Jonah Keri

Jonah Keri is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's "Page 2" and the editor and co-author of Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Book I'm reading now: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Because I wear two hats as both a sportswriter (primarily for ESPN.com, with occasional contributions to Salon.com, YESNetwork.com and other sites) and a stock market writer (Investor's Business Daily), I need to constantly stay up to date on the latest sports and business books. That doesn't leave much time for novels, so it can take me a while to get to some books, even hugely popular ones like The Kite Runner.

With that said, I'm loving it. The subject matter is almost irrelevant. What draws you in is the rich, yet crisp writing, which immediately sucks you into the narrative and the characters' lives. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through it, but find myself sneaking away from work to dive back into the story. If you work from home like I do, do not read this book. It will mess with your productivity.

Book I recently enjoyed: The Cheater's Guide to Baseball by Derek Zumsteg. If you're a big fan of the game and a big baseball historian, you'll love this book. But it's an excellent read even if you're not. The stories detailing how players, managers, groundskeepers and other baseball personnel use underhanded, often illegal tactics to gain an edge on the other team are almost unbelievable. Teams stealing signs by sticking someone inside a manually-operated scoreboard in the outfield, pitchers loading up balls with all manner of foreign substances, grounds crews watering down the dirt around first base to slow down opposing base stealers -- all the best cheating stories are in here, in some cases with how-tos for the reader. It's also rare to see an author combine this much serious research with such a light-hearted, irreverent tone. A great, breezy read.

[Full disclosure -- Derek is a friend of mine, and I made some very minor contributions to the project (though I don't see a dime, regardless of how many copies get sold).]

Keri recently penned a feature for Salon.com, "The 18 best Jewish ballplayers of all time."

Visit Jonah Keri's website for more links to his work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Bazelon

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

A few days ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Warm Springs, by Susan Richards Shreve. It’s a memoir about the two years she spent at a recuperation facility for children with polio established in Georgia by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1920s. The waters at this Georgia spot were supposed to have healing qualities, and Shreve (a Washington, DC, writer whom I know) uses the history of FDR’s haven, as she calls it, to vividly evoke the days of polio fear and the president’s relationship to his illness and paralysis.

The history is useful and well done, but Shreve is sharpest and most affecting when she turns her analytical skills on herself. In particular, she deftly unwinds her feelings about her mother. Their relationship was a close one. And yet Shreve’s mother left her daughter at Warm Springs on her own for the better part of two years, when she was between the ages of 11 and 13. Even after Shreve had major surgery, her mother came for only a few days. As Shreve remembers it, she put up a brave front throughout, telling her mother that she was perfectly happy staying at Warm Springs by herself for Thanksgiving, for example. Yet as an adult, Shreve probes her mother’s choices and her own apparent nonchalance. And she shows herself acting out in a variety of ways as she casted about for close connections. In the end her efforts cause disaster, when her friendship with a boy called Joey Buckley ends in a wheelchair race in which Joey breaks both his legs. Shreve loses her place at Warm Springs and gains a ticket home. And we gain this sharp account of a childhood broken, interrupted, and yet also bravely restored.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov is the work of a novelist who is confident in her craft, the sort of confidence that often takes years of writing books and accumulating wisdom to acquire. In fact, it’s a first novel by a 30-something writer, Olga Grushin (another D.C. writer whom I’ve met). Grushin emigrated from Russia to the United States for college and has been here ever since. But for this book she reached back to her homeland the effect of the glasnost of her youth. Her protagonist, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, was once a rebel artist but traded his promise for the life of a career apparatchik. Now the regime is crumbling and he has to face up to the limitations and damage of his own choices. Grushin jumps back and forth from past to present, marking most of the transitions with a shift from the first to third person that could be a gimmick but is instead fluid and moving. She is especially good at rendering Sukhanov’s relationship with his wife. I found the book mesmerizing — the best novel I read this year — and it’s given me a new prism through which to view all things Russian.

After I read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty last year, I picked up E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, to which Smith pays tribute. And that got me started on a Forster tour that just ended with Maurice, his book about homosexual love. Published in 1971, nearly 60 years after it was written, the novel is poignant and wistful, and yet Foster never loses his mordant sensibility. He’s a master, and while I sort of can’t believe I didn’t discover him a long time ago, it’s a great pleasure to be immersed in the complete works now.

In addition to her work in Slate, Emily Bazelon's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, Legal Affairs, and other publications. She has worked as a freelance journalist in Israel and as a reporter in California's Bay Area. She graduated from Yale Law School and worked as a law clerk for Judge Kermit Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryant Simon

Bryant Simon is a history professor and the director of American Studies at Temple University. His most recent book is Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I have had a sort of strange and assorted mix of books in my Timbuk2 bag and on my nightstand over the last couple of weeks. I just finished Phoebe Kropp’s California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. This book starts with a question – where did all those red brick Spanish title dotting the landscape of Southern California come from? Kropp answers this with a close – really close and really imaginative – reading of the buildings, streets, literature, and maps of California from the first half of the last century.

Last week, I started reading about another Californian – actually I took it on the plane on a trip to California to take my kids to Disneyland from Philadelphia. My father had lying around the house, Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life and I grabbed it as I walked out the door. I’m not really huge baseball fan and I am definitely not a Yankee’s fan, but this book is great. Cramer seems to get DiMaggio – his remarkable skill and pressing loneliness – and he also gets the neediness of sports writers and fans for a hero – a true American hero. So this book has been with me on trains, subways, and planes – whenever and wherever I can steal a minute I open it up. I just read Cramer’s wonderful account of DiMaggio’s great hitting streak.

And finally, yesterday, I picked up Sasha Issenberg’s brand new book, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. The title says it all. The question for me is whether he can capture the complex flow of culture and products back and forth along the many channels of global commerce. So far, this book is fascinating, if a tad heavy of the bright theme of modernization.

Last year Ben McGrath reported in the The New Yorker that Simon is working on a book about Starbucks -- a cross between Bowling Alone and Fast Food Nation -- which entails a lot of time in many Starbucks outlets. "What we drink has meaning," he explains in an engaging and enlightening video about his research project.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of The Grasshopper King, a novel.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

As the father of a two-year-old, I am partway through a lot of books. Only time will tell whether I am actually still reading them. But here are some of them: Super Flat Times, a great collection by Matthew Derby, set in a vaguely defined future, possibly in Korea, where people are only allowed to eat meat and spend a lot of time digging the memories out of corpses buried in concrete. A Summons to Memphis, a typically potent and quiet novel by Peter Taylor. One Jump Ahead, by Jonathan Schaeffer, a sort of biography of Schaeffer's computer program Chinook, the checkers champion of the world. A great read if you've ever tried to write a complicated computer program (but maybe not so much, if you haven't.) On Beauty, by Zadie Smith, which I certainly will finish because it's the book all the students here are supposed to read over the summer, and it looks bad when the professors don't finish their homework. It's splendid so far, though I wonder how much of it will make sense to 18-year-olds.

Some books I've read the beginnings of and haven't decided whether to read: Drop City, by T. Coraghessan Boyle. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Murmur, a short book about R.E.M.'s first album, by J. Niimi.

Long non-fiction books about murders in early America which I stopped reading more than a year ago but still believe I'm going to go back and finish: the true-crime-and-19th-century Mormonism expose Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer, whose writing I learned to love when I read his great Everest memoir Into Thin Air as part of the research for an article I was writing for The Believer about the Riemann hypothesis; and Big Trouble, by J. Anthony Lukas, a giant book which starts out with an ex-governor of Idaho being blown to pieces by a bomb at his own front door, and which spirals out into a history of the vicious battles between labor and capital at the turn of the 20th century, and maybe more -- I don't know, not having finished it.

A book I don't even own yet but I am soon to own and read: The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence, by my friend Stephen Burt -- he' s the poetry critic to read if you don't read poetry criticism, because his writing is so lively, so interested in things outside poetry, and so open to the public.

Read more about Ellenberg's novel The Grasshopper King at the publisher's website.

Ellenberg also writes an occasional column called "Do the Math" for the on-line magazine Slate, and has written for The Believer, the Washington Post, and SEED.

His recent columns in Slate explained how "The New York Times slip[ped] up on sexual math" and why "Roger Clemens might be worth every penny" the Yankees are paying him.

If you found this account of what Ellenberg is reading interesting, visit his personal website which tracks what he was reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Pilling

David Pilling's journalism caught my eye with his account of lunch with the novelist David Mitchell.

So a few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Because of my job, Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, I read a lot of non-fiction about Japan both in English and Japanese. I tend to have several books on the go at once, which is probably not a good thing. At the moment, these include (in no particular order) Alan Macfarlane's Japan Through the Looking Glass, a book that grapples intelligently with the question of just how different is Japan; Totetsumonai nihon (Incredible Japan), a book by Taro Aso laying out his bid to be the next prime minister; A History of Japan to 1334 by George Sansom, the first part of a three-part classic.

I have just finished the diaries of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spin-doctor in chief. This was a fascinating if somewhat self-serving account of the Blair Years, but it includes a lot of Clinton, Bush, Iraq and Ireland as well. A really interesting read.

I also try to keep up with fiction, but not very successfully. For work (though it turned out for pleasure) I recently read three David Mitchell novels, the best of which was Cloud Atlas followed by Black Swan Green, the latter a much more personal childhood autobiography than his usual romps through time and space.

I would like to go back and read Turgenev's books, especially Fathers and Sons. I also love Chinua Achebe, especially the marvellous Things Fall Apart.

"Lunch with the FT" isn't always free, but you can always have a taste of Pilling's account of lunch with David Mitchell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Goffard

Christopher Goffard is a general assignment reporter at the Los Angeles Times. His first book, the literary crime novel Snitch Jacket, will be released in the U.S. in October.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I just finished American Prometheus, the excellent Robert Oppenheimer biography, which is about how cold war hysteria devoured one of our greatest scientists, and which reminded me that during the first test of the atom bomb, the Los Alamos gang did not even know if the explosion would ignite the atmosphere.

At an airport I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's engrossing The Tipping Point -- his exploration of the subterranean life of social trends from smoking to suicide to kids' TV shows -- and read it on a cross-country flight in nearly one gulp.

I'm now deep into Don DeLillo's Libra, which is a reimagining of the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy hatched by disaffected CIA agents, with a fascinating psychological portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald as this angry cipher desperate to merge his life with history.

Publishers Weekly gave Snitch Jacket a starred review:

In Goffard's impressive debut, a darkly comic romp through the Southern California underworld, Benny Bunt, a 41-year-old dishwasher, finds his main escape in the Greasy Tuesday, a blue-collar bar in Costa Mesa. Among the recidivist misfits, his is a harmless familiar face. What they don't know is that Benny is a snitch who earns pocket money by ratting out his buddies to the cops. Enter one Gus “Mad Dog” Miller, a massive, bearded Vietnam vet, covered with prison tattoos; Gus holds court at the bar with outrageous tales of his exploits, military and criminal. Gus soon becomes Benny's best friend, and seeks his assistance in a contract killing. Only problem is, the police “botch” their surveillance and Benny ends up taking the fall for a double homicide committed at the Howling Head festival in the Mojave desert. Goffard's prose shimmers with intelligence and humor, and he has a keen ear for telling detail. Fans of such cultish neo-noir scribes such as Charlie Huston and Duane Swierczynski will be richly rewarded.

The Page 99 Test: Snitch Jacket.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Zimler

Richard Zimler is the author of seven novels over the last decade: The Seventh Gate; The Search for Sana; Guardian of the Dawn; Hunting Midnight; The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon; The Angelic Darkness; and Unholy Ghosts.

His novels have appeared on bestseller lists in 12 different countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Portugal, Italy, and Australia, and he has won numerous prizes for his work, including a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award for the best historical novel.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am in Helsinki at the moment and I am reading two books. The first is a novel by an Irish writer named Brian O'Doherty called The Deposition of Father McGreevy, published in Britain by Arcadia Books. It's about a remote Irish mountain village where all the women die of a mysterious disease, leaving the priest, Father McGreevy, to try to keep the men and their way of life going despite all the logistical and emotional problems . I'm not entirely sure where the narrative is going at the moment, since I'm only on page 57, but the writing is good and I'm intrigued. What exactly happened up there on top of the mountain that left the women dead?

The second book I just picked up yesterday at a fantastic bookshop in downtown Helsinki. It's entitled Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day. It's a great idea: what would a traveler to Rome in 200 AD find and how would he or she spend his days? The book has chapters on Dining Out and What to Buy, as in a modern guidebook. I've read the first chapter, called "Getting There." It's full of surprising information and is written in an engaging style: who knew, for instance, that a person living in a Roman province needed an exit visa from his area of residence in order to go to Rome? If I ever decide to write about ancient times, I'm sure the book will be very helpful. It's published by Thames & Hudson.

Visit Richard Zimler's website to learn more about his books, short stories, and reviews and interviews.

The Page 99 Test: Guardian of the Dawn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Perry

Thomas Perry is the author of the Jane Whitefield series as well as the bestselling novels Nightlife, Death Benefits, and Pursuit, the first recipient of the Gumshoe Award for Best Novel. He won an Edgar Award for The Butcher’s Boy, and Metzger’s Dog was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

His latest novel is Silence.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I was going to say that this isn't a moment when what I'm reading is typical, but then I realized there is no such moment. So here, without apology, is what I've been reading. I just finished the second of two hard-boiled British novels that Harcourt is publishing in U.S. The first was Allan Guthrie's Hard Man. This one is Ray Banks's Saturday's Child. I found it a special treat. The central characater is an ex-convict working as an unlicensed private detective His current client is a murderous old small-time crime boss. The story is told through the consciousnesses of the "detective" and the boss's psychotic son, both of whom are always more or less drunk, drugged, and groggy from their latest head injuries. I liked it for the same reasons I like foreign and independent films. The people who write them haven't fallen automatically into the assumptions and structural cliches of American popular storytelling (although they may have conventions of their own), and so the vision is fresh and new to us, and makes us think occasionally.

When I finished that I happened to have Nadine Gordimer's The Pick-Up, which I received in the mail a couple of days ago. Cornell, where I went to school, has its freshmen and alumni read one book at the start of each school year, and I picked it up last night. I'm not finished yet, but even without the academic recommendation and the Nobel Prize, she's very good.

As a rule, I read mostly non-fiction. Next on the pile is Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, and then Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. I've been traveling much of the summer trying to promote my latest book, Silence. I never write or read while I'm traveling, because trips are my best opportunity to look and listen and start conversations with strangers, but that always puts me behind in both writing and reading, so the unread book pile continues to grow.

The Page 69 Test: Silence.

The Page 99 Test: Nightlife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Spiegelman

Peter Spiegelman is the author of three John March novels. His debut novel, Black Maps, was published by Knopf in August, 2003 and won the 2004 Shamus Award for Best First Novel. It was followed in 2005 by Death's Little Helpers, which Ken Bruen called "...a multi-layered novel of compassion and power." Earlier this year Knopf brought out the third John March novel, Red Cat.

Spiegelman is also editor of and contributor to Wall Street Noir.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I've been reading a fair amount of non-fiction lately, both for research purposes and because it's always been a significant component of my reading diet. I recently finished re-reading A.L. Kennedy's beautiful On Bullfighting which, yes, is actually about bullfighting. It's also part memoir and part rumination on death and art and work. Really, a one of a kind book -- and gorgeous writing.

Currently I'm in the midst of Tim Weiner's lucid history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. And a damning history it is, of an organization that's apparently been dysfunctional from the start. Weiner lays bare a spectacle of arrogance, incompetence, willful blindness, and terrible waste (of lives, money, opportunity) -- all horribly relevant to the current mess we're in. Maddening, scary, entirely fascinating.

Visit Peter Spiegelman's official website, and read my rave review of Red Cat.

--Marshal Zeringue

Evan Thomas

Evan Thomas is assistant managing editor of Newsweek. He has won a National Magazine Award and taught writing at Harvard and Princeton.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am reading the last Harry Potter. I just finished Walter Isaacson's Einstein and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

My favorite fiction this summer was Claire Massoud's The Emperor's Children.

Evan Thomas has written seven books, including Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945, The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA, and John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy.

--Marshal Zeringue