I’ve been reading “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time,” by the writer and food critic Moira Hodgson. When Hodgson was a young girl, her father was a British Foreign Officer and her mother a great Irish beauty. With her younger sister, Phillipa, Hodgson received the kind of education most stay-at-homes would envy. Because of her father’s position, Hodgson was raised partly in Vietnam and partly in post-war Berlin. The complications of her parents’ union, and her later life as a writer and a muse to the poet Bill Merwin, are just a part of this amusing and profound meditation’s narrative thrust; underlining the beautiful orderliness of Hodgson’s prose is a funny and sad meditation on female domesticity—a number of the stories she tells are prompted by a meal she cooked or a menu she recalls—and a woman’s right to her own intelligence and independence in a post-Churchill, post-Eisenhower world.

Most people prepare for travels by reading about their destination; it always seemed an odd approach to me. I find it much easier and more pleasant to focus with the sights and smells of a place rattling around in my mind. So having just returned from India, my weekend reading is fairly clear: first, Aubrey Menen’s version of the Ramayana, which was first published in 1954. The original Ramayana, attributed to Valmiki, is an epic poem in Sanskrit with origins around 1,000 B.C. It is, among other things, the story of Prince Rama, exiled from his father’s kingdom as a result of the perfidious behavior of one of the king’s wives. That’s just for starters. Menen’s version is a light gloss—beautifully written, frequently hilarious and maybe even true. (“King Dasa-ratha, Rama’s father, was loved by all his subjects and he loved certain of them in return, especially if they were women.”) The other book is big and deep like the world it describes: William Dalrymple’s “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty.” Let’s face it; the subject deserves an epic and this is it. It is one of those non-fiction books that feels like fiction. But then so does much of life in Delhi even today.

It’s supposed to rain this weekend. That’s a drag, but (I’ll admit it) I’m looking forward, in ways, to a few guiltless afternoons on the couch. The forecast is the push I need to spring for a couple of books—both of which cost forty dollars and both of which I covet more than a dinner out. One is Frederick Seidel’s “Poems: 1959-2009,” which Farrar, Strauss & Giroux published last year, and the other is David Kynaston’s “Family Britain,” a survey of British life from 1951 to 1957, just out from Walker. My interest in Seidel has been accumulating since last year’s New York Times profile. A line of his a lot of people hated—“A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare”—pretty much blew my mind. Recently, in the New York Review of Books, he wrote, in memory of his Harvard roommate, Charlie:

I remember a particular color of
American hair,
A kind of American original orange,
Except it was rather red, the dark colors of fire,
In a Tom Sawyer hairstyle,
Which I guess means naturally

Unjudicial and in a boyish
Will Rogers waterfall
Over the forehead,
And then we both got bald…
My Harvard roommate, part of my heart,
The Honorable Charles Proctor Sifton of the Eastern District.

Kynaston’s book, the second in his New Jerusalem trilogy, “is made highly readable by all sorts of extracts and quotations from diaries, columns and oral records, and deals as much with ordinary, everyday lives as with the machinations of politics and power,” according to a review in the Guardian. Sample tidbit: the magazine Woman’s Own didn’t do bathroom features until 1958, because most of its readers didn’t have them. Wherever that came from, I want more. I’m thinking of the book as the literary version of “Seven Up,” the great documentary series, which began as a “World in Action” program about fourteen British children of different social classes (toffs, Cockneys, a Yorkshire farm boy) and has checked in on them every seven years since 1964 (they end up everywhere from council houses to the Costa del Sol). Britain in the fifties, according to Kynaston, had even worse weather than it does now: in 1952, an indoor performance of “La Traviata” was suspended, halfway through, due to smog. While we’re at it, I should say how much I’ve been enjoying The Awl, whose editors also have an interest in Knifecrime Island (and its tabloids), and sort of like the wet stuff.

I'm reading biographies—I've just finished Flora Fraser's extraordinary "Princesses, The Six Daughters of George III," and now Michael Holroyd's biography of the painter Augustus John. And I'm dipping into Ted Hughes's letters. His voice, it turns out, was set from the start—here's a line, to his first love, the elder sister of a schoolmate, at just nineteen: "I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars, moons, leapards [sic], and all symbols of moons of Diana." And the next one describes seeing a hedgehog: "There was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a corner in a pool of tears."

I am guiltily, glumly, and slowly reading “Revolutionary Road,” Richard Yates’s 1961 novel about marriage, the suburbs, and conformity. My guilt comes from not having read this modern classic—a kind of darker, less glamorous “Mad Men”—until now. My glumness arises from the Vintage paperback, which has Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet plastered on the cover. I haven’t seen the Sam Mendes movie, but I hate having preëmptive pictures in my head of the characters’ appearance. DiCaprio as handsome, violent, frightened Frank Wheeler? Barely possible. The earthy Winslet as April Wheeler, “a tall ash blond with a patrician kind of beauty”? Not a chance.

I am reading slowly because the book is so acute about the forms of human misery that it should come with a teddy bear and the numbers for suicide hot lines. I stop often to go do something like clean the grease from the stove hood to cheer myself up, and to allow myself time to rebut Yates’s persuasive suggestion that all communication is foredoomed. He ends one chapter as follows: “She went on talking and talking, moving around and around the room; and Howard Givings timed his nods, his smiles, and his rumblings so judiciously that she never guessed he had turned his hearing aid off for the night.”

The staff writer revisits an old favorite.

I’ve been on a George Eliot kick: I’ve just finished re-re-reading “Middlemarch”; have been reading Eliot’s journals (filled with alarming accounts of illness and depression, as well as her immensely daunting reading lists); and am now on the final pages of “Adam Bede,” her first full-length novel. (If my office were at Seventy-second Street rather than Forty-second Street, I’d have finished it on the subway this morning—a rare occasion of wishing for a longer commute.) Strangely enough, having assumed for years that I had already read this novel somewhere along the line, I am forced to admit that I hadn’t, so it’s a treat to enjoy the tension of the drama—feckless if good-hearted gentleman despoils shallow if beautiful lass—for the first time.

“Middlemarch,” which I first encountered when I was seventeen or eighteen and re-read every five years or so, reveals itself in new ways on each revisiting. When I was young, I identified intensely with the ardent, clueless Dorothea (to the extent of falling in love with Casaubon types left and right, but that’s another story). As I have grown older, Lydgate’s marital—and professional—disillusionment becomes more and more painful to countenance, and I grow fonder each time of Fred Vincy, whose understated virtues escaped me completely when I was younger. I can’t think of a writer who more completely—and more compassionately—captures the texture and the complexity of intimate human action and motivation. Sometimes I feel as if everything that is worth knowing about love and marriage (and maybe about everything else, too) can be learned from reading “Middlemarch.”

I’ve been reading David Quammen’s “The Song of the Dodo.” It’s a great book that combines biography, natural history, and intrepid on-the-ground reporting.

I’ve also been re-reading Borges’s “Labyrinths,” to be honest just because it was lying around. It’s a book that astonishes you on every page, not just with its brilliance, but with its precision: there’s not a single extraneous word.

The magazine’s deputy editor travels east with Orhan Pamuk.

I’m on an Orhan Pamuk roll. Or a reverse roll. I read his most recent novel, “Snow,” last year, then his memoir, “Istanbul,” in advance of and during a trip there last month, and now, back home, I’m deep in one of his earlier novels, “My Name Is Red.” It’s an amazing feat: nineteen characters narrating a murder-mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul. It plays out in the world of the Sultan’s miniaturist painters, at a moment when Western innovations like perspective and individual style were perceived by Ottoman traditionalists as heresy—even murder-worthy. The tension between East and West, religion and secularism, that is so central to “Snow” and “Istanbul,” in radically different form, is here, too—and it’s unsettling to be reminded of how long it’s existed. “Red” is clever and rich, and like, say, sweetbreads or chocolates, you can’t have too much of it at once. Looking for a faster read for a flight last week, I picked up “Triple Homicide,” by Charles Hynes, who is the D.A. of Brooklyn, where I live. It’s the fictional tale of an idealistic young New York City police sergeant on trial for the murder of a corrupt cop, and it plunged me back into the bad old days of the N.Y.P.D., a moment in the force that begs to be called—with all respect to Istanbul—Byzantine.

An editor at the magazine brushes up on his German. (And grabs a back-up.)

I’m going on vacation to Germany and so it’s time to face up to how little of the German I spent ages learning in high school remains in my head. The typical vacationer’s remedy&#8212and something I’ve often done in the past—is to buy some ludicrously ambitious work of literature in the semi-forgotten language and kid yourself that you’ll get anywhere with it at all. (I know: I’ll resurrect my high-school German by reading “The Magic Mountain” in the original!!) But the other evening, I hit on an alternative to this wild fantasy of self-improvement. I was browsing in the secondhand bookshop Heights Books, which has recently (and oxymoronically) moved out of Brooklyn Heights and into my neighborhood, Boerum Hill. There I picked up an old paperback of “Giovannis Zimmer” and started to read. James Baldwin in German turns out to be much easier than Mann or almost any writer who’s actually German and has thoughts deeply embedded in that linguistic idiom. Nice plain sentences, and, given that I’ve never read “Giovanni’s Room” in English, I’m getting to fill an important gap. And if I don’t even have enough German to get through that, I’m taking along Leonardo Sciascia’s “The Wine Dark Sea,” a collection of short stories (in English). I’ve loved the three short, elegant, peculiar novels that NYRB Classics have republished in recent years. Set in Sicily, they start off as police procedurals with Mafia overtones, but have a way of ingeniously unraveling themselves into uneasy pictures of a society in which it’s essentially impossible to get to the bottom of anything.

The author of “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” dives back into fiction, to the Congo and beyond.

When I was working on my novel, I actually read very little fiction. I was so steeped in my own imaginary worlds that I needed to keep my nighttime reading firmly rooted in the here and now. But now that I am lightly salsaing between books—collecting the wet clay that will form the next tale—I’ve been diving back in the world of literature… and what a world! I’m currently devouring Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” piece by delicious piece. This is one of the best American story collections since Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son.” Just spectacular. I feel drunk when I read these stories, drunk with the possibilities of existence. Makes you want to get back to the page and bang it out.

I’m also working my way through the colonial/post-colonial canon of Congo classics because my next book takes place, at least in part, in the jungles around that great river. So V. S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” is pretty extraordinary. He wasn’t afraid to drop in lots of exposition, break all the rules, and he gets away with it. I would like to invent a machine the size and shape of a cereal box with a yellow button on the top, that, when pressed, produces a long table adorned with much wine and mutton, and seated at this table are Conrad, Naipaul, and Tolstoy (and perhaps Calvino, if he is not busy) in all of their most effusive and sympathetic forms. I would wear my Barbara Walters wig and we would talk of rubber, vegetarianism, and adultery.

David Grossman’s article on Bruno Schulz in the New Yorker a couple of weeks back inspired me to go back and read “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” When I was in England several years ago, I stumbled across this rare book, which includes his gaunt, masochistic sketches (see: Maid whipping a naked man). His writing, like his illustrations, are so haunting and also vaguely familiar, in that way great literature can often feel, as if the words have been cast in perfect order/disorder. Schulz constantly gives me goosebumps—I too love tailor’s dummies and twine and the melancholic wheeze of a barrel organ, and the fact that many of us feel this way about his writing gives me hope for the future of barrel organs.

Finally, I just returned from Holland, where I was handed an amazing little Dutch spy novel about World War Two called “The Darkroom of Damocles” by W. F. Hermans. I could not put this puppy down. It’s only recently been translated into English and I love that there are all these local masterpieces floating around in Icelandic and Portuguese and Farsi that are known and loved in their native countries but have not had a chance to cast their spell beyond the linguistic borders that divide us. I’m also developing a theory that in order to keep the mind healthy and wise, we must read one well-written, exquisitely composed crime/spy novel per year. Chandler, Hammett, le Carre, Price, and now Hermans. This may or may not fight cancer.