What I'm reading now

My library school class is coming to a fast close. I'm a little sad, because this has been one my favorite classes of library school. It's called "Adult Services," and it focused on what's known as "Reader Advisory," or recommending voluntary reading material to adults. This could be anything a person wants to read: literary fiction, romance novels, science fiction, whatever. I'm working on my final project now, which is an annotated bibliography on the topic of "great books discussion groups." I'm taking a broad view of "great books": My reading tells me a librarian should ask, "Great for who? Great in what way?" And I definitely don't mean that in a relativistic, throw-away-the-standards, "what anybody wants is fine" sort of way. I mean it in a rigorous, standards-based, "you're not going to stick my patrons with a boring book" sort of way. So I'm reading articles on how to select the best sorts of books for discussion groups, with nods toward the Western canon, multiculturalism and diversity, bestsellers vs. award winners, readability, and how books lend themselves (or don't) toward group discussion. Lots of interesting intersections here.
On another front, my book group just finished a very long selection (A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, 500 plus pages), and now we're going to read two much shorter young adult novels (Stuck in Neutral and Cruise Control by Terry Trueman). So this means I have extra time to read my own choices. Nice. Here's what I'm reading right now:

• Nothing Right, by Antonya Nelson. This is literary fiction, short stories about upper-middle-class Americans and their nefarious ways. Affairs, deceptions, break-ups, stabs in the back, etc. I'm not sure why it's so interesting to read about the twisted characters in Nelson's stories, but it sure is. Nelson has this fascination-with-the-grotesque thing going, much like Flannery O'Connor. Except Flannery wrote about people living in the (mostly) rural South of the 1950s; Nelson writes about people who listen to NPR.
• Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the GOP, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The conservative authors argue that the Republican Party needs to develop and promote policies that provide economic stability for the working class. Douthat was recently named a columnist to the New York Times, which will certainly amplify his voice on the national stage. I read Douthat's blog occasionally; I like that he puts his intellectual integrity ahead of his loyalty to party. (Actually, I love writers who put intellectual integrity ahead of loyalty to party -- any party. This is a nonpartisan blog.)
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky. This book looks at the implications of the Internet for group dynamics and organization. Shirky recently wrote a blog post, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," on the decline of newspapers that was pretty brilliant. He concluded we're in the grips of systemic, historical change similar to the advent of the printing press. So I'm just starting on his book and interested to see what the implications are for the future of journalism.
  

And after all this, I really, really want to read and stop putting off reading The Brothers Karamazov. It's time!