The end of the story

The Reading Room, the only literary bookstore on the Strip, is closing at Mandalay Place. The closing date is likely to fall in March, though that has not been settled, nor has what will be taking the bookstore’s place.

But according to Scott Voeller, vice president of hotel marketing at Mandalay Bay, the decision is final: “We are really looking at who our customers are and the mix of stores overall, and that is what this is about, part of a process of constant reevaluation.”

Interestingly, literary life in Vegas has never been so high-profile with two new novels set here: “Beautiful Children” by Charles Bock and “The Delivery Man” by Joe McGinniss Jr. Both books have been embraced by locals, and the writers have given readings in town and been interviewed by the local public radio station. Both books have been excerpted by an alternative weekly. For Vegas, this is a lot of attention to give to literary fiction.

The list of masterpieces of Las Vegas fiction, in my opinion, has yet to lodge a single candidate. Obviously, there is one book that is considered a classic set in Vegas: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson. But the story is not told as fiction and, even then, Vegas is grotesquely caricatured by an author less interested in observing the Strip than in using Vegas as a stand-in for larger points about America.

But if you want to read books like these about Vegas while visiting, the Reading Room was the only place inside a Strip resort you’d be likely to find these titles. There is nothing on the Strip like the stock of books and magazines at the Reading Room, which boasts not just a strong contemporary fiction section, but also a poetry section, as well as odd specialty books and limited editions. Otherwise, unless you count the paperbacks you can buy in snack shops or the high-end first edition market, Strip resorts and their shopping malls do not have bookstores.

As with most of the cool things on the Strip, the Reading Room was originally a pet project of a Las Vegas executive, Glenn Schaeffer, once president of the Mandalay Resort Group. Schaeffer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he saw potential in an area most book retailers thought of as a literary dead zone. Unlike most of the other retail shops at Mandalay Place, the employees of the Reading Room are employees of the casino.

“It was a step up in every way,” says Michelle Vinik, 24, who worked at the Reading Room for about three years. Vinik left a chain bookstore in the suburbs to work at the Reading Room: “I was never going to get such great health benefits and that kind of wage working at a chain store as I could working for a casino. But it was weird being a bookstore in a casino. A lot of customers would come in drunk and be confused by us. But a lot of locals loved the place.”

Unfortunately, math always wins in the end in Las Vegas, and selling books is apparently not capable of justifying 1,300 square feet of the Strip for much longer.

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Small-town feel

Usually, when you critique a performance, the artist is long out of town by the time the review appears. But in Las Vegas, like Broadway to an extent, it is the audience that changes and not the shows. And compared with New York, Las Vegas is a tiny town for residents involved in covering and performing Strip entertainment. I’ve run into people I have written about in restaurants, at the veterinarian and at the grocery store. You never know what will set a headliner off or even a lounge act. In the last Buffet column, I wrote a generally flattering piece about Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. I love Cheese’s show, but I described Cheese as “pear shaped.” The morning the story appeared, an irritated text message, sent just after 2 a.m., arrived from Cheese: “Richard -- I need you to have the phrase ‘pear shaped’ removed from that article without delay. Seriously, man, that’s not cool.” Not thinking he was serious, I wrote back but never heard from him again. I am not looking forward to the next time I run into him.

This is not an isolated example.

Recently, Rich Little gave my colleague Mike Weatherford, the entertainment writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, a spanking in a radio interview for a mixed review of the impressionist’s new show at the Golden Nugget.

Referring to Weatherford’s first writing a flattering profile before giving a lackluster review, Little told host Dave Berns, “He makes friends with you and then he stabs you in the back.” Weatherford responded with a column explaining that his job in writing a profile is different from his job as reviewer. In short, listening to Little tell anecdotes backstage was fascinating and fun, but watching Little’s show, well, not so much.

Weatherford agrees that the tiny town issue is dominant. He is one of only a handful of reporters to review and cover entertainment on the Strip full time. He frequently has to call performers shortly after he has given less-than-glowing reviews as well as meet them in public. “It would be ideal if we could separate the critic from the beat reporter, but we don’t,” says Weatherford, bringing up one thing that might mitigate the situation.

He has been on the entertainment beat for the Review-Journal for almost a decade.

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For more of what’s happening on and off the Strip, see latimes.com/movablebuffet.