Hint to recent grads or those about to graduate soon: While your well-intentioned friends and family will inevitably give you books like Oh, the Places You'll Go! and How to Win Friends to ready you for the real world, you might want to add Megan Hustad’s How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work to your summer reading. Hustad pored over hundreds of years of “success literature” to compile the best......

We don’t know about you, but Sunday mornings are about sleeping in, getting breakfast late, then scurrying back home to read the LA Times from the comfort of your unmade bed. When you read the Times on Sunday, there are many things you get – Comics, Current, Parade, West. Those trifles we could take or leave. Really. What gets us going is the blessed, blessed Book Review section. We have come to count on......

Spring is less than 7 days away. What better way to greet the new season's arrival than to focus on the Fallen Fruit Project, which distributes maps of places where people can pick free fruit throughout Los Angeles. The collective also hosts foraging sorties. You can check their website for info on upcoming sorties and maps. Dave Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young started the organization as an art project for "The Journal of Aesthetics......

Last night author Paul Auster (right) sat down with LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin at the Writers Bloc reading series. They talked a lot about process — after having a cup of tea, Auster goes to an apartment to write, picking up a tuna sandwich along the way — that writing is a lot of work and actually quite boring. Aspiring authors love to hear about how successful writers write, and the......

Mark Sarvas has championed local reading series, excoriated the LA Times Book Review, and tirelessly blogged about all things literary on his site The Elegant Variation. With its smart writing, frequent updates and splashes of wicked humor, it has become required daily reading — for both Angelenos and folks in the Big Established Publishing World in NY. He is also a founding member of the LitBlog Co-Op (more about that below), which announced its latest......

FRIDAY • John Vanderslice, Charles Bissel (of The Wrens) and Thee More Shallows take the stage at the Knitting Factory at 8 PM. Tickets are $10 advance, $12 day of. • KCRW presents Nikka Costa and Driveblind at The Roxy tonight at 9 PM. Tickets are $23. • In conjunction with Vroman's Bookstore, Joan Didion will appear at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid in Pasadena, at 7 PM to discussion her new memoir,......

LA eggheads gather at the REDCAT tonight at 8:30 PM to ponder a panel on "What Makes a Magazine Great," which will ask guest to explore the "special alchemy when the right editor confronts the zeitgeist to create a magazine that speaks to and reflects the moment." Guests include Gil Maurer, former president of Hearst Magazines and winner of the Henry Johnson Fisher award for distinguished service to the magazine industry; Eric Nakamura and......

Over at the TEV book blog, Mark Sarvas spreads the rumor from Publishers Weekly that Steve Wasserman, the Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, may be leaving. Sarvas pretty much echos our feelings about Wasserman's editorship of the section. He writes: Now, since Wasserman's apparently only "likely leaving", we'd like to urge Wasserman in the strongest possible terms to follow your impulses and skeddadle. We'll even help you pack your books. Really, the door's......

Influential intellectual and author Susan Sontag died today at 71. Steve Wasserman, Los Angeles Times Book Review Editor, published her obituary in today's issue of the Times. The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of "Notes on Camp," written for Partisan Review and included in "Against Interpretation," her first collection of essays, published two years later. Sontag died at Memorial......

Anyone can tell you what's wrong with Los Angeles and its surrounding areas, but few can clearly articulate what's right, magical and true about this place as well as Lawrence Weschler does in his 1998 New Yorker essay, "LA Glows," which is included in Weschler's latest collection of New Yorker articles, Vermeer in Bosnia. That essay inspired many Angelenos, including local writer Jim Ruland, who interviews Weschler in the "The Golden West" issue of......

LA Observed shares the frustrations of blogger Lee Watters, as he struggles with the inoperable Calendar Live registration system. A VERY BRAVE LA Times.com web developer wades into the LA Observed comments section, faces readers' wrath and vents a few frustrations of his own. Who says Angelenos don't have real conversations? Speaking of frustration with Calendar Live, Dan Green gets in a dig at the Los Angeles Times in his The Reading Experience: A......