I picked up Beginning Python by Norton, Samuel, Aitel et al, and Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff on my way to the train to New Jersey to visit my sister for dinner.
There's a pretty good Borders Books right near Penn Station, and even though it's only a 45-minute ride to New Brunswick via New Jersey Transit, my reflex is to pick up some new reading material.
The Python is book is for my transition from the Microsoft world of Visual Basic to a much larger universe of open source scripting. I made this decision a while back, and it's just coincidental that the Google App Engine requires Python.
Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins is a collection of ten new short stories along with 21 classics. I vaguely recall reading a biography of Hemingway that gave his list of best short story writers. It included de Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy and others. Wolff is on my list.
You can listen to T. Coraghessan Boyle reading Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” (scroll down to the "ONE WITH A BULLET" podcast) in a podcast that's part of The New Yorker series. There's also a brief discussion at the end of the reading.