We've taken to leaving the house -- sometimes for hours at a time -- without a jacket, which can only mean one thing: it's Summer Book Club time. Dude, look at the stipulations: "Small incentive prizes will be awarded to enrolled children who have read for two, four and six hours during the eight weeks of Summer Reading." When we were a kid, we read six hours a day (our "honey, don't you want to go outside?" parents will attest to this). We would clean up at ther SFPL's club! Oh, to be under 13 again.

SFist Derrick asks "Why start one new book when you can start two?" He hasn't quite figured out how that will work, but he's cracked open William Zinsser's On Writing Well and Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. The latter, of course, is the much-talked-about investigation into the routes that food takes as it comes to the table. It's sparked a Web-based debate between Pollan and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who feels that the book comes down too hard on the industrial organic model that Whole Foods helped build. On Writing Well is one of the classic books for nonfiction writers who want to improve their craft, and comes highly recommended by pretty much everybody whose opinion Derrick cares about.

While the SFPL's great One City One Book program doesn't begin until this fall, they've already announced their next choice, The Hummingbird's Daughter.

According to Rosie Levy Merlin, One City One Book's Program Manager, "We'll have over 500 copies of the book available at SFPL soon, and people can already reserve one of the 500 titles so they'll have a nice brand-new book to borrow and read when they arrive!" Thanks for the heads up, Rosie!

Like many of you, SFist Emily finds the English countryside kind of creepy, so she was pleased to see Kazuo Ishiguro (of The Remains of the Day fame) elaborate this theme in his latest novel, Never Let Me Go. (Ed note: Hey, Rain and I read this too!) While skirting a policital debate about the ethics of human cloning and selling of organs, Ishiguro manages to paint a very disturbing picture of a world where these things are commonplace. Like Remains of the Day, the narrative style of this book is sort of slow and plodding, but it carries you through as you try to piece just exactly what is going to happen to the characters, and especially the narrator.

Hungry Planet, the latest book by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, visits 30 families in 24 countries to take a look at what they eat. The book's subtitle is What the World Eats but the authors are a couple from Napa, the publisher from Berkeley: this is a local effort, and we can chauvinistically be proud of the James Beard Foundation award it just received. Each family in the book is photographed with all the food they would eat in one week displayed on the dining room table, or whatever substitutes for a dining room or a table. The effect is striking as one can see at a glance how much, or how little one family eats in different countries.

They visit a struggling Sicilian family, who, when they do the accounting for the picture with a week's worth of food, is shocked to discover they spend more than $2,000 on cigarettes every year, as they purchase the packs one by one: by consuming products, be it cigarettes or food, in small quantities every day, one is immersed in the particular, and loses the sense of the big picture. Little streams, bad rivers, you know. One has little idea how much of this or that the rations of every meal eventually add up to. Cigarette is one bad habit, but on that dining room table, even in the developing world, many others find their way: processed food, junk food, bottles of soda, fast food. One week is enough to bring out some perspective into the consumption habits of a family and to draw some lessons already.

Have you checked out the eBooks and eAudio at the SFPL? We're itching to try out the audio options, but they don't have anything that works on Macs or iPods. Boo!

After a weekend double feature of In Cold Blood and Capote, both never seen before by SFist Rain, she got the urge to actually, finally, read the book that was (in a sense) responsible for both films: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is a testament to the quality of the book that, after seeing its events portrayed twice the previous weekend, Rain was instantly engrossed and unable to put the book down. It also reminded her that "true crime" books don't have to be hackneyed and painful to read. Hell, it proved that the majority of the books she has been reading recently (and not worth even mentioning to SFist Reads for months) have been badly written. How nice it is to read a book by someone who really knows how to capture a reader and maintain beautiful prose, even when describing some gruesome events indeed.

SFist Cheshire is barrelling through The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard. As usual from Mr. Leonard, it's a good, fast read with sharp dialogue and hardboiled characters. This time it's a crime novel taking place during prohibition in Oklahoma and Kansas, about a deputy U.S. Marshal, a sort of young Tommy Lee Jones character. It's got old-fashioned bank robberies, whorehouses, deceit, killings, all the good stuff. Not quite as good as Get Shorty, but way the hell better than Be Cool, the two other Leonard books Chesh has read.

Every spring we have a major purge and get rid of a lot of the books we've accumulated over the past year. We sell what we can at a local used bookstore, before donating the rest to the Friends of the SFPL. Any recommendations on where we can get the biggest bang for our book sale? Let us know in the comments!

SFist Eve just finished The Brief History of the Dead. Half set in the after-life, where the dead remain until everyone living who remembers them has died, and half set in the near future, where a super-virus has killed every person on earth but one, TBHOTD is a beautifully written book with a cool concept. Unfortunately, it's as terribly unsatisfying as it is thought provocative, as we finished the book wondering "is that all there is?"

Since she was stuck on planes for a day, Mary-Lynn actually read a book. She's about 20 frustratingly close pages away from finishing Bill Buford's Heat, about his time spent learning to be a cook, mostly at the feet (and in the heat) of Mario Batali's own masters and kitchen.