Submarine, by British writer Joe Dunthorne, is a first novel of plainspoken and guileless poetry.

"Nngh," says Oliver Tate's father, staggering a bit.

"No time for vowels," Oliver observes.

Oliver is the protagonist of Submarine, which is set in Swansea, Wales, and he is way too clever for himself. But he's still endearing as he self-consciously expands his vocabulary, keeps a list of girls he has kissed, and surveils his parents. Worried that his mother is having an affair, he decides to investigate. This is a funny and affecting coming-of-age novel, and the protagonist is a British great-nephew-in-law to Salinger's Holden Caulfield.

At the end of our second episode, Daniel Menaker gives each of our guests a copy of American Photobooth, a stunning book by Näkki Goranin. It's a history of the machine, which first achieved widespread use in the United States, accompanied by hundreds of photos that the author has
collected over the years.

I'm almost as big a sports fan as I am a reader, but books about sports often leave me cold. I usually find them too argumentative or too hagiographic -- too consciously subversive or too wide-eyed and faux-innocent. I'd almost always prefer to just watch a game. There are exceptions, though, and one of them is recently out in paperback: Cait Murphy's Crazy '08.

With the new baseball season just a few weeks away, it's the perfect time to go back exactly a century to a time when the sport was making the transition to its modern incarnation. Murphy argues (persuasively) that 1908 was the best season on record, featuring a tremendous three-way battle for the National League between the New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Pittsburgh Pirates.

Murphy does a rollicking job of recounting several pivotal games, but equally terrific are the more tangential anecdotes that she seamlessly includes: How and why team nicknames stuck; how a series of fires led to the creation of new stadiums; and how an 11-year-old boy got thrown in jail, prompting a judge to rule that fans could keep the foul balls they caught.

If you want to know about the cauldron out of which Barack Obama has surfaced--Chicago politics--there can be few better ways than to read Windy City by Scott Simon. It's about the death (natural or unnatural? that is the question) of the city's mayor, and the efforts of Alderman Sonny Roopini, a widower born in India who must fill the mayor's shoes, take care of his own teenage daughters, and figure out what really happened--all within seventy-two hours. Chicago's ethnicities, cuisines, aldermanic compromises, political horse-trading, and spirit are all brought to life here.

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker is a monumental work of research about the causes and the avoidability of the Second World War--in its short-take composition, it's structurally reminiscent of Clive James' recent compendium Cultural Amnesia. Many of the heroic myths about Winston Churchill suffer badly at Baker's (and these selected historical records') hands, as this always-surprising author builds a case for pacifism as a plausible and possible alternative to what most historians claim was an inevitable war.

At the end of our first episode, Dan gave each of our guests a copy of A la Cart by Hillary Carlip. For years, Carlip collected grocery lists that had been dropped on sidewalks, pinned under tires in parking lots, and left in shopping carts. Using these lists, she imagined who their original owners might have been. She then wrote a short essay about each person and -- here's the kicker -- used costumes and make-up to assume the identity of her creations. The result is a colorful, fun book that will have you looking at your fellow shoppers with more (or maybe less?) sympathy.
Carlip has also produced one of the smoother tie-in web sites I've seen to promote the book.