What I've been reading

"When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession" by Jane Hirschman and Carol Munter

and

"Conservatives Without Conscience" by John Dean (yes, THAT John Dean)

A few additional comments here:
http://community.livejournal.com/50_in_06/106932.html

and a lengthy post about "When Women..." here:

http://community.livejournal.com/no_more_diets/3364.html

More on "Conservatives Without Conscience"

The review from Publisher's Weekly accuses Dean of using social science to put a respectable coating over his ad hominem attacks on the "wrong" kind of conservatives, and I won't dispute there's an element of that in the book.

However, I am finding certain parts of it very interesting, including the bit about "authoritarian personality." You can take this test to see if you have thoughts and traits that would qualify you as an authoritarian (either follower or leader) personality (I scored as a liberal airhead):

http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

The other bits I like included:
-Dean's analysis of the different strains within modern conservatism; it explains a lot about why even hardcore old school conservatives dislike much of what's gone on under the current administration.
-Dean's discussion of the liberal nature of the founding of our country (if conservatism is about respecting the past and being resistant to change, then the American Revolution certainly wasn't conservative!)
-Dean's breakdown of some of the basic tenets of conservatism that I, and many other liberals, would actually agree with, such as learning from the past and being careful about change for the sake of change.