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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have one of our most articulate, surprising guests, Gary Steingard, whose new book, Lake Success,

has recently been published by Random House.

It's really a good book.

Thank you.

What it seems to be about is someone who's done what they all did, became a business major at Princeton, became a banker, a hedge fund manager, a billionaire, and lost track of what he once cared about and once loved, as we all do anyway.

But him especially, he's got an Indian wife whose skin smells, I think, of honeysuckle,

even her feet, he tells us, or he thinks.

Because the book begins in...

What's the name of that?

The Port Authority of New York, the bus station.

The bus station...

Which doesn't smell of honeysockle.

Which doesn't smell of honeysockle, which smells of feet.

Of feet.

Bad feet.

Bad feet.

...