Night-table Reading

Naomi Wolf (writer): Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, by Andrew Motion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "It's striking to see how one man's life embodies the beauty and the hopelessness of postwar England."

Jimmy Scott (jazz vocalist): Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, by John Edward Hasse (Simon & Schuster). "It brought all the music back. I remember every place and every thing like it was yesterday."

Cokie Roberts (news analyst, NPR and ABC News): Jefferson: A Novel, by Max Byrd (Bantam). "It's about Jefferson's years in Paris. We get a different view of him—a sense of him as a father and as a complicated and complex person.