"what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

For most of the hours I'm awake in a day, I'm reading. But my book reading has been progressing in jumps and spurts, not at all smoothly.

The book I turn to on an almost daily basis is called The Girl with The Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market by Lindsay Pollock. It's a pretty big book (the back cover claims 464 pages). The premise is that Halpert almost single-handedly created an interest among buyers in American modern art. Before her, American artists were a joke. But, through her marketing prowess and the conviction that American artists had a lot to offer the world, her pioneering efforts paid off. I'm doing a full review for Bookslut, but suffice it to say here that this book is a must read for anyone interested in American modern art.

I'm also reading Golem Song by Marc Estrin. I should first note that I'm reading this book in my capacity as Unbridled Books' web marketer. And perhaps also because I'm drawn to Jewish books (I have a BA in Jewish Studies and MA in Jewish History). And books that take place in New York. This book, though filled with lots of funny moments, is actually a difficult read. Maybe because I'm young and/or not nearly as smart as Estrin, I just don't get some of the references. There are parts of the book that remind me of A Confederacy of Dunces, but I didn't like that book much and I do like Golem Song. In other words, Golem Song is difficult but rewarding.

The third book I'm reading (and it's one that's already been published) is Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. All the GTD geeks at Lifehacker and 43 Folders finally got to me, and so I broke down and bought the book. I made the mistake of trying to read this book aloud to my husband, who will not take advice from anyone on anything, so it's been slow going. The worst part is that Allen (whose photo is annoyingly on the cover) gives me that, "I know you're not reading my book" look every time I walk by.

Because I work in publishing and try, to some extent, to keep up with new books, it can be hard to find the time to read classics. So, I subscribed (for free) to DailyLit, which sends brief, sequential sections of public domain books via email. I set which book and how often, and today I read the penultimate section of Alice by Lewis Carroll. I recently purchased an old copy of The Annotated Alice and wanted to read the original prior to tackling the annotated version. I'm trying to understand what it is about Alice that so captivates Alberto Manguel.

Books in my queue: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice by Allen Ginsburg, and By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art by Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro (editors).

- Rachel J. K. Grace

The Booker Prize is Due to be Announced Today! and What I'm Reading

Anticipation's running high, at least in the literary-related blogging community, as to which book will wind up winning the ManBooker Prize for 2006. My own money is still on Kate Grenville, for The Secret River, but I've been hearing an awful lot of buzz that Sarah Waters may pull ahead with her The Night Watch. Personally, I'd say these two are both so incredibly talented it wouldn't surprise me if either won. I'm just wondering if there'll be an upset, and an unexpected dark horse candidate will win the prize. We shall see.

I haven't completed a whole lot this week, partly because my attention was partly diverted due to the beginning of the month new periodical publications. The Oxford American has its music issue out, for one thing, and that can really turn a girl's head. That's not to mention new issues of The Common Reader, The American Scholar and of course the new New York Review of Books in which Joan Didion has a go at Dick Cheney. These all really do cut into the reading time.

Still, I did manage to squeeze in Nora Ephron's absolutely wonderful I Feel Bad About My Neck, which I'd highly recommend. It's a great example of how to balance the serious with the comic, and it's about as entertaining as a book of essays gets.

I also read the fourth installment in a mystery series written by David J. Walker, a local Chicago-area writer. All the Dead Fathers entirely gripped me for an evening. I couldn't put the thing down 'til I'd finished it. Definitely a great thriller, and also timely as it deals with the issue of sexual abuses committed by priests, and one woman who set about eliminating these men in a rather gruesome manner.

Ruth Rendell's The Tree of Hands rounded out my completed reading this week. This is one of her older books, and every bit as psychologically disturbing as her best books. She takes a mother's worst nightmare, the unexpected loss of an only child, and adds in a disturbed grandmother who seeks to replace the lost grandchild, with absolutely heart-pounding results. Great stuff.

Ongoing reading that may or may not make next week's completed list includes: Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates, Harm Done by Ruth Rendell, and a bio about Emma Hamilton. But, as with the Bookers, I wouldn't discount the idea of a dark horse (or two) usurping the lot.

- Lisa Guidarini

Even More Staff Reading

Robert Birnbaum: I'm reading the forthcoming Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth, new Ward Just - Forgetfullness, newest Janet Fitch - Paint it Black, The Blind Side - Michael Lewis, The Return of The Player - Michael Tolkin, Half go a Yellow Moon by Chimmananda Ngozi Adichie, and thinking about whether I want to read Cormac McCarthy's new grim post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

Also Edwidge Danticat's piece on torture at the Washington Post, James Hynes on the Wire at Salon, Matt Taibi on 9/11 in Rolling Stone, Lousi Menand on Charles Frazier in the New Yorker (these are all accessible on line and I urge you to have a look at them).

Eric Lagergren: To follow RB (humbly): I just finished Set This House In Order (A Romance of Souls) by Matt Ruff; close to finishing Saturday by Ian McEwan; reading The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison (thanks to RB and Elizabeth Benedict discussing books in his interview); the Remnick article on Clinton in the New Yorker (a bit about it in huffingtonpost; umm... still wading through The Majors by John Feinstein when the golf jones hits.

Will probably move on soon to reading Missing Mom by JC Oates.

Was just out in Portland on my honeymoon and got stuck in Powell's for the day. I didn't walk away with too many books, however. Self-control wasn't really the issue--it was lack of suitcase space, no desire to ship extra stuff home, and also the advent of this amazing new tool called the Internet that allows me to order those same books online! Imagine.

Drew McNaughton: I read Saturday by McEwan recently too, and from a purely professional review stance; it sucked. But you know, people liked it, whatever. I did like The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, by Amy whats-her-name. I am reading old National Geographics right now. They're old.

Summer Block: I just finished Philip Roth's Everyman, and now I'm on The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, Lawrence Wechsler's Everything That Rises, and a year of Martha Stewart Weddings back issues.

Jesslyn Roebuck: I'm reading sex, drugs and cocoa puffs by Chuck Klosterman. I recently read Killing Yourself to Live and enjoyed it. After reading these books, I feel humbled with regards to my pop culture knowledge basically meaning that I know nothing about pop culture. I also recently read Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It was definitely one of the best books I've read in a while.

Andrew Whitacre: In Search of the Craic, by Colin Irwin, has been my bus book for a couple of months now and consistently causes me to miss my stop, which, you know, thank god I only take the bus on days it rains or else I'd be in big trouble at work. Irwin's a British music writer obsessed with Irish music--the Dubliners, Christy Moore, Planxty, the Pogues--and the book covers his extended romp from county to county, town to town, bar to bar, in western Ireland. Ostensibly a search for the famed fiddler Tommy Peoples, In Search of the Craic is Irwin's excuse to rework over and over again a formula of arrive/get trashed/listen to great music/provide background on the music/pass out, to great effect. His writing style is breathless, often works itself out in great big circles, and reflects his love of Irish music well.

Writers on Writers, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, just arrived in my mailbox as a supplement to the regular VQR, which asked authors to write short stories featuring, by name, other authors. I started the collection yesterday: Joyce Carol Oates has the first story, and her author of choice was Emily Dickinson. Or, actually, a robot replicant of Emily Dickinson, which was purchased by a lonely couple. Early on you kinda saw where the story was headed, but it was still terribly entertaining, what with the wife slipping fragments of her own mediocre poetry into the robot's apron in the hopes that Emily Dickinson would do something with it. Other writers on writers: Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick, Brock Clark on Mario Puzo, and (DJ) Steve Almond on James Frey.

Christian Bauman: Screamer of the week is The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless, a collection edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad. This altogether tasty book includes the essay "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will shop the earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption" by my friend Matthew Walker. Matt was once my editor at Simon & Schuster/Touchstone; he's since dropped out to get his PhD in philosophy from Yale. More important, he's from Pittsburgh, not far from the mall where the original Dawn of the Dead was filmed. Matt is a supremely cool person for many, many reasons, but these two reasons alone (buying my first novel and loving zombies) make him el supremo in my book. He's also co-author of the very funny book Tipsy in Madras.

I'm also re-reading Sleazoid Express this week, a book Matt edited whilst ensconced at S&S. It's about the old grind house theaters on 42nd Street, and the crazy freaks who made the movies. Fantastic book.

Mara Naselli: I just read a great little piece in the second issue of A Public Space, the new magazine edited by Brigid Hughes. "Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber" by Amy Leach is a wonderful mix of science and art. Strangely enough, themes of science and art have appeared on my desk three times this month. Using science to rethink artistic renderings of things like memory, transformation, and who knows what else seems to be creating little tremors in the staid halls of academic publishing. I also started rereading Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm, which reads as though I never read it before--it does philosophy in a way philosophy can't. And then a bit back there was Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas.

Matt Borondy: Read an article about the Buddhist practice of Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo in the latest Tricycle. Finished up The Littlest Hitler by Ryan Boudinot, another wonderfully mind-blowing story collection (been really lucky with those this year). A bit entranced by Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers, from Princeton Architectural Press (pretty much my new favorite publisher).

As Summer Turns Into Fall...

October?! Surely you jest. I turned my back for what seemed just a few days and weeks slipped by. Something is not right.

What on earth have I been reading? Well, I haven't finished that much but drat if I haven't been reading at all. I have been dipping into Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them, for one thing. It's a brilliant study in the sort of "deep reading" I hardly ever give myself the luxury of doing. I'm always reading in fast-forward, ADD mode, seldom stopping to smell the metaphors. Tisk, tisk, says Francine Prose. You'll never learn anything about an author's craft that way.

I know, I know, she's right. It's just hard carving out that kind of time. I can't even always manage to scrape together enough time to cook something that takes longer than the popcorn cycle in the microwave, much less the time required to deconstruct a major work of literature. But I do agree with her in principle.

Around this time of year I always like to read something creepy. Ruth Rendell's always dependable for these sorts of books, and her The Tree of Hands did not disappoint. This one's about a young single mother who suddenly loses her child to a disease that's so common it must be rare, indeed, to actually have a child die from it. Add to that upset her off-kilter mother, who goes out in search of something to make her daughter feel better and comes back with a toy she just shouldn't be playing with. Throw in a few other desperate characters and you have another winner from Ruth Rendell.

What I'm reading now, the quick recap (with random exclamations):

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (classic!)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by RL Stevenson (creepy!)
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron (hilarious!)

There's probably more, but the microwave's beeping. Until next time.

- Lisa Guidarini