I’ve been a fan of “The Twilight Zone” since I was 10 and saw my first episode, the one with Telly Savalas and the creepy talking doll, and it scared the living piss out of me. Back when it actually meant something to be a writer in Hollywood, the Holy Triumvirate of Rod Serling, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont were nonstop human factories of some of the smartest ideas on TV, and the episodes hold up to this day. William Shatner and the monster on the wing of the airplane. Donna Douglas getting the bandages off and finding she’s (gasp!) still hideous. The kid from “Lost in Space” who’d send you to the cornfield. “It’s a cookbook!” I’ll drop you like a bad habit to watch some Zone.

But the one episode that gets me like no other is “Time Enough at Last.” That’s the one (by Serling) with Burgess Meredith as the guy who just wants to read. His job at the bank’s a stone drag, his wife’s a hectoring bitch and he has no time to read - until the day he’s inside the vault when the nukes come down and he emerges to find that everyone else is gone. At last he has all the time he wants.

I won’t give away the ending.

The hazard of being an avid reader (and by the way, The Reader is the name of the column, like the McGuffey’s Reader - it’s not me; people have asked) is that you know you’re never going to be able to read everything you want to. I’m fortunate in that this gig gives me access to books I might not otherwise have discovered, but on the other hand, I’m often forced to set aside other books in order to meet my deadlines. I’ve taken to reading several books at the same time, depending on where I am. At this particular moment, for example, I’m reading Ken Smith’s Junk English, The Daily Show’s America, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (an excellent horror novel, the vampire done right for once) and volume one of The Essential Howard the Duck (don’t laugh - Marvel comics from the ’70s were freakin’ surreal). And still it’s not enough. The monster just gets hungrier and more demanding.

Here, then, are a few recent books that made their way into my hands but not into the column. All are highly recommended.

Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China by James Fallows (Knopf, 2009): Despite its place as the most populous nation on Earth and the world’s third largest economy (and closing in fast on number two), for most Westerners getting a handle on China is like the seven blind men feeling up the elephant. We know certain aspects of China - their food is yummy, their Hong Kong martial-arts flicks kick ass, their gymnasts are suspect, their baby formula sometimes contains the stuff cheap ashtrays are made of - but most of us have no real idea what life is like for the Chinese at ground level. This collection compiles Atlantic Monthly reporter Fallows’ dispatches from 2006 to 2008 as he lives among the Chinese people and travels to all parts of the country, from the gambling dens of Macao to the hinterlands bordering the Gobi Desert. He interviews factory workers in the plants that produce basically everything we use and spends time with one of China’s new billionaires, reports on their most popular reality show and fills us in on the continuous information war going on behind the Great Firewall of China. While not comprehensive by any means - nobody could capture all of China in one book - Fallows’ missives point out again and again that we have more to be wary of but less to fear from the new China than most of us in the West believe.

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (HarperCollins, 2009): Pope Benedict XVI declared the span from June 2008 to this June as “The Year of Paul,” a time to reflect and reconsider the work of the second most important figure in the New Testament after Jesus. From his early days as Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee who led the Sanhedrin’s persecution of the radical new cult of Christ until receiving an ecstatic vision of the risen Jesus while on the road to Damascus, to his continuous travels throughout Asia Minor, Greece and Rome building the community of followers that would eventually become the Christian Church, Paul’s letters (which predate the Gospels themselves) were an instruction manual on how the life and teachings of Jesus were to be interpreted and institutionalized. But Paul has always been a controversial figure, as many of his letters appear to advocate slavery, the subjugation of women, and a level of prejudice that has fueled much of the popular perception of Christianity as intolerant and hopelessly patriarchal.

Rock-star theologians Borg and Crossan come to Paul’s rescue with an in-depth piece of historical, textual and contextual scholarship that separates the seven letters actually written by Paul from the others written in Paul’s name, and demonstrate that the inauthentic letters were disseminated in an attempt to rein in some of Paul’s more revolutionary ideas into a form more palatable to the doctrines of the early Roman church. As the scholars - one Lutheran, one Catholic - pick through the writings of Paul in his times, we get a clearer picture of Paul than the archconservative, misogynist crab his reputation has suggested, and thus we get a more lucid idea of what Christianity was supposed to look like from the get-go.

Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs by R.U. Sirius (Kensington, 2009): Here is one of my favorite jokes: “What does a Deadhead say when the acid wears off? ’What’s this shit we’re listening to?’” No discussion of rock and roll (or hip-hop or country or jazz, for that matter) can proceed without bringing drugs into it. Without drugs we would have no Beatles, no Stones, no Dead, no Dylan, no Jimi or Morrison, no Lou Reed or Bob Marley, no Johnny Cash or Snoop Dogg. On the other hand we also wouldn’t have Elvis face-down in the bathroom or Brian Jones face-down in the pool, Syd Barrett in the loony bin or Kurt Cobain eating the shotgun (Courtney conspiracy theorists, start your engines). Drugs are incredibly stupid, but they’re also fun, and the indispensable fact is that half if not most of the music you listen to was written, performed, and/or recorded by people whose brains were baking, frying or sauteeing in butter at the time.

R.U. Sirius, the twisted mind behind the late great magazine Mondo 2000, presents this compendium of quotes, anecdotes and trivia about the long dysfunctional relationship between rock stars and their chemicals. Here’s David Crosby defying anyone to produce the music he has before condemning his drug use, and here’s Frank Zappa refusing to do drugs and firing anyone in his band who does. Here are the ridiculous commercials for Rock Against Drugs, the favorite form of community service for musicians caught holding. Here are the best albums made on drugs and the best albums to listen to while on drugs. And it has my new favorite quote this week, from the decidedly anti-drug Henry Rollins: “You can survive it; look at Keith Richards. But, you know, LOOK at Keith Richards.”

Sirius, to his credit, doesn’t come out for or against drug use - he states from the outset that his book is simply about the way it is. All he does is draw from 50 years of the convoluted history of popular music and the various monkeys on its back, and the result is a book that’s light on conclusions but funny and interesting. Astute readers of this column know that I have no problem recommending bathroom reading, and as toilet books go, this one is pretty entertaining.

John G. Nettles