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We infiltrated this weekend's LAT Festival of Books at UCLA, partly out of curiosity. We all know that people in L.A. don't read books. Was "books" being used at a euphemism for scripts? As it turns out, there were actual books, and people who seemed to enjoy books. We're not sure how the LAT afforded to import tens of thousands of bibliophile tourists (we think airlift). Either that or they lured the locals with an open casting call for the next Survivor.

Out of our element and wandering among the functionally literate, we discovered a couple of stalls that made us feel more comfortable and reoriented to Hollywood—one for the Scientologists (pushing Dianetics) and one for the Kaballah Centre. And we were hardly surprised to find Madonna's children's book, The English Roses, being hawked by the Kaballah Centre. If they're dependent on Madonna books sales to keep the KC liquid, keep an eye out for a Kaballah telethon in the near future.