Book Review

With his 30th novel, "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," the fascinating Walter Mosley not only returns to top form, but also extends once again the boundaries of the hard-boiled suspense genre in which his best work always has been rooted. No other writer of the 58-year-old Mosley's generation has done quite as much to keep the style of Hammett and Chandler from lapsing into mere mannerism. His popular Easy Rawlins mysteries ? probably his best books until now ? extended the genre's affinity for social realism and added a dimension of historical recovery in portraying African Americans' vital but bittersweet life in postwar Los Angeles.

"Bub Moose" Carol Wallace and Bill Wallace Bub Moose and his mom go to a valley where people live. Bub's mom tells him to stay away from people. Bub disobeys and goes to the people anyway. Will his mom find out? He also makes new friends. But when a bear is mad at his friends, can Bub stop him? Reviewed by Ryan, 11 Monterey Hills Elementary South Pasadena   "Mom's Best Friend" Sally Hobart Alexander Mom is blind. Mom's best friend is a dog. But her guide dog died and now she has to use a cane.

Almost two years after Suzanne Collins first burst onto bestseller lists with her dystopian young-adult thriller in which 24 children are dressed up in costumes and forced to compete to the death before a television audience, the final act of the "Hunger Games" trilogy is upon us. One minute after midnight Monday, "Mockingjay" will finally be available to readers, bringing a wrenching conclusion to the tale of a country in chaos and the 17-year-old protagonist...

Bring Up the Bodies A Novel Hilary Mantel Henry Holt: 432 pp., $28 Hilary Mantel's novel about the Tudor political puppet-master supremo Thomas Cromwell, "Wolf Hall," winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for fiction, was so richly packed with character and action that it was bound to burst its banks. Originally intended to take Cromwell through the four years that it took him to fall from the pinnacle of power (where we left him at the end of "Wolf Hall") to his own appointment with the executioner's ax, "Bring Up the Bodies" forms the middle volume of what is to be a trilogy.

1Q84 A Novel Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel Alfred A. Knopf: 926 pp., $30.50 Here's an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami's "1Q84" in as close to a single sitting as you can. It won't be easy - the novel clocks in at 926 pages and is often densely allusive, if readable throughout. Still, there's something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows.

Spending countless hours playing the video game Guitar Hero has fostered an illusion among many middle-age guys. It's not too late to be a guitar god. Then they discover something: There's a big difference between the colored plastic buttons on the guitar-shaped game control and the six strings of an actual guitar. But is the difference insurmountable? Gary Marcus set out to answer that question in "Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. " "I had a sabbatical coming up," says Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University.

There's something inspiring ? for old-fashioned booklovers ? about an early scene in Deborah Harkness' novel "A Discovery of Witches. " Magical creatures gather as a woman opens a legendary, lost book. Never mind that most of these creatures ? vampires, daemons, witches ? are plotting to get the book out of the hands of Diana, an American professor on a research trip in England. Menace aside, the scene is almost a homage to the printed word: There's far more magic in an old book than in an iPad no matter how good its backlighting is. "My fingers trembled when I loosened the small brass clasps?

From 1961 to 1966 (and ever since in reruns), "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was a jewel of comedy writing and acting, its loose-limbed namesake among the most likable stars ever on television. During that same brief period, Van Dyke played Bert in the movie "Mary Poppins," sidekick to Julie Andrews' practically perfect nanny. And it is Van Dyke's chimney sweep, looking out across the rooftops of London, who sums up the glory of the working stiff, a quiet moment and seditious sentiment that underpins "Mary Poppins": "What did I tell ya?

State of Wonder A Novel Ann Patchett Harper: 368 pp., $26.99 In Ann Patchett's new novel, "State of Wonder," an ordinary woman winds up in increasingly extraordinary circumstances. That woman is Marina Singh, a 42-year-old pharmaceutical researcher who travels to a remote part of the Amazon after receiving news that her colleague Anders has died there. The dutiful daughter of an American mother and an Indian father who divorced when she was young, Singh seems an unlikely choice for a jungle adventure.

Southern California residents — and most Americans outside the Northeast corridor — can only envy the speed, comfort and ease of rail travel that the French have, especially the speedy TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse). Ina Caro celebrates this mode of travel in "Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by Train," as she describes a series of trips to noteworthy places that are within a few hours of the capital by rail, allowing one to explore history and the countryside by day and return to Paris for dinner.

Looking for a stylish read? Here are some very fashionable books out this spring. "City of Style" (Harper Collins, $21.99) is an approachable field guide to L.A. style in all its incarnations, whether Laurel Canyon bohemians or Mexican American cholas, written by former Los Angeles Times Image section staff writer Melissa Magsaysay. "L.A. style is ever-changing and moving in a direction not solely dictated by what's happening on the runway. It blends the past with current trends and a lifestyle determined by the varied landscape, golden light and sense of freedom," Magsaysay writes in the introduction.

Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?" The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" he had just bought from a used-book store.

At Home on the Range A Cookbook Margaret Yardley Potter with a forward by her great granddaughter Elizabeth Gilbert McSweeney's Books: 256 pp., $24 You've probably never seen the fine art of bread-making broken down quite like this in a recipe: "Now relax. Sit down, light a cigarette, write a letter or make your own plans for the next fifteen minutes while the dough 'tightens up' as we bakers say. "Is your cigarette finished? Let's go. This is fun. " So writes Margaret Yardley Potter in her cookbook "At Home on the Range.

Nearly all the considerable attention generated by Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism" has focused on its final 81/2 pages. There, warning that the "hour is late," he calls for liberal supporters of Israeli democracy to engage in "direct action" against Israeli occupation of the territories occupied after the June 1967 war. To save Israel from what he sees as the corrosive effects of settlement in the West Bank, he says, American Jews should boycott...

Martin Sheen was a struggling 21-year-old stage actor when his first son Emilio was born. Sheen, seventh of 10 children in a family that knew him as Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez instead of his stage name, was more accustomed to having siblings than being a father. He felt more like a brother to Emilio, and that dynamic has defined their relationship to this day. In their new memoir, "Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son," the two examine the nature of their relationship and the ways it formed and has informed both of their lives.

The tale told by former Los Angeles Times reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in "The Hunt for KSM," the story of the pursuit, capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of9/11, at times so resembles something straight out of "24" or the Bourne movies that the authors have to keep reminding the reader that this is for real. On the one hand, "The Hunt for KSM" is a flat-out thriller. On the other, it lays out aspects of our factual contemporary world that are far more ambiguous, internecine and dangerous than anything Hollywood dare contemplate.

If it had not caught the attention of a handful of important readers, Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones" would most likely have quietly faded into obscurity; many worthy books do. Now, however, this novel about a poor Mississippi family in the weeks leading up to 2005's Hurricane Katrina has a prominent place in bookstores and boasts the gold medallion that comes with winning the 2011 National Book Award. Book awards are marvelously idiosyncratic. While major film and music awards are based on the votes of a large group - meaning there is a general consensus or popularity - book awards are frequently selected by just a few people.

The more you know about Emma Donoghue's ninth novel, "Room," the harder it is to assess. That's a tricky issue, since "Room" is one of the hot books of the moment: shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, with coverage everywhere. If you've heard about it, you know the setup: The novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy named Jack, who was born and has spent his entire life in a room (a fortified garden shed, really) with his mother, imprisoned by the man who kidnapped her seven years before.

The Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson Robert Caro Alfred A. Knopf: 736 pp., $35 "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume in Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, encompasses the period of LBJ's deepest humiliation and his greatest accomplishment. It is a searing account of ambition derailed by personal demons in Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. It is a painful depiction of "greatness comically humbled" when Johnson gave up his unbridled authority as Senate majority leader to becomeJohn F. Kennedy's disdained vice president.

A bio on NPR's website of its commentator Frank Deford notes that the magazine GQ christened him, quite simply, "the world's greatest sportswriter. " (Is he?) A story on ESPN's companion website, Grantland, referred to Deford as "a writer who had achieved legendary status by the age of 50. " (Did he?) OK. Maybe he is, and maybe he did. Wikipedia's entry for Sports Illustrated - if no one overnight has deleted it - alludes to an editor at that magazine who helped "launch the careers of such legendary writers as Frank Deford.