A quick rundown of what some Identity Theory staffers are digging into this month...
Drew McNaughton: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, The Brightening Glance: Children and Imagination by Ellen Handler Spitz, The New Kings: Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass
Robert Birnbaum: The Song Before it is Sung by Justin Cartwright, Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee, The Guardians by Ana Castillo, The Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, The Optimists by Andrew Miller, Terminal by Andrew Vachss, Yalo by Elias Khoury, and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Also the McSweeney's 25 and the newest Open City.
Summer Block Kumar: I just came back from Christmas in the U.S. and brought back a big haul of new books. Right now I'm reading Denise Baker's Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures, and I just finished the Dale Peck collection Hatchet Jobs. And plenty of health food cookbooks as part of New Year's Resolutions 2008.
Alexandra Tursi: I got my art fix with Joe Andoe's sugar-high insane autobiography Jubilee City. I also recently enjoyed Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything and now I'm reading her latest, The Rest of Her Life. Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter, which I picked up at the Burlington Book Festival, is another that I'm slowly trudging through. On my night-table? The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Matt Borondy: Reading through the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook as part of my resolution to cook more and to make sure I'm being a healthy vegetarian. (The more I read about it, the less I can believe that I ever voluntarily ate meat.) I recently started Right Livelihoods: 3 Novellas by Rick Moody and Boy by Japanese film director Takeshi Kitano.