Barbara J. King

Barbara J. King is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary and author of, most recently, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.

Earlier this week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Summers in hot humid hazy Virginia are made for reading. The book I have just read is Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. The twins, Henry and Owen, are Doerr’s and his wife Shauna’s; the insomnia is Doerr’s alone; the funeral was that of Pope John Paul. If I held the job of Subtitler to Excellent Writers, I’d have squeezed in there “on writing,” because Doerr captures so well the process of starting a book on one topic only to find that other interests powerfully assert themselves, and “on learning to see the world,” because the book exquisitely conveys the process of coming alive to one’s surroundings and seeing, really seeing, the little things in the natural world and the built one.

Before the Doerr, I read Caitlin O’Connell’s The Elephant’s Secret Sense, another non-fiction book. A scientist who worked for many years in Namibia in southern Africa, O’Connell writes compellingly on subjects ranging from encounters with lions to her discovery that elephants use their feet (yes, their feet) to communicate (for details, see my July features column at www.bookslut.com).

Don’t think I’m neglecting fiction! My friend Stephen, who has known me forever and well, insisted I read Jonathan Tropper’s The Book of Joe. It totally absorbed me. Joe, at 30-something, returns to his home town, his dying father, a friend who turns out too to be dying, his estranged brother, and his first and only love. How Joe finds a path back to himself is a story imagined with the best balance of dark humor, warmth, and Springsteen lyrics.

I also read The Sea Lady, which may be my favorite-ever Margaret Drabble novel, and that’s saying a lot. The language shimmers, right along with the marine-biology theme. The story involves two English ex-lovers, now meeting again in their older age. Drabble enlivens Ailsa and Humphrey with such genuine human strengths and weaknesses, I was entirely happy living in their world for a few days.

OK, I’ve got to stop here: the 50 pages left to go in John Connolly’s The Unquiet are calling to me. As beautifully creepy, well-written thrillers go, this one in Connolly’s Charlie Parker series is way cool.

"Evolving God (Doubleday, 2007)," King explains, "explores the deepest roots of the human religious imagination, using the behaviors of African apes (including empathy and compassion) as clues to the behaviors of early human ancestors, then tracing the development of religious ritual through the Neandertals through the cave artists of our own species."

Salon published an interview with King about the central ideas in Evolving God, followed by an audio link at the end to an NPR interview.

The Page 69 Test: Evolving God.

My Book, The Movie: Evolving God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Morgan

An award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, Robin Morgan has published more than 20 books.

I recently asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Re-re-re-reading (it's an evergreen) Ursula K. Le Guin's profound, hilarious, gender-free, and exquisitely written transliteration of Lao Tzu's The Tao Te Ching (Shambala). In prose and poetry, nonfiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and realistic fiction -- Le Guin is just one hell of a fine writer, and this book is a keeper-by-the-bedside challenge and comfort.

Also I'm plowing through The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Belknap/Harvard) -- a must-read for poets, readers of poetry, and people who are as interested in form as in formlessness.

A Tranquil Star, by Primo Levi -- the previously unpublished stories (Norton); I read Levi for the sense of unease he provokes by whatever he writes, even spilling over through the translations.

Last, Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Houghton Mifflin) is a delight -- fact filled, informative, and a really fun read since Angier, science columnist for the New York Times, writes in a lively, accessible, yet never simplistic style.

Morgan's books include six collections of poetry, four works of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. Her latest books include Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, her best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, and her new novel, The Burning Time, about women fighting the Inquisition. Her most recent book is a nonfiction work, Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right.

The Demon Lover made Richard K. Morgan's list of "Essential Reading for Modern Humans: Six Books That Will Change the Way You View the World (Though You May Not Thank Them for It)."

Visit Robin Morgan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Silva

Mark Silva is the White House Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Readers who miss his byline in the Trib (or in the Los Angeles Times or Newsday or in another Tribune paper) might catch his reporting at The Swamp, the blog of the Trib's Washington bureau.

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

I am reading Einstein, by Walter Isaacson, which I have been working on for a while because it's too heavy, and I mean in pounds, to travel with. So while I work on it at home, I have been reading other books on the road. I am working on Jim Harrison's newest novel now.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Campion

Peter Campion is Assistant Professor of English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He is the author of a collection of poems, Other People (University of Chicago Press), and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art).

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

I'm up in Vermont where my wife's family lives. It's gorgeous: the skies a postcard blue, the green so green it's searing. And yet I seem to have spent most of my time inside, reading.

I finished The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. I love his plotting, the way he gets his characters to balance, for hundreds of pages at a time, on the fulcrum of their own psychologies. Trollope is a new favorite. I'm inchworming my way through the Palliser novels. (To be honest, I'm not sure how many more fox hunts I can handle).

Then I read Henning Mankell's Before the Frost. With mysteries I usually skim the filler -- the fluff about romance, family, pets, etc. -- and "cut to the chase." But Mankell does a fine job all around. His famous detective, Kurt Wallander, joins up with his daughter Linda; and the interplay between them deepens the admittedly sensationalistic plot.

I also read Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics. It's structured as an interview. The French philosopher asks how can art be emancipatory. I'm particularly fascinated by his concept of "the distribution of the sensible." He claims that as creatures who live inside political structures our experience is always already channeled, structured by larger forces. One thing that art does is to rearrange these structures and redistribute the sensible.

I thought I was done with French theorists. But then on Sunday we drove to my friend, the painter Eric Aho's studio. I'm writing a catalog essay for a show of Eric's -- a genuine pleasure. I wanted to see the paintings in person one more time. Eric was away but he left his studio open, and there on a chair, a gift: Gilles Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. I read it yesterday, in one swoop -- I'm sure I missed some of the subtleties. Deleuze manages to combine his theorizing with superb formal examination of the paintings. I wish more theorists had that skill.

Oh, I've also been immersed in Caroline Bingham's Big Book of Trucks. My two year old son and six year old nephew know this book backwards and forwards, from grille to trailer hitch. Talk about the logic of sensation!

Peter Campion has held a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lecturership at Stanford University. His poetry and prose have appeared recently in The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Parnassus, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tikkun, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His monograph on the painter Joseph McNamara was published by The Seven Bridges Foundation, and his catalog essay on the painter Terry St. John was published by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery.

Read -- or hear Campion read -- his poems "Lilacs," "Poem to Fire," and "Other People" in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan O'Doherty

Susan O'Doherty, a writer and clinical psychologist, is the author of Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity. Her popular advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In,” appears every Friday on MJ Rose’s publishing blog, Buzz, Balls, & Hype.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I am reading The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. I admire Didion’s writing, but although I’ve had the book for over a year, I put off starting it because I knew it would be difficult and painful. I finally forced myself to open it because my desire to see how a master writer deals with intensely personal information trumped my reluctance to delve into such a potent reminder of the inevitability of death and loss.

Each time one of my own autobiographical essays is about to come out, I am seized with panic: What if I have misremembered, misrepresented an episode that is meaningful to someone else in my story? If there are two or more competing versions of a story, how do we determine which one is “correct”? And even if I can prove definitively that mine is “true,” do I have the right to broadcast someone else’s personal information? Yet when the facts, or “facts,” are disguised, a writer is vulnerable to charges of fabrication. I am looking at the memoirs of more accomplished writers for guidance in handling these issues.

Didion’s prose is specific, detailed, and devastating. She explores her reactions to her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness with excruciating precision. Yet the questions of truthfulness and of protecting others’ privacy become irrelevant, because she emphasizes that this is an attempted reconstruction of her personal experience, not a recitation of “facts.” And because she does not try to convince us of the validity of her version — because she does not set up an internal conflict in the reader — we are free to enter into her experience more fully. This is a real education for me.

I am also nearly at the end of Ptolemy’s Gate, the final book in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy. Generally speaking, fantasy is not my genre of choice; I have enough trouble navigating everyday life without adding magic spells and demons to the mix. However, my 13-year-old son loves these books, and I try to stay current with what he is reading. I must admit, I am riveted. Stroud’s djinni is engagingly world-weary, cynical, and possessed of a dry sense of humor; and his teenaged heroine is resourceful, honorable, and perilously, perhaps fatally, ignorant. In fact, I need to stop writing right now to find out what happens to her.

O'Doherty's stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Eureka Literary Magazine, Northwest Review, Apalachee Review, Eclectica, Literary Mama, Reflection’s Edge, VerbSap, Carve, Word Riot, Style & Sense, Phoebe, and the anthologies About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope (Penguin, 2007), It’s a Boy! (Seal Press, 2005), The Best of Carve, Volume VI, and Familiar (The People's Press, 2005). New stories are scheduled to appear in Hospital Road and in the anthologies Mama, Ph.D. and Sex for America, edited by Stephen Elliott.

Her story “Passing” was chosen as the New York Story for Ballyhoo Stories’ ongoing Fifty States Project.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is a writer who focuses on intelligence, international security, technology, and the globalization of crime.

His first book is Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.

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

Leisure reading has become sort of an aspirational exercise for me lately. My bedside table is piled high with various novels, each dog-eared at approximately page 25. I acquire books much more quickly than I read them, and they collect there on the table, like a rebuke. Part of the problem is that between foreign policy research at the think tank where I work and research for various magazine articles and other writing projects, I'm obliged to read a lot of interesting nonfiction, and so I end up reading a lot of books in my spare time that are, strictly speaking, for work. This means I end up reading (or finishing, really) less and less fiction, which is a pity. Also: the Internet. It's eviscerated what meager concentration span I had to begin with.

That said, I've been reading two excellent books this week, both somewhat related to work. One is The Devil's Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea. It's a story about a group of migrants who crossed an especially barren, scorching portion of the Mexico/Arizona border in 2001. They were on foot and got lost, and fourteen of them died in the desert. I picked the book up because I'm halfway through writing my second book, which grew out of this article I wrote last year for The New Yorker, and deals with a boat full of Chinese immigrants who traveled around the world and ran aground off the coast of Queens, New York, in 1993. In that light, Urrea's book is daunting: it's beautifully written and observed, from his searing descriptions of the brutal landscape where these men came across to his brief portraits of the members of the border patrol, the "coyotes" who get paid to smuggle people across, and the walkers themselves. He's a poet, and his prose is very lyrical -- much more so than my own -- but it's instructive to look at the way he handles evidence that is similar to the sorts of evidence I'm handling. When you track down a report of the items recovered from the body of an immigrant who has died trying to get to America -- a belt buckle, a comb, a piece of paper with a stateside telephone number -- how do you put that on the page? Urrea just makes a list of these few spare objects: "taken all together, they did not have enough items to fill a carry-on bag."

The other thing I'm reading is a galley of a book that will be out next month, Inside the Red Mansion, by Oliver August. August was the Beijing bureau chief for the London Times, and his book is about a man named Lai Changxing, who was sort of China's answer to the Russian oligarchs -- a wily entrepreneur who got into business in a big way just as China's markets were opening up, and became one of the wealthiest men in the country. The Party ended up turning on Lai, and he went into hiding, becoming China's most wanted man. August's book is about his search for Lai (he eventually finds him in Canada, where Lai asked for asylum), which gives the book an almost thriller-ish narrative spine. But it's also a rumination on the thumping economic growth China has experienced in the last decade, the gaudy excess of the newly rich, and the enduring power of old-school corruption.

Patrick Radden Keefe currently works as a program officer and fellow at the Century Foundation, and as a project leader at the World Policy Institute. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Visit his official website.

The Page 69 Test: Chatter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer 8. Lee

Jennifer 8. Lee is a metropolitan reporter at the New York Times, where she has worked for many years.

She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, a book that explores how Chinese food is all-American, due out in March 2008.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

There are two genres I swing between:

- non-fiction of a sociological or current affairs nature and

- fiction by authors who are one or more of the following: 1) alive 2) female 3) "diverse" (all three would definitely catch my attention).

As a journalist, I also get sent a lot of galleys, that I will often at least look at, if not skim or read entirely. Sometimes the pitches are kind of random (young adult novels) but I like getting books.

On the non-fiction side, I just read Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, about why some ideas thrive while others die. It is in the genre (both style and content) of The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds. I also read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Those two books, I hope will help me distill the kinds of ideas and memes that will help newspapers determine new business model for the digital future.

In my bag currently, I have The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner, which just came out in paperback. It is about the myths of the diamond industry — diamonds, which have limited industrial use, have little value other than what humans socially ascribe to them. It's a really well-written book that spans every continent except Antarctica. I was interested in it because I had asked him how to do the endnotes for my book.

I was also passed an advanced manuscript of Starbucked by Taylor Clark, out in January 2008, because I am always interested in food social issues, which I also read in one sitting.

On the fiction front, I just read Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, in one fell swoop. It's (a huge book) about Ivy League-educated Korean Americans in New York City. I stayed up until 4 a.m. because it is a subtle page-turner about race and class and privilege. Every sentence and paragraph is there for a reason, so you cannot just skim. I am enthusiastically recommending it to my friends, many of whom are Asian-American.

I also picked up Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2 ("Now even younger!") at the Book Expo America a few weeks ago, mostly because it had a number of people I know through various means (friends of friends) listed on the back. In it, there was a poignant short story on a Jewish soldier during the American civil war by a classmate, Dara Horn. Since most Jewish immigrants arrived in New York between 1880 and 1920, it was interesting to see the perception of Jews in a society before that period.

Compilations of short stories/excerpts are great. They are like dim sum. You can get a little taste of a lot of things and are not obligated to try the things you don't want.

Read recent and archived news articles by Lee in the New York Times.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is currently being edited, so excerpts are not yet available. Lee has this placeholder paragraph until the excerpts are online:

I can tell you that the current draft has chapters on General Tso’s chicken (I meet his family in China!), chop suey (with a new theory on who invented it and why, it’s not the historically bantered-about theory), fortune cookies (surprises galore here), how delivery got started in New York City, why Jews love Chinese food (or as I like to say “Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people?), and the hunt for the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside Greater China.

Visit the website for The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Scott

Joanna Scott is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at The University of Rochester and author of numerous novels and stories, including Everybody Loves Somebody, a collection of stories (Back Bay Books, 2006) and Liberation, a novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Your email reaches me in Italy, at the Villa Santa Maddalena outside Florence, where I'm staying for a couple of weeks. Thanks for your question.

When I'm not writing at a little desk in the garden or battling the tiger mosquitoes or swimming in the pool or walking through the olive groves or enjoying good meals or watching the fireflies flicker through the bamboo, I'm reading Jen Christian Grondahl's illuminating and absorbing novel, Silence in October, which was thrust in my hands by one of his fans here.

In preparation for a class I'm teaching next semester, I'm rereading Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Woolf's The Waves.

And for the rich, engrossing pleasure of it late at night, I'm reading Zola's The Earth.

Scott's other publications include Tourmaline, a novel (Back Bay Books, 2003), Make Believe, a novel (Little, Brown, and Company, 2000), Various Antidotes, a collection of stories (Picador USA, reprint, 2005), Arrogance, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2004), Fading, My Parmacheene Belle (Picador USA, reprint, 2003), The Closest Possible Union, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2003), and The Manikin, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2002).

Joanna Scott has received numerous honors for her writing, including Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, the Rosenthal Award from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Lannan fellowship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dana Stabenow

Edgar Award–winning Dana Stabenow is the author of fifteen novels in her "Kate Shugak" series, three Liam Campbell mysteries, three science-fiction novels, and a stand-alone novel.

She also writes an acclaimed column for Alaska magazine.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I was at the winter meeting of the ALA in Seattle in January, where I had breakfast with Nancy Pearl and Talia Ross, my publisher’s (Holtzbrinck) library marketing manager. I was telling the two of them about a science fiction lit workshop I would be teaching at the Kenai Public Library in March, and how I was using classics (H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, the Heinlein juveniles, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country) in my syllabus and very few new books because I hadn’t read a lot of new sf or fantasy that I liked.

Well. That was a mistake. Ever since, Talia has been sending me boxes full of Tor books, which I dive into headfirst when they’re dropped off at the door, much to the neglect of my to-read shelf (not to mention the book I’m supposed to be writing). I just finished S.M. Stirling’s The Sky People, a reincarnation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter on Mars as Marc Vitrac on a Venus that reminds me of Heinlein’s Venus in Between Planets. Before that I read Brenda Cooper’s The Silver Ship and the Sea, about a bunch of back-to-the-land space colonists who go to war with latecomers who have been “altered,” all the better to survive the planet. They win, and are left with raising six “altered” children, told in first person by one of the altereds. Some good characters, especially Jenna.

I told Talia it was like turning a drunk loose in a distillery. I just love being a writer.

Visit Dana Stabenow's official website and her Amazon blog.

The Page 69 Test: A Deeper Sleep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Salway

Sarah Salway has published numerous short stories, as well as winning several writing competitions. Her first novel Something Beginning With, an extremely funny and sad story of love, self-discovery and the alphabet, was published in 2004 by Bloomsbury in the UK and Ballantine in the US (as The ABCs of Love), and has been translated into many languages. Her latest novel is Tell Me Everything.

I recently asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I am never sure which comes first, the reading or the writing. But what I do know is that they both feed off each other. I can't imagine being the sort of writer who blithely says: 'I never read.' If nothing else - ignoring the pleasure, the stimulation, the excitement that comes with reading - it seems bad manners. Rather like not joining in with the conversation but shouting out random sentences from the corner instead.

However, I do try to stay away from books with direct links to whatever I'm writing in case I either 'borrow' by mistake, or get overwhelmed by other voices. Instead I read round the subject. At the moment, I'm enjoying Isabel Allende's Aphrodite. It's the best possible reminder, not just how nourishing good food and sex can be, but how funny too. Really life enhancing.

Another food book I'm devouring is Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - the story of how the novelist and her family decided to live for a year eating only local produce. Like Aphrodite, but with slightly different aims, recipes are woven into the narrative, and using them to cook for my family feels like I'm taking the role in someone else's story. Delicious. Perhaps it's not surprising that food is becoming even more central to my current novel in progress.

I'm also re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. What's interesting for me is how I'm seeing completely different themes from the first time I read it, younger, and perhaps angrier. It's the links between all the characters I notice this time round, whereas before it was the discord. Strange that.

Then poetry. I always try to read some poetry every day, and my favourite collection of the moment is Susan Wicks' latest book, De-Iced.

Lastly, I'm working my way through Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. There are several included I haven't come across before and I'm looking forward to reading more of Maile Meloy and Rattawut Lapcharoensap in particular.

Recently, Salway selected a top ten list of books about unlikely friendships for the Guardian.

Learn more about Sarah Salway's writing -- and read some of her poetry and journalism -- at her website and at her blog, Sarah's Writing Journal.

--Marshal Zeringue