Richard Siken, bartender at the Cup Café, poet: I'm reading Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. I first encountered Cortázar through his poetry; he's famous for his prose poems. (This new work) is amazing; it's not quite a novel and it's not quite an epic poem, but rather reinvents the rules for literature as it goes along. There's a table of instructions on the first page which suggests at least two ways of reading the book; you can read the first 56 chapters in order and never know what happens in the remaining 99--the expendable chapters located in the last half of the book. You can read the first half and be done, or follow the program telling you how to jump back and forth between the main and auxiliary texts. Here's the thing: The chapters are like prose poems, but they accumulate. The first 56 are connected by a narrative; the others by theme. So you sort of get your choice: Do you want to continue to follow the narrative or do you want to digress? I've been getting frustrated with the traditional beginning-middle-end, because it's not the way I live and it's not the way I think. It's so wonderful to encounter a book that's charting the course of an emotional life and a life of the mind rather than a simple description of who did what to whom and when. Michelle Haller, waitress at Café Poca Cosa: I'm reading Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis. It's about an evangelist preacher who's a womanizer and boozer as well. It's weird because all of a sudden I've been inundated with all this religious stuff. I picked up Elmer Gantry because the movie was recommended to me, but I spotted the book and decided I'd read it first. Lewis captures middle America quite well--the small town, Midwestern feeling at the turn of the century. It's kind of like everybody is very accepting of the life they've been given, their lot in life; to me the Midwest still has a little bit of that feel, though the themes of the novel still seem pretty contemporary. Elmer Gantry feels guilty for his vices: seeing people on the sly and drinking. At one point he shacks up with a woman preacher, and they're living in sin while they're preaching against sin. The back of the book says it's "a penetrating study of hypocrisy." Joe Marshall, cook at a downtown restaurant. I've been reading a bunch of stuff, including Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. In it, Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan all the cities of his empire. Some of the cities are real, some are imaginary and some no longer exist because they've been destroyed by the great Mongol hoards. It's one of those books you can read because it's easy and then you can yak about it--you know, "I like the city with all the plumbing sticking out"--because it's not written in any particular sequence so it's easy to sift through and remember. I'm also reading the Acme Novelty Comic Library, Issue #7, by Chris Ware. How to describe it? It's more than a good story or really good art. Every single thing in it is designed to be part of the whole. Even the real ads are designed by Ware. You can really dive into it. It's kind of mind-numbing to realize he's so obsessed that he can draw and write every part of it. Also I'm reading The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols, because I like laughing at white people.

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