BUZZ BOOKS

The audience had the answer

In his hallucinogen-fueled, five-year quest for spiritual truth, Daniel Pinchbeck saw a conga line of elves after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms and felt as if he was followed by a sneering hipster after taking DPT. Both were part of his journey from agnostic New York intellectual to shamanic newbie, a path he detailed during a recent reading for his book “Breaking Open the Head” (Broadway Books).

About a dozen people and one dog squeezed into a cramped space at the Book Soup Addendum in West Hollywood last week to hear all about it. Most of them--dog excepted--had the aura of having done more than a little experimentation themselves. The 36-year-old author--blond, bearded and wearing an ill-fitting, blue velvet suit -- kicked off the night with a reading about an Ecuadorean ayahuasca ceremony. The night got even more interesting after he closed the book and opened the floor to a heady discussion that began with the question, “Why are so many experiences on ayahuasca post-apocalyptic?” and ended when someone asked where it was possible to find the drug.

Before Pinchbeck could answer, he was cut off by several attendees, all of whom volunteered: “On Melrose.”

-- Susan Carpenter

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The next ‘Corrections’?

It’s got one of the least conventional narrators in current fiction -- an irreverent hermaphrodite from an inbred Greek family. But “Middlesex” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, could have the same kind of broad appeal “The Corrections” showed last year. Like Jonathan Franzen’s novel, “Middlesex” is a critics’ darling that combines a knowing, ironic tone and postmodern trickery with the heft of an old-fashioned social novel.

Eugenides appeared at Los Feliz’s Skylight Books on Sunday night, greeted by a packed, wide-ranging crowd that chose to miss the second game of the World Series. “It’s like a nightclub in here,” one young man in dreadlocks said to a friend.

The author, a charming, intelligent and severely balding presence best known for “The Virgin Suicides,” read from two passages. One recounted the narrator’s complicated baptism, which Eugenides rendered with a perfect Greek accent, the second a scene in which the character’s grandfather, then a young man, begins an ill-fated job at the Ford Motor Co. (The book, which Eugenides dubs a “comic epic,” takes such a long view that its protagonist is not born until Page 215.) After the brief reading, Eugenides answered questions from the crowd, describing the book’s nine troubled years of gestation; his Herculean amount of research on sexuality, 1920s Asia Minor, and ‘60s Detroit; and his interest in making his hermaphrodite seem like “a real person,” not an isolated or a mythical figure. Eugenides says he tackled the character as a Method actor would, trying to imagine himself in a sexually ambiguous body. In fact, Callie Stephanides, his narrator, possesses a biography eerily similar to the author.

For more information, www.fsgbooks.com.

--Scott Timberg

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Once a hacker, now an author

Breezing into the room with a box of books and a bulging over-the-shoulder bag, Kevin Mitnick stepped up to the microphone: “How many FBI agents are in the audience tonight?”

The country’s most notorious computer hacker drew polite laughter as he peered at the room -- a filled-to-the-gills alcove at Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica, where he discussed “The Art of Deception” (John Wiley & Sons), his consumer-protection guide to computer-vandalism techniques.

“How many computer hackers are here?”

Only a few of the 150 or so computer nerds and curiosity seekers who packed the house earlier this month were bold enough to raise their hands. Mitnick, after all, was in a league of his own -- a hacker who was once on the FBI’s most wanted list and served five years in prison for repeatedly breaking into corporate computers.

Nearly two years after his release, Mitnick is retired from the nefarious world of illegal computer trickery.

After introducing the audience to some basic infiltration techniques, he opened the floor and was flooded with questions on everything from topic including how to choose a password (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel) what he thought of the Mitnick biopic “Takedown” (it was “crap”) and how he spent his time during eight months of solitary confinement (reading law books).

-- Susan Carpenter

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What I’m Reading

“The Book of Illusions”

Paul Auster

Henry Holt & Co. Inc. (September 2002)

“A very elegant presentation of magic-realism. Auster’s best so far.”

-- David Bowie