Geoff Schumacher

The acquisitions.

The annual pilgrimage to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books featured a little twist this year. The usual routine has been for Steve, Scott and I to pile into a car in Las Vegas on Friday morning and drive to L.A., munching snacks and stopping at a Chili’s along the way. This year I was in Ames, Iowa, so I flew to L.A., and Steve and Scott picked me up at the airport.

From there, things got back to normal. We ate, scoured various bookstores and enjoyed the booths and panels at the festival. Another change this year: Instead of being held at UCLA, the festival was on the USC campus. All things considered, UCLA is a better venue for this event, but USC is all right.

I ended up acquiring quite a few books this year. Nothing unusual about that, but I’m particularly pleased with some of them. A few highlights:

– The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Nation Books had a cool idea here. It’s amazing that on Dec. 10, 2010, the Vermont senator spoke continuously for eight and a half hours on the Senate floor, criticizing President Obama’s compromise with the Republicans on tax cuts as part of a wide-ranging discussion of how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

– Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia by Frank Westerman. Scott and I heard Westerman, a Dutchman, talk on a panel, and his thoughtful comments prompted both of us to buy this book. It’s brand new, and when Westerman signed my book, he said it was the first copy of the U.S. edition that he had signed. The book is about how the Soviets hired writers to basically rename everything to conform to the communist version of history and life, and to write eloquently about mundane things such as a dam on a river. It sounds really interesting.

– The Professor: A Sentimental Education by Terry Castle. This is an essay collection by a Stanford professor that got rave reviews last year but was impossible to find in the chain bookstores. Didn’t have any problem finding it at Vroman’s in Pasadena, of course.

– What?: Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History — or Is This a Game of 20 Questions by Mark Kurlansky. This is a small tome that promises to be a very interesting essay about life’s big questions.

– Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. Dyer, a Londoner, is one of my new favorite writers, and this is probably his most celebrated book. He set out to write a serious study of the great English writer D.H. Lawrence. But this book isn’t what he originally intended to write. Instead, it’s a memoir of sorts about his inability to write a serious study of Lawrence. Dyer was on the panel with Frank Westerman.

– Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir by Marc Cooper. Cooper, a well-known journalist, is a friend, and Scott, Steve and I spent several hours with him at dinner Saturday night. He’s a journalism professor at USC these days, so he gave us a tour of the Annenberg school, and then we hung out in a semi-secret bar and grill on the campus. Anyway, this is Cooper’s memoir of the period in the early ’70s when he worked as a translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende when he was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet.

– A Heartbreak and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino D’Ambrosio. This is the story behind Cash’s protest album called “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian,” which faced censorship and a backlash from country radio stations. This is an enticing piece of cultural history.

– Zeroville by Steve Erickson. I picked this up in a great used bookstore, Book Alley, in Pasadena. Erickson is an interesting writer and this novel promises to be a good entry point to become more acquainted with his work.

Among the panels and talks, the highlight for me was Vincent Bugliosi. He’s a lawyer and best-selling writer whose most famous book is “Helter Skelter” about the Manson family. His new book, which I intend to get but haven’t yet, is called Divinity of Doubt, and it’s an investigative piece attacking both the Christian faith and atheism. Bugliosi is an agnostic, and he explains why in his usual careful, detailed way. He outlines all the inconsistencies in the Bible, and exposes the fact that some common Christian beliefs aren’t even in the good book at all. But Bugliosi is also critical of atheists, who, he says, fail just as badly as believers to make a persuasive case for their cause. “God should only be a question,” he said. Fascinating talk.

I had to leave the book festival a little early on Sunday to fly back to Ames. I caught at taxi about 2 p.m. and soon embarked on the long flight home, my new books in tow. It was late when we landed in Des Moines. As the wheels touched down, I of course turned on my BlackBerry to find out if I had missed anything. It just so happened that I had missed something big: the breaking news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I had at least three e-mail alerts about it, which I shared with a few people sitting around me on the plane.

I wonder if some big news event will break while I’m at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books next year?