Maybe it started with Annie Hall, in which Woody Allen said that the only cultural advantage to living in Los Angeles instead of New York was that you can turn right on red. Or maybe it was when n+1 said all those things about McSweeney's. Or maybe—this one's unlikely—it started with that mean song by Death Cab For Cutie: You can't swim in a town this shallow / You will most assuredly drown tomorrow. Point is, the West Coast set is tired of everyone thinking that New York is the only American city where people read. Are they kidding?

The uproar comes in the wake of a report in LAObserved saying that the L.A. Times' is planning to shrink their book review, which has been a stand-alone section for 30 years, and fold it into a 12-page opinion supplement that comes out on Saturdays as a tabloid. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the news "set readers on edge."

An article in the Wall Street Journal said the change was a sign of things to come—and that the only book review in the country that will not be affected is the one that comes in the New York Times. The other ones—published by the Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Diego Union-Tribune—are expected to suffer because publishing houses are spending their promotional dollars on prominent display shelves at Barnes & Noble instead of ad space.

So the Westerners are mad. New York may be the publishing capital of the world, they say, but that doesn't mean the great state of California is illiterate. No, really!

Steve Wasserman, the editor of the LAT Book Review from 1996 to 2005, told the Chronicle that, "Despite all the seductions of the 'infotainment industrial complex,' more people are reading and buying books, and more bookstores are thriving in Los Angeles, than ever before," The Chronicle identifies Wasserman as a "force behind the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books," which they eagerly say "attracts up to 150,000 people" every April. "Banishment of the book review to the Saturday ghetto," he says, "certainly is evidence of a retreat, and a considerable diminishment of its importance."

Apparently there are some book clubs in the Midwest too. Jim Warren, the managing editor for features at the Chicago Tribune (owned by the Tribune Co., obviously, who also own the LAT), told the Wall Street Journal that he's vexed by the fact that so many "New York-based publishers prefer to advertise in the New York Times Book Review, while ignoring regional reading communities."

It is a nice idea, these reading communities.