When Sonny Bravo Met Holden Caulfield

Spurred by what one critic said of Dagoberto Gilb's The Flowers (that its narrator Sonny Bravo could be Holden Caulfield), I read The Flowers then reread Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The narrators do share the word "phony," it's true. Rather than interchange them, I'd like to see them meet.

Finished a novel that debuted in 2005, The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau. Lyrical and exacting, the author hits a lot of nerves, one that especially twangs: growing up gray in a black and white United States.

In the middle of Voltaire's Candide. What took me so long? It's hilarious. No wonder it's been around since 1759.

On my to-do list: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. And another by authors that hail from or otherwise beholden to the Motor City: Detroit Noir, an anthology of edited by E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking.

Following that will be Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, one of those books that hasn't stopped talking since it was released.

Next time, a slew of women and one man.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Rereading Steinbeck

I'm rereading everything Steinbeck for my 11th grade English class (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath).

For fun I've got Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs and Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (I adore her).

-Sarah Presite, assistant fiction editor

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished reading, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. On deck is Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

-Jesslyn Roebuck, contributing editor

How to Rig an Election

For this fiction editor, no fiction lately! I recently finished How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, am in the middle of Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind, and have Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions waiting on my nightstand after reading a great review of it in the MIT Technology Review.

I do have one novel in the queue: Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. My fiancee and I were visiting the mystery book store--well, a house more than a store--up the street from us, and I pulled Mystic River off the shelf to find it was a whopping $35. Turns out the shop's owner, Kate, had Lehane autograph it.

-Andrew Whitacre, fiction editor

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

I just finished reading Jason Brown's collection of short stories, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, David Bornstein's How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, and Daniel Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder.

-Sherry Saturno, interviews editor

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

James Warner: I just read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, and Christine Falls by John Banville (writing under a mysterious pseudonym). I'm now engrossed in Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire--not very close to me politically, that guy, but I can forgive anything of someone who writes that kind of prose.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

The Magus (still)

I'm just finishing The Magus, still, I've been on that one for a while. But as soon as I started reading it, it immediately fell into my Top 5 list. And I always take my time with those. Remembrance of Things Past, Of Human Bondage, Lolita.
I'm going to be traveling most of this month, so I need to pick some smaller books. I'm going to bring The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, and Notes From Underground because I've never read it.

-Anna-Lynne Williams, music editor

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I just finished rereading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is pretty great but I don't think matches up to some of his subsequent books. Before that was South of the Border, West of the Sun (also by Murakami), and before that was a cool little comic book called Tales of Woodsman Pete, by Lilli Carre. This morning on the train I started rereading Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is just too good to be true. I'm hoping after that to start the Yiddish Policeman book, but who knows.

-Sumanth Prabhaker, assistant fiction editor