Scott Dickensheets: Menus, mostly. Street signs. Faces. Tea leaves. The wind. Somewhere in between all that, I gulp magazines—Esquire for protein, Entertainment Weekly for the carbs, Vanity Fair for the fizz—and try to read some books. As the foregoing suggests, I hop around a lot: Willie Morris' memoir, New York Days; Robert Hughes' memoir, Things I Didn't Know. Also, dumbly, ambitiously, and to my certain detriment, I'm trying to reread all of Hunter Thompson's books by February 20, which is both the anniversary of his suicide and my birthday. I'm halfway through Hell's Angels and reloving it.
Joshua Longobardy: In the morning, when I'm on top of my faculties, Mark Bowden's Road Work, a collection of some of the best magazine articles from a man intrepid enough to report on rhinos in Africa and tyrants from Iraq, and with enough skills to have composed a book like Black Hawk Down, which inspired the popular movie by the same title. At night, when my day-long need for lullabies hits its peak, the poetry of T.S. Eliot: any of it. And not because that genius from the turn of the 20th century or his voluminous work has anything to do with me—but for the simple soothing pleasure of hearing his words roll through my internal ear like midnight waves during low tide, its undertow carrying me far off into my dreams.
Stacy J. Willis: Nora Ephron's neck book—the full title escapes me, as will the book shortly, which is somehow part of its appeal. Philip Roth's American Pastoral; love it, it's likely to stick around in my psyche longer. Snippets of The New Yorker, Dave Hickey's piece on Dina Titus in the Atlantic Monthly; Damon Hodge's monorail story in the front of this week's Weekly. The morning newspapers online, Slate.com; 10,300 emails and 4,700 text messages; my Sprint bill—longer than American Pastoral and likely to lodge in my credit report rather than in my psyche. Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, slowly; chapters from two to six dozen other books I'll never finish but which double the height of my nightstand and fill the floor by the bed.