Notes from a story collection

Reading was anything but a solitary pursuit over the weekend at the 14th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA.

Throngs attended dozens of panels that ranged over topics including the literature of outsiders, activism and current political issues. Attendees lined up under a warm Westwood sun to hear the likes of James Ellroy, Ray Bradbury and other literary lights. Also on hand were Michael J. Fox, Danica McKellar, stars from another firmament.

In front of Powell Library, a “reading wall” asked, “What are you reading? Grab a marker and give your book a shout-out.” Thousands responded, listing titles such as “Twilight,” “Go Ask Alice,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Revolutionary Road,” testimony to a love of literature.

What follows are snapshots of the festival weekend selected from Jacket Copy, the Times book blog.

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Not many people are comfortable disclosing intimate details of their life to an auditorium full of strangers, but that is exactly what happened during the “Memoirs With a Twist” panel.

Authors Gustavo Arellano, Chris Ayres, Marion Winik and Rachel Resnick spoke about the tough aspects of memoir-writing and the sometimes unfortunate effects of being honest.

Resnick, author of “Love Junkie: A Memoir,” revealed that personal accounts often lead to damaging repercussions. Her father, she said, recently retracted his approval of her frank memoir and cut ties.

Ayres confessed that during nearly every waking second of his nine-day tour of Iraq, he felt he was going to die. “I have the distinction of being the first journalist to officially desert the unit I was embedded in,” quipped Ayres, the author of “War Reporting for Cowards” (2005).

-- Kelsey Ramos

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Actress Alyssa Milano may be an unlikely spokeswoman for the game of baseball, but she did a great job of promoting the sport during her conversation with Dodgers blogger Jon Weisman. Milano’s recently published book, “Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic,” is, in her own words, a memoir and love letter to baseball.

Those who may have been skeptical about Milano’s passion for baseball and her beloved Dodgers dismissed those thoughts early on when she quickly discussed the team’s need for pitching help. She also mused on the possibility of what it would be like to see Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez on the same team again.

-- Joshua Sandoval

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Critic Jonathan Kirsch’s considerable familiarity with biblical scholar Robert Alter’s work led to a brisk discussion of the practice of translation that ranged across many topics, including lexical nuances, negative reviews, Harold Bloom, the biblical author J and his (or her) gender, the storytelling of Homer versus that of biblical storytellers -- you name it.

The most memorable moment was also one of its earliest -- Kirsch and Alter opened their discussion by giving the audience some sense of the task facing a translator by taking the opening passage of Genesis, about the creation, and presenting it in three versions: the original biblical Hebrew, the King James Version and Alter’s own translation.

Alter’s reading of the original Hebrew was followed by the Elizabethan splendor of the King James Version and then by Alter’s small, startling changes. Where the KJV describes the world as being “without form and void,” for instance, Alter rendered the primordial world as being a place of “welter and waste.”

At other places, however, he left the language alone, such as when Cain says to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“I could have used other words, but why tamper with that?” he said.

-- Nick Owchar

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What comes next for publishing? That was the question that the panelists at a “Publishing 3.0: The Next Generation” panel tried to answer.

Patrick Brown of Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena predicted that in 10 years, most books will be electronic; hardcovers, he said, will exist as special editions geared for collectors and aficionados (much like vinyl has emerged as a preferred choice for music collectors). Brown’s prediction generated a murmur of discomfort from the audience. It’s not necessarily going to happen, he amended, but bookstores have to imagine that it might.

Brown had emphasized that the value of independent bookstores like Vroman’s are the special communities they nurture. “It’s no secret that you’d be able to find that book somewhere else, cheaper,” he said, but added that people choose to come to Vroman’s for a host of reasons other than the book itself. Would Amazon book a bus and an author and drive readers to the Festival of Books? Maybe, but it hasn’t yet.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Times columnist Patt Morrison gave the audience appropriate warning before James Ellroy’s loud and expletive-filled speech at the festival: “Seat belts fastened low and tight? All right, you’re gonna need ‘em.”

Ellroy didn’t disappoint. The crime writer thanked the audience for coming out, rather than staying home to tend to their “sex lives and drug habits.” He opened with his trademark crowd welcome to the “peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps.”

And then he immersed himself in a rather hard-to-follow speech, calling “Blood’s a Rover,” his forthcoming book covering Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “the greatest novel since the holy Bible.”

-- Leslie Anne Wiggins