Novelist Darin Strauss has no problem with his books being made into movies—in fact, he and actor Gary Oldman are even working on a screenplay for Chang and Eng, the author's 2000 debut about Siamese twins. But a recent review of his new novel, More Than It Hurts You, went too far, in Strauss' opinion, when it recommended readers skip the bound version and catch it on, of all networks, Lifetime. "That really pissed me off," Strauss told Radar at a reading at New York University Monday night. "It was dismissive. I'm compared to [John] Updike in other reviews, so I was hoping for something more ambitious." Are you listening A&E?

Which isn't to say the novel's without a Lifetime-ish story line. In the book, a doctor turns a family in to child protective services because she thinks the mother is harming the baby to get attention, a classic Munchausen by proxy diagnosis. But this being a novel of the acclaimed variety—replete with sentences like: "However."—the doctor is black, the parents are Jewish, and blurbs say the book manages to comment on race, gender, and the sorry state of the media.

At the reading, Strauss was joined by buddies John Hodgman, his former literary agent, and songwriter Jonathan Coulton. First, Strauss read a chapter "about a single black mother going on a blind date. So it's autobiographical," he joked. Then Hodgman—the PC to Justin Long's Mac in Apple commercials—read from his forthcoming book, More Information Than You Require. "Writing the book was tiresome," Hodgman told the crowd of good-looking, four-eyed grad students. "Now that I'm on television, I don't think I'll be doing that again."

No longer an agent but still very much a cheerleader, Hodgman thinks writing about contemporary Long Island presented native son Strauss with his greatest challenge yet. "The myth of writing is that it's easy to write what you know and where you're from. Darin didn't live in the 19th century. He was only briefly a conjoined twin," Hodgman deadpanned to Radar, alluding to Strauss's previous, more historical efforts.

Tonight Strauss will be reading in Los Angeles, which may be cause for concern. "Every reading I've done in L.A. has been bad," he said. "L.A. is not a good reading town." Maybe he can get Oldman to show up—if there's nothing good on cable.