Jenny Slate and Colin Hanks Share Drinks, Stories at Library Benefit

“The bartenders really did it, so...” Jenny Slate steadied herself at the podium in the ballroom of Los Angeles’ Line hotel to read a portion of James M. Cain’s classic noir novel Double Indemnity. The room was full of what the Los Angeles Library Foundation calls its “Young Literati”: patrons in their 20s, 30s and 40s who gathered on Saturday night for the Seventh Annual Toast to hear stars like Slate, Gillian Jacobs, Jason Reitman and Colin Hanks read passages by some of their favorite L.A. authors. Next up after Slate was Colin Hanks, who led with the quip, “Old Fashioneds and public reading. What could possibly go wrong?” before doing more than adequate justice to Jerry Stahl’s dark comic essay “Inside Ms. Los Angeles.” Gillian Jacobs followed with a quirkily sweet chapter from the Y.A. novel Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block and Ali Shaheed Muhammed of A Tribe Called Quest warned the crowd he was just a “Crooklynite” looking to lighten their pocketbooks before reading a touching poem about L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley called "Enter the Year of the Dragon, 2000" by Russell Charles Leong.