pyramid in the middle of Beverly Hills.

The problem persists today for local readers who are either Spanish-dominant or bilingual, said Cervantes, citing her mother, who lives in Montebello.

"She goes to these stores and finds very limited things," said Cervantes, director of cultural and special events for the University of Guadalajara Foundation USA. "We read, and we want to read in our...

John Green, bestselling and prize-winning author of young adult novels including "The Fault In Our Stars" and "Looking for Alaska," gave the commencement address at Butler University on May 11. It's witty, smart, thoughtful, and going viral; if you start hearing people in your life saying "happy birthday, sir," you can thank him. There's a YouTube video of the entire graudation ceremony -- Green begins speaking about an hour in -- and he's put the text of the speech online on his Tumblr.

In publishing biz news, Cary Goldstein will join Simon & Schuster in June as vice president, executive...

Ten...

Jaron Lanier has a research job with Microsoft. He won't go into specfics, but it has something to do with imagining the future and asking questions.

Lanier is a longtime Silicon Valley insider whose primary occupation has been to imagine, think and ask questions. What if we could enter a simulated electronic world? Answer: Virtual reality, a term he coined. What if computers could recognize faces? The company Eyematic Interfaces, which has been absorbed by Google. What if your computer could trace your movements in real time, putting them on screen? Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, another project...

In a widely circulated interview with Publishers Weekly, writer Claire Messud was asked if she would want to be friends with the protagonist of her new novel, "The Woman Upstairs." She responded with frustration: "For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?"

Her point: Humbert Humbert was a creep, but "Lolita" didn't suffer from his lack of likability.

Messud went on to list a number of other iconic characters who would make lousy friends, including Hamlet, Oscar Wao and Raskolnikov. Then she started getting bigger, adding anyone...

In one sense, though, whether set before or after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the subject of Le Carré's fiction has never changed. A theme always was, and remains, the question: How can the individual hope to take any effective action in the murk of politics?

Le Carré's most famous (and best loved) character, George Smiley, plodded through the shifting sands of counterespionage with...