Literary blogger and debut novelist Mark Sarvas sorts through the schedule for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, trying to decide which panels he most wants to see. Mind you, this was taken Saturday morning, before many of us began refusing to walk across the UCLA campus in the blinding light and heat and contented ourselves with meeting our favorite authors in the “green room,” for which the Times appropriated the university’s faculty lounge—where you could see conversational pairings like Walter Mosley and James Ellroy on a regular basis. (Later in the day, when Richard Price appeared to be signing a copy of Lush Life for Ellroy, it was all taking place too far away for me to get a good picture. But it’s seared in my memory.)
I got to meet almost everybody I wanted to meet over the course of the weekend; I was worried Saturday that I’d missed my opportunity to say hello to Pico Iyer, but then I spotted him in the lunch line Sunday afternoon and we chatted briefly about an interview I’d done with him in Seattle a decade ago, and how much I was looking forward to reading his new book about the Dalai Lama, The Open Road. I ran into Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution, at the Book Soup booth during one of my few forays outdoors (for an interview you’ll read later on), and told him how much I was looking forward to the panel on Hollywood history he was about to do with Peter Biskind—so was everybody else, it seemed, because when I finally got there the auditorium was already filled to capacity.
I think the only person I didn’t get to meet was Peter Matthiessen, and I eventually found out that was because he’d never made it to Los Angeles, having bowed out a few days earlier due to health concerns, which I was gravely sorry to hear.
Sarvas was one of several of my bookblogger chums invited to take part in the Festival; in addition to letting me moderate a panel, the Times had their own blogger, Carolyn Kellogg, working two events, ex-GalleyCat Sarah Weinman also led two discussions, and James Marcus did not pick a fight with Lee Siegel. I didn’t actually go see their panel, but they certainly seemed to be getting along well, based on the photographic evidence.
