Over tapas at the bar in a Spanish restaurant, we heard two guitars beating out a fascinating fusion of rock, Latin harmonies, salsa, and heavy metal with what felt like a dash of flamenco thrown in for good measure. The couple making this striking music was Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero, known simply as Rodrigo y Gabriela. They left their native Mexico City with $1,000 and two guitars to try to make it in Ireland, where they imagined that their unique musical style and what they referred to as the “unknown factor” would build their success. They didn’t know any English at the time, but now, after making it in Ireland, and almost everywhere else in the world, their English is full of charming Irish turns of phrase and their music is simply addictive.

Barcelona The Great Enchantress is an extended love letter to the vibrant, noisy, freedom-loving European city that looks out over the azure Mediterranean and is the most creatively exciting place we know. Written by noted art-critic Robert Hughes, this small volume overflows with his passion for Barcelona's art and architecture, subjects he generously expands to include cultural history, food, and politics, as well as sketches of his personal engagement with Barcelona's people and the creative life-force of the city. Hughes writes, "You are lucky if not too late in life, you discover a second city other than your place of birth which becomes a true home town."

In his album Chavez Ravine, Ry Cooder gathers great, if little known, musicians to present a rich retrospective musical journey back to the Chicano culture that flourished in 1940s and '50s Los Angeles. This masterwork focuses on the Chavez Ravine community that was destroyed to make way for the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers when they relocated to Los Angeles in 1958. Chavez Ravine includes some of the most soulful music you've ever heard, tunes that ably demonstrates how the incomparable Ry Cooder can overhwelm you with musical pleasures yet make you consider important, sometimes tragic, cultural issues at the same time. Cooder reintroduces us to an era and a place that were all but lost, one where great and forgotten voices get to sing aloud again.

Annie Dillard's masterpiece For the Time Being is a book we have read numerous times, listened to on car trips, purchased in quantity for friends, and recommended to students as exemplifying extraordinary nonfiction writing about complex subjects. It opens with a meditation on birth defects and moves gracefully to include the seemingly unrelated stories of palentologist Teilhard de Chardin's exploration of the deserts of China, the natural history of sand, the teachings of the mystic Baal Shem Tov, and other esoteric bits of story, past and present, that become a cohesive and deeply intelligent examination of life, death, calamity, and the question, "Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" For the Time Being is a daring work by a virtuoso at the peak of her powers.

We are clearly transitioning into a very different age for storytellers. Before long, we’ll look back and marvel that stories were once described by the mechanism for their delivery. Nowadays, books speak, movie theatres host live performances broadcast to millions, and film and television merge in wonderful new ways. The brilliant Mad Men unspools as a many-hour film that we are happy will continue at least for a fourth season. Nurse Jackie and Brotherhood have also been renewed, thank heaven. The inventive United States of Tara is available on demand while we wait for more. And on DVD, we can continue to watch the late great series we miss very much, The Wire, and the now classic Deadwood. Its three seasons still get our vote as some of the best of the best television available on DVD—a series in which mad-genius David Milch hews something singular and extraordinary out of the lawless American West. Some of our friends and colleagues challenge our contention that it’s the most humane series we know—what with the feeding of the recently deceased to pigs and all. We insist they keep watching, knowing that Deadwood will eventually get under their skin in the very best sort of way. And then there are the quirky pleasures of watching the same guys fish for crab year after year on Deadliest Catch, which can still hold our rapt attention. Go figure.

Our daughter Megan is a physician's assistant specializing in neurological surgery, and when the family book group makes an exciting discovery, it tends to come from the literature of medicine. Megan is most at home in an operating room, and has organized medical missions to Ghana and Haiti, so she adds her own behind-the-scenes stories to the discussion of books like Dr. Atul Gawande's Better and Complications. Another favorite is Pauline Chen’s Final Exam. Pauline is a friend who writes as skillfully and with as sure a hand as she practices surgery. Her narrative investigation of death, and the fear of death that sometimes prevents doctors from connecting meaningfully with their dying patients, is elegant, insightful, and full of grace.