Book reading by flashlight

Last night's winds knocked out the power at Book Soup for the first half hour or so of Jesse Katz's launch party for The Opposite Field, his new memoir about parenting and growing up pegged to his time as commissioner of the Monterey Park Little League, where his son played. The launch has inspired Katz, a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine, to start blogging. In one of the posts he talks about when he and best-selling author Michael Connelly were cops reporters in the old L.A. Times local sections — "he in the San Fernando Valley, me in the San Gabriel, and from that shared history, and the common trials inherent in it, perhaps I can say that a certain solidarity was born." The book is getting some good early media atttion: Katz was on KTLA's morning show this week, on NPR's Only a Game over the weekend, and wrote a piece for the new Huffington Post book section. His first official event east of the river is Nov. 7 at Vroman's in Pasadena.

Photo: Forest Casey