Actually it's just one book, the new novel set in Los Angeles by fabulist James Frey. But look at how differently it's being read. LAT Book Editor David Ulin holds nothing back: "Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read....an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining." Also this: "Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life." Ulin does give Frey credit for chutzpah, and notes that Harper Collins reportedly paid a million and a half dollars and that the book is a bestseller on Amazon. In the June issue of Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz gives Frey a much warmer welcome back: "...a sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams." I'll take Ulin's word for it — even if Peretz hadn't met and apparently befriended Frey while trying to get in the Manhattan pre-school where he was a parent.

* East Coast bias?: Janet Maslin in the NYT also likes it, a lot: "He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time."

Also from VF: Angeleno-turned-DC power couple DeeDee Myers and Todd Purdum dissect the Democratic presidential race on video at the Vanity Fair website. The series is called Capital Conversation.

Photo: James Frey, Vroman's Bookstore via LAT