Dan Gaardner, musician, Trailer Trash and many others

I just finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (okay) and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (good) and I'm in the middle of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (good so far). I recently found a set of 19^th century encyclopedias and I've been grazing those as well.

Tara Key - Photo by Dawn Sutter Madell

Tara Key, musician, Antietam

I just finished The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I have not been reading fiction for a long while, and I really enjoyed this because I have spent a couple of short stretches in Barcelona in the last few years and was craving a return. It does a pretty good job of painting a darker version of being on the streets there. Now on my desk: The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World edited by Brian M. Fagan.

Jeaneen Gauthier, songwriter/artist

1. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. I can't really describe this book, except that it's mind-blowing. It explores the cultural context of art and creativity, and I think it's helping understand what it is to be an artist in a way I never really thought about before—he takes the idea of being "gifted" literally. Here's a quote: "For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world."

2. In My Blood by John Sedgwick (who is Edie of Andy-Warhol-Factory-fame's brother). It's a history of their whole f-d up family starting with colonial times.

3. O Magazine! This is my favorite magazine these days and reading it feels a lot like going to a day spa or something. I just finished reading Oprah's interview with Sally Field, who is so much more deep and dark and intense than I ever realized. You know I'll be re-reading Sybil again really soon!

Shawn Gibbons, singer/guitarist

Shawn Gibbons - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

However, for the last few years I've had a little book that I use during Lent and Easter season. I wish they had a book for the whole year, but they don't. It's called The Little Black Book. Our parish handed them out a couple years ago for Lent, and I absolutely loved the book. They don't hand them out anymore, but I just order my own.

At the risk of sounding goofy, it's meant to make you sit down and spend five-to-six minutes with the Lord. It's not a real "Bible-thumpy" kind of thing. It does walk you through a very short verse, but then it relates the verse to life, and it gives you something to think about. It is one of my favorite parts of my day, reading that little book. It makes me peaceful. I think it makes me kinder.

Stook!, songwriter/musician/producer

Laura Stamm’s Power Skating: Skills For Explosive Skating Proven By The Pros. Make hay while the sun shines. When it won’t/don’t, play hockey in the park!

Dan Wilson - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Dan Wilson, singer/songwriter/producer

I'm reading two books: This Wheel's on Fire, by Levon Helm, the drummer and singer of the group The Band. It's a great story, and I love their music, and I had heard that Helm's version of the saga is wild and fun, which it is.

The other book is Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This book is a multi-threaded discussion of number theory, DNA, musical fugues, artificial intelligence, human thought, and the limitations of formal logical systems. It's really amazing, but you have to do a bunch of math to really follow the arguments, so it's not for everyone. I have been reading and hearing about this book for a long time and I finally bit the bullet and launched in, and it's totally worth it, Hofstadter is endlessly creative in his presentation and he makes mind-blowing connections between science, art and philosophy. I'm reading this book for fun, and it's delivering.

Michael Hanson, editor, Minnesota Historical Society Press

Outside of the usual stack of unpublished manuscripts, I'm reading Blues People by Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and am only a little ways into it. The book, published in 1963, is a cultural history of the blues written by a radical black poet who made a name for himself in the 1960s and 1970s. In the part that I've read, Baraka traces the history of the blues, claiming that music and language were the only aspects of African religion and culture that were able to survive slavery. At the time Baraka was writing, the black consciousness movement was just forming, and African Americans were starting to look back at what the fuck happened and try to sort things out. Part of that was understanding where their culture came from and how it was shaped and distorted by three hundred years of forced labor and servitude. What's amazing to me is that deep elements of a culture can be subconsciously preserved in music and language, despite the worst of conditions. Values and insights can be preserved in tone and cadence.

Previously, I read A Choice of Weapons, a memoir by African American photographer Gordon Parks. The book was first published by Harper & Row in 1966, and the Minnesota Historical Society Press published a reprint edition in 1986. (Parks died in March 2006, and Harper took back the publishing rights.) At any rate, Parks was a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, and most famously a photographer for Life magazine, and the book covers his late-teenage years and the beginning of his career. The book begins with his move to St. Paul, Minnesota, from Kansas, after his mother's death when he was sixteen. From about that point on, he had to make it on his own, working odd jobs, sleeping in pool halls, playing piano in a brothel (and sleeping with the pimp's girl), traveling with a big band that played a song he composed, serving as a railroad porter, and working with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was also paid to play basketball at one point. He eventually found his thing in photography and won a position in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a Roosevelt-era program designed to battle rural poverty that had a phenomenal photography program, with alumni such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and, well, Gordon Parks. After the dissolution of the FSA, Parks became a war correspondent during World War II. He was attached to an African American flight group but was denied permission to join them in Europe. Elements within the government were pretty unhappy that the army had African American pilots and didn't want their heroics and sacrifice documented, lest they inspire their fellow African Americans to demand their god-given rights.

Tony Nelson, photographer/musician

Tony Nelson - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Erik Lundegaard, writer/editor/journalist

David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography and I'm liking it even though I think Michaelis needed a better editor. The book is full of unnecessary details and Michaelis assumes too much with his adjectives and adverbs. On Charles Schulz’s childhood cousins: “And in his sulky anger at going unnoticed, except as a target for corncobs, he kept boiling behind a cool facade a vast resentment against these loutish country cousins to whom he was humiliatingly kin.” Remove “sulky,” “cool,” “loutish” and “humiliatingly.” Hell, get rid of the entire sentence, which is convoluted anyway.

Too much of the book is this way. Michaelis gives us a detail of Schulz's life and then takes us inside Schulz's head and beams the flashlight around. See? See? This is why he was the way he was. Meanwhile I'm thinking, "What are we doing in here? We don't know enough to be in here."

But it's a subject I'm interested in so I continue. Schulz colored my childhood and thus my world and it's nice to know where he came from — with or without the flashlight.

Mare Lennon, musician

I'm reading poems - quotes -
anything anyone can say
that'll make me stop or make me go.

I'm reading fluff to stuff myself silly.
I'm reading Ann Lamott for protein.
I'm reading Eat Pray Love for dessert.

I'm reading faces - as best I can.
I'm reading currents - like a sailor
I'm reading blogs, fog, and the lyrics my friends are coming up with -

and I come up for air.

Steve McPherson, Reveille Magazine

Currently, I'm working on two books: Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and James Agee's Film Writing and Selected Journalism. The Obama book is great, although I've bogged down a bit in the part where he's talking about community organizing. I was more interested in the early stuff about his childhood. Of course, it's just amazing to think that this guy, who can form complete sentences and is very upfront about how difficult life can be, could be president. I just can't picture Bush coming up with something as subtle and nuanced as this, where he likens the situation in the south Chicago neighborhood (Altgeld Gardens) to his experience growing up in Indonesia:

"I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River [in Chicago], joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets [the farmers' markets he grew up with] have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djarkata, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair."

Just a beautiful exposition on how culture is not independent of industry, but is dependent on it in so many ways.

I found out about Agee from a writer named Louis Menand, who's one of my favorite critical thinkers and writers right now. Menand writes frequently for the New Yorker, and I just finished his book American Studies, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in history, ideas, or the history of ideas. A very easy writer to read.

Agee most famously wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but he also wrote a film column for The Nation in the '40s, and no less a writer than W.H. Auden wrote a letter to The Nation expounding on Agee's virtues and saying that although he never went to the movies, he looked forward to reading Agee's column every month. The writing is fantastic, and it's true that you don't necessarily even need to be overly familiar with the movies he's writing about to appreciate the exacting, joyous, and ruthless way he dives into dissecting them. It's also interesting to compare the ways in which filmmaking have changed in the decades since Agee wrote, and how so many of his demands—that actors develop a screen-acting tradition that separates itself from stage acting, that the physical comedy of the silent era has been lost and needs to be rediscovered—have come to be met by movies since that time. The writing itself is witty and honest; when he hates something, he really takes it to task, but not in a mean-spirited way, and when he loves something, he makes you want to go out and see it, which, I think, is the hallmark of a truly great critic.