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Book Soup 8 results for Book Soup

Everything at Book Soup — including past events
Ellen O'Connell Whittet w/ Melissa Seley, "Book of Hours"
Coming Soon
19h away
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Ellen O'Connell Whittet w/ Melissa Seley, "Book of Hours"
Tomorrow · Oct 8 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Anyone who trained seriously at something as a child and then had to stop knows the particular grief of a body that was built for one purpose and then released from it. Whittet was a ballet dancer until an injury ended it, and she has spent two books now writing about what the discipline does to a person - the obedience, the pain tolerance taught as virtue, the way beauty gets extracted from young women who are not asked. The new one takes the title from the illuminated devotional books, which is the right frame: the daily practice, the hours kept whether or not anyone is watching. Seley joins her. The audience for this at a West Hollywood bookstore is reliably interesting - dancers, former dancers, and people who did gymnastics or music or anything else that demanded everything at twelve years old. Free, Thursday at seven, thirty chairs between shelves. Sit near the front; she reads quietly and does not reach for the microphone.

Lyndsay Faye in conversation with Leslie Klinger, "Raven"
Coming Soon
4 days away
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Lyndsay Faye in conversation with Leslie Klinger, "Raven"
In 5 days · Oct 12 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Some people never got over the first time a detective explained the solution and it turned out better than they had guessed. They are a whole secret society, and they have annotated everything. Tonight two of their high priests are in a bookstore on Sunset: Faye, who writes Victorian crime well enough that the Sherlockians accepted her as one of their own, and Klinger, who produced the annotated editions of Holmes and of Dracula that sit on those same people's shelves like scripture. Faye's new novel goes at Poe, which in this company is not a casual choice - it is picking up the other founding father of the form and asking whether the raven was ever really the point. If you hold opinions about which Holmes adaptation is defensible, you will find your people in this aisle. Book Soup runs its events crammed between the shelves on a weekday evening: thirty chairs, no stage, the author more or less standing in the true-crime section. Free, and the mystery shelf here is stocked by somebody who clearly reads it. There is another writer on that same small stage tomorrow, and the night after; the rest of the week is just as full.

Emily Yahr in conversation with Sarah Rodman, "Taylor Swift: The Debut Years"
Coming Soon
5 days away
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Emily Yahr in conversation with Sarah Rodman, "Taylor Swift: The Debut Years"
In 6 days · Oct 13 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

You can date your own life by whichever album you were ruining yourself to at the time, and for an enormous number of people the first one arrived with a banjo and a MySpace page attached. Before the stadiums there was a teenager in Nashville nobody was betting on, and the story of those years is messier and more interesting than the mythology built on top of it since. Yahr covered that stretch in real time for the Washington Post, which is the difference between a book about fame and a book by somebody who was in the room while it was not yet fame. Rodman sits across from her, and both are music journalists rather than fans with laptops, so expect actual reporting and some unflattering specifics. The crowd on the Sunset Strip will be the interesting part: people who have argued about track-five placement for fifteen years, standing in a narrow aisle thirty chairs deep. Free. Arrive early, because Book Soup's events fill from the front and the shelves do not move. Book Soup puts a writer in that room most nights of the week, and the Sunset Boulevard regulars treat the schedule like a subscription.

Abigail Savitch-Lew w/ Emdash, "Livonia Chow Mein"
Coming Soon
6 days away
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Abigail Savitch-Lew w/ Emdash, "Livonia Chow Mein"
In 7 days · Oct 14 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Every immigrant restaurant in America is also an argument about what America will eat, conducted quietly, over decades, by people nobody interviewed. Savitch-Lew's novel sits inside one of those places and takes the argument seriously - the family, the neighbourhood that changes around them, the dish that gets adjusted year after year until it belongs to somewhere new. She covered housing and neighbourhood politics as a reporter before this, and it shows in how carefully the block is built. The conversation partner is billed only as Emdash, which is the sort of thing that happens at a first-novel event and is part of why these nights are worth attending - nobody has decided yet what the book is, including the people presenting it. Free, Wednesday at seven, on the Sunset Strip, in a store where the staff still hand-write the recommendation cards. Thirty chairs. Eat before you come, or the book will make it worse.

Sally Hayden, "This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World"
Coming Soon
12 days away
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Sally Hayden, "This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World"
In 13 days · Oct 20 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Most foreign correspondents write the cruelty because the cruelty is the story, and then spend the rest of their lives quietly unable to explain why they kept going back. Hayden has written the other half of it. She is the reporter who broke open what was happening in the Libyan detention centres - the book that came out of it won most of the prizes there are - and this one is about the goodness she kept finding in places where the reporting said there should be none. It is not a consoling book and it is not a cynical one, which is a narrow line to walk. The evening is co-presented with the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles, which tells you something about who will be in the room: the Irish community here is large, old and almost invisible to the rest of the city, and it turns out for its own writers. Free, on the Sunset Strip, a Tuesday at seven. Thirty chairs between the shelves. Come if you have ever wondered what the people who go there actually carry home.

Cal Hoffman in conversation with Penelope Ann Miller, "Judah Can't Tell"
Coming Soon
13 days away
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Cal Hoffman in conversation with Penelope Ann Miller, "Judah Can't Tell"
In 14 days · Oct 21 Free (RSVP) Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

The secret you kept as a child to protect an adult is the one that follows you longest. You learn early how to manage a room, and then you are forty and still doing it without noticing. Hoffman's novel sits inside a boy holding something he has decided nobody can be told, and it gets the arithmetic of that right - the small lies required to keep the big one standing. Miller joins him in conversation, which is a genuinely odd and good pairing: she has spent a career playing people with something withheld, from Carlito's Way to The Artist, and she reads a scene differently than a critic would. Wednesday evening on the Strip, free, RSVP requested, in a store that has been selling books to people who work in the industry since 1975 and treats a first novel with the same seriousness as a memoir by somebody famous. The staff recommendation cards here are handwritten and worth reading on their own. Thirty chairs between the shelves and no microphone worth speaking of, so sit close.

Marcy Kelly w/ Colin Campbell, "The Porcelain Heart: A Mother's Memoir of Unexpected Loss"
Coming Soon
20 days away
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Marcy Kelly w/ Colin Campbell, "The Porcelain Heart: A Mother's Memoir of Unexpected Loss"
Oct 28, 2026 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Grief has a social problem: everyone wants to help for about three weeks, and then the casseroles stop and the thing itself is still there, permanent, and you learn to stop mentioning it at parties. Books like this exist for the part after the casseroles. Kelly has written about losing a child, and she is in conversation with Colin Campbell, who lost two and then wrote the book that a lot of bereaved parents in this city hand to each other. That pairing is the whole point and it is not accidental - these events function as something closer to a meeting than a reading, and the people who come are frequently carrying the same thing. It is not a comfortable evening and it is not meant to be. Free, Wednesday at seven, a narrow aisle in a bookstore on Sunset with thirty chairs in it. If you are the person everyone has stopped asking about, or you love someone who is, this is a room where you would not have to explain yourself.

Angelica Page discusses "Bountiful: Growing Up with Geraldine Page"
This Happened
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Angelica Page discusses "Bountiful: Growing Up with Geraldine Page"
Today · Oct 7 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

There is a particular loneliness in being the child of someone the world has decided was great. The world gets the performance; you get the person who came home afterwards. Geraldine Page won her Oscar on the eighth nomination and was, by most accounts, the finest American stage actor of her generation. Her daughter has written the book about what that was actually like from inside the house, and she is reading it aloud on the Sunset Strip on a Wednesday. Angelica Page is an actor herself, which means this will not be read like a memoir - it will be performed, and that changes what a bookstore reading can do. The theatre people in this town have been waiting for this one: the ones who can still recite the Trip to Bountiful monologue line by line and get upset about it. Book Soup's event space is a narrow aisle between shelves with perhaps thirty chairs wedged in, close enough that the reader can see your face while she does it. Free. The film and theatre section here is the deepest on this side of the hill; browse it while you wait.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.
Firehouse Swing Dance — Weekly Thursdays, San Diego
Weekly
332 Gathering
19h away
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Firehouse Swing Dance — Weekly Thursdays, San Diego
Every Thursday · Next Oct 8 Free 4255 Ruffin Rd Ste 200, San Diego,…

Most scenes depend on somebody deciding it is worth running this month. This one just shows up, every Thursday, and has since 1998. That reliability is the whole engineering trick. Because the floor is dependable, the good dancers keep coming; because the good dancers are there, the first-timers learn from people who are genuinely excellent; because first-timers keep arriving, the floor never calcifies into a closed club. Twenty-five years of that loop has made it the largest weekly swing dance in San Diego. Classes run 7 to 8 PM — beginner Lindy Hop, included with entry. Social dancing 8 to 11. Live bands when the calendar allows. The venue is a dedicated dance space, not a bar that shoves its tables aside at nine. On any given Thursday the room holds people in their first lesson and people who have been coming since the 1990s, and they dance with each other. 4255 Ruffin Rd Ste 200, San Diego. No partner required. No experience required. Dress code: whatever you can move in.

San Diego Swing Dance Club — Sunday Afternoons
Weekly
12 Gathering
3 days away
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San Diego Swing Dance Club — Sunday Afternoons
Every Sunday · Next Oct 11 Free 5035 Shawline St, San Diego, CA 92…

Nobody ever builds the good version of this for people who want their evening back. Everything worth dancing to starts at nine and ends when you have to be at work in six hours. So a roomful of dancers quietly moved the whole thing to Sunday afternoon and never looked back. West Coast and East Coast both welcome, four hours long, the early stretch leaving room for instruction and the rest given over to social dancing across a spread of tempos. The regulars have been at it for years, which sounds intimidating and is actually the entire point — the floor level is high enough that a newcomer learns more standing at the edge watching than in any beginner class. That gradient is how the club has sustained itself. No partner required. Lessons if you want them. And the building is air-conditioned, which in July is reason enough on its own. Come alone. You will not stay that way for long.

Pasadena Fall Festival 2026 — Victory Park
Coming Soon
16 days away
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Pasadena Fall Festival 2026 — Victory Park
Oct 24, 2026 Victory Park, 2575 Paloma St, Pasa…

The costume gets worn once. You spent three weeks on it, or forty dollars and a lot of regret on it, and then Halloween lands on a weeknight and the whole thing is over in ninety minutes of doorbells. This is the pressure valve for that — an afternoon in a park where the costume gets a second outing and an actual audience. Carnival games, a costume contest, free food, three hours on a Saturday in late October when the light in Pasadena goes gold early and every kid in the neighbourhood is already in character. It is small on purpose and it is free, which means the crowd is the people who live within a mile of Victory Park rather than anyone who bought a ticket. Worth knowing if you are bringing someone small: three to six in the afternoon means the whole thing happens in daylight and finishes before dinner, which is a very different proposition from a night event with a tired four-year-old. It is also the version of Halloween that works for the adults who wanted the season without the horror. Saturday, October 24, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Free, all ages. Victory Park, 2575 Paloma Street.

Comatose 20 Years Tour
Coming Soon
23 days away
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Comatose 20 Years Tour
Oct 31, 2026 YouTube Theater, 1011 Stadium Dr, …

Loud music about doubt is a category most people do not know exists, and for a lot of teenagers raised in church it was the only place the doubt was allowed out loud. Skillet's Comatose turns twenty, and the reason a full-album tour for it fills a theater is that the record functioned as permission - big guitars, strings, lyrics that were unmistakably about faith and unmistakably about not being sure. The audience is a mix nobody predicts: youth-group kids who are now in their thirties, metal fans who do not care about the theology, and a fair number of people who arrived through a wrestling entrance theme. Halloween night is a strange and perfect slot for it. If somebody you know has a complicated relationship with the music they grew up on, this is that conversation with a rhythm section. The 31st of October, an early seven o'clock downbeat.

Noche de Altares 2026 — Downtown Santa Ana
Coming Soon
20 Gathering
30 days away
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Noche de Altares 2026 — Downtown Santa Ana
Nov 7, 2026 4th Street between Ross and Broadw…

Grief in this country is supposed to be handled indoors, quietly, and then put away. Somewhere around year two you realise nobody is going to ask about your person again, and that the silence is worse than the crying was. Calle Cuatro closes for this, and for one night 4th Street becomes something a closed street almost never is: hundreds of altars built on the asphalt by families, students, neighbourhood groups and strangers, running block after block. Now in its twenty-third year, organised by El Centro Cultural de México, it stays deliberately community-built rather than programmed — the altars are made by whoever shows up to make one, which is why they look nothing alike and why some of them will stop you where you stand. The part outsiders never expect is how ordinary the conversation is. You will stand in front of a stranger's altar and they will tell you about their brother the way you would tell someone about a cousin at a wedding. Nobody lowers their voice. That is the whole technology of the thing. Saturday, November 7, noon to 9 p.m., 4th Street between Ross and Broadway, Santa Ana. Free.

Minty Boi Presents: Memphis LK in Los Angeles
Coming Soon
42 days away
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Minty Boi Presents: Memphis LK in Los Angeles
Nov 19 – Nov 20, 2026 El Cid, 4212 Sunset Blvd, Los Ange…

The best nights of your twenties were the ones you almost skipped. Someone sent you a name you did not recognise, the show started at ten on a work night, and you went anyway — and that is the one you still bring up. Memphis LK came up through Melbourne's club scene, which has spent a decade quietly producing some of the most interesting electronic music nobody in America has caught up to yet. Her records sit between club weight and actual songwriting, which is a harder trick than it sounds and the reason Australian dancefloors claimed her early. El Cid is a small Sunset Boulevard room with a stage built for flamenco in the 1920s, which gives a club night an odd, low-ceilinged intimacy — you are much closer to the booth than you expect to be. Ten p.m., eighteen and over, on a Thursday. That is not an accident; that is the promoter filtering for the people who actually want to be there. Thursday, November 19. El Cid, 4212 Sunset Boulevard. Presented by Minty Boi.

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