Currently on My Reading Table

How To Write a Book Proposal - Michael Larsen. Thanks to my Second City teacher and friend Nancy for terrifying me with this one. Yes, your dear Bella is working on a book, and therefore a book proposal. What's it about? You'll find out.

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It occurs to me as I finish this one up that I've never actually read a book about blogging before. It's sort of annoying to see footnotes with URLs and not be able to click on them. Damn the static nature of printed paper. On the plus side, the way these two wrote this book has changed the way I'm going to approach both writing and marketing my own book. Stay tuned for more details on that.

How To Read And Why - Harold Bloom. A loaner from my little peanut Sloan, who is a terribly good influence on my reading habits. She's also prompting me to read as much Bill Bryson as I can get my hands on. (Aw...I just saw a picture of him for the first time...he's adorable. And he's ginger. It's love.)

Latest issues of Wired. In a recent issue, Beck discussed his fun with multimedia. A few nights ago Sloan woke me up at 1 AM to report on the Beck concert here in Chicago, and, to summarize her initial explosion of enthusiasm, "The band had dinner onstage, and then there were puppets that looked just like the band, and then they had dinner, and then you realized the puppets were backstage, and it was like a movie they were shooting live, and totally coordinating all the movements with these puppets, and it was awesome! And THEN..." (Oh, and she blogged about it, too.)

Latest issues of Discover. I love, love, love me some science. I have Father Leo back at Marian College in Indianapolis to thank for that. Besides giving his students a thorough and well-rounded history of scientific thought, and requiring his students to read and report on one science fiction novel every month, he also had us regularly report on articles from Scientific American and such, and I was immediately hooked. For years I crammed my cranium with subscriptions to all the general interest science magazines as well as several pricey journals, like Science and Nature. I've let up on that recently only due to budgetary constraints (and, of course, the fact that comedy is now running my life).

Latest issues of the New Yorker. I wrote about it on the Bastion, but it took those fancypants New Yorker writers to poke around and get Charna Halpern to finally spill her guts on the mystery of what happened to Del Close's skull. Hint: it hasn't starred in Hamlet at the Goodman Theater.

Shadow Divers - Robert Kurson. This one is a loaner from my dad, who visited me here in Chicago recently. We took a trip through the U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry and marveled at the stories of the men who lived, fought, and died in these amazing pieces of military history. I'm going to read it, Dad, I promise. It's just a little intense, that's all.