If you work at a magazine, you should read The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing. Or so I tell everyone.

Read: "The Art of Fine Baking," by Paula Peck
Why: I like to bake
A detailed guide to making cakes and pastry
Takeaway: I like to bake (see above) but I don't know if I have it in me to make anything in this book. These are the classic recipes for things you love from the bakery; each cake involves four or five complex steps for the cake itself, separating eggs and cooking sugar syrup to 238 degrees on a candy thermometer, and then you can make a buttercream frosting or glaze that involves another three steps and three pans. Making strudel or your own puff pastry would tie up your kitchen all day; it would be a fun project with my sisters but how annoyed would we be when people ate only small slices, or left half the plate uneaten? Reading this made me tense with all the tied-up expectations of making a cake that takes eight hours.

Read: "Lebek: A City of Northern Europe Through the Ages" by Xavier Hernandez and Jordi Ballonga; illustrated by Francesco Corni (1991)

Why: Wanted to buy something from used bookstore in Italian Market

A large black-and-white illustrated book in the style of Macauley's "Cathedral," it shows how a seaside port city develops from 1000 BC to the present.

Takeaway: Every time I open this book I get lost in it and get a crick in my neck. Fourteen enormous bird's-eye-view illustrations, in pen and ink, follow the city from the Bronze Age to the late 20th century. The city of Lebek starts as a farmers' campsite, builds a stockade, fights the Vikings, then builds a Gothic cathedral that rises in the middle of the little townhouses like a giant turbine. The whole city is like a machine that's being built from the inside -- it's neat to watch the city grow bit by bit and make itself into something that looks familiar. I got so invested in the growth of Lebek that when it got pounded in World War II, I was sad.