Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

This show represents a return home of sorts.

Louis B. Jones is a writer, and he's written a book, Radiance, which features a character

that he wrote about early on. He is a physicist. Now he's an older physicist, a physicist,

a physicist to whom it doesn't all make sense anymore. He knew physics, but not the new physics. Then he learned

the new physics, but not the new new physics. And like many of us as we get older, he's kind

of wondering where he fits in. He's a parent. He's bringing his daughter to Los Angeles where

to combat a lack of self-esteem. He's taken her for a

celebrity weekend where it will be pretended that she is a rock star. She'll get to sing,

dance, have videotapes made of her, right in a stretch limo, everything in order for her to go

back and be able to look back on that day when she was given the gift of selfhood.

Now, Louis B. Jones, as you can guess, is something of a satirist, but famously he is a satirist whose soul is sweet.

He wants to rend but not tear apart.

And it's a wonderful thing to read a comic novel with such a lyrical vocabulary.

Louis B. Jones, the book is Radiance, and it's published by Counterpoint.

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