Gerald Everett Jones Does Snapshot Book Reviews on KRLA Radio and Podcast

January 30, 2015 - Author Gerald Everett Jones, who is perhaps best known for his humorous Rollo Hemphill Misadventures novels, is now doing weekly book reviews on the radio. His two-minute Boychik Lit "snapshot reviews" air every Saturday night on The Mark Isler Show, KRLA 870 AM in Los Angeles. Mark's show runs from 9 – 11 p.m. Pacific Time, and Gerald's book reviews typically air around 9:30. Then, the following day, the reviews are posted in the Boychik Lit podcast feed on SoundCloud, FeedBurner, and iTunes. Text and MP3 clips of all the reviews are available on Gerald's blog BoychikLit.com.

During its House Party segment from 10 – 11 p.m., The Mark Isler Show is a current-events roundtable during which Mark hosts invited guests, who often represent widely different positions on the political spectrum. In addition to his book reviews, Gerald is a recurring House Party commentator. Mark and perhaps the majority of his listeners tend to be conservative on most issues, as is the station and its network, Salem Communications. However, Gerald thinks of himself as a progressive Democrat. "It's a testament to Mark's fair-mindedness that he lets me on the show at all," the author quips. "But even if at times they're all laughing at me, that's fine, too. I can only hope my humorous novels are half as entertaining as my gaffes on live air."

Gerald's novels include Mr. Ballpoint (fictionalized history of the wacky Pen Wars of 1945), Christmas Karma (an homage to Anne Tyler, narrated by an angel with a weird sense of humor), and The Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill (three comic novels about an impudent young man on the make who fails continuously upward). The author's nonfiction business title How to Lie with Charts is a "how-not-to" primer on graphic design and business math. That popular book, selling well for two decades, has been adopted for courses at colleges such as Empire State and Georgetown.

The Boychik Lit book review segments are short, about the same length as Michael Medved's movie reviews, also heard on KRLA. Gerald explains, "A difference in approach is that I'm not giving ratings or awarding stars. If I talk about a book, I think it deserves attention. I'm trying to answer the question, 'What should I read next and why?' I'm also not focusing primarily on new releases or emerging writers. The book may have appeared in the last year or the last century, fiction or nonfiction. My own novels so far have been mostly male-oriented comic fiction, and I do admit that relationship issues and sexual politics often figure into my commentaries."

Gerald's coined term boychik lit puns, of course, on the literary genre chick lit, which is hugely popular with mostly female audiences. Boychik is a Yiddish term for a teenage male with more chutzpah than brains. "The main character is a heedless young man on the make," the author says. "But the audience is not just young men. It's also mature men who want to think about what it was like to be young and desperate, as well as women of any age who can't help laughing at male foolishness."

Indeed, Facebook reports that a surprising 53 percent of the fans of the page "Gerald Everett Jones – Author" are young women ages 13 – 18!

Gerald's next public appearance will be Sunday, February 8, 2 – 4 p.m. PT at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena at an event sponsored by the Independent Writers of Southern California. He'll be reading from his forthcoming novel, Bonfire of the Vanderbilts, about an art scandal in Paris in the 1890s. "This one isn't a comedy," Gerald hints, "unless we're talking about the human comedy. It's about what we think we know about history and about ourselves. Faced with new facts, we too often find our memories are unreliable."