Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to.

Bronte Coates is reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman

I’m a third of the way through The Idiot and loving it. This is such a smart, surreal and absorbing campus novel; Elif Batuman is a sharp and insightful writer, with a talent for bringing out the funny side of everyday life. The eponymous idiot of the novel is Selina, a Turkish-American Harvard freshman from New Jersey. As she adapts to her new environment – populated by self-obsessed professors, weird housemates and unmotivated ESL students – she starts to falls in love with a Hungarian maths student, over email. Batuman’s observations deftly capture so many of my own experiences from my late teens and early 20s. You can read an extract from this brilliantly funny book here.

Mark Rubbo is reading Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

I’ve just finished Phillip Kerr’s twelfth Bernie Gunther novel. I really think he keeps getting better. If you haven’t read any of these books, you’d do worse than start with this one and get two stories in one.

Gunther is a world weary detective in the Berlin police force. He can’t stand the Nazis and they can’t stand him, but he’s such a good cop that sometimes they need him. In Prussian Blue, Bernie has to solve the shooting of one of Martin Bormann’s flunkies at Hitler’s retreat in Berchtesgarten and he has to do it quickly before the Furher arrives to open his new tea house. Everyone’s evil and madly popping ‘pervetin’, a meth amphetamine based product that was all the rage in the Nazi army (see Blitzed by Norman Ohler for context). In a parallel story set 15 years later, Bernie is battling a former colleague who’s now a flunky for the GDR’s Stasi. Your Easter reading solved!

Stella Charls is celebrating the critic Hilton Als

I am thrilled that my favourite critic Hilton Als has picked up the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism this week. Als engages with art so deeply – not only are his observations acute and beautifully written, they’re often intensely personal. Consider his recent piece on the film Moonlight. (I highly recommend this review if you’ve seen the film. If you haven’t – what are you waiting for? Go now!)

Als’s most recent essay collection, White Girls, is a bold and insightful analysis of literature, art and music. I loved the book, and I loved Rebecca Harkins-Cross’ reflection on it, which you can read here. She writes: ‘The way Als merges ideas and genres is audacious, exhilarating; at times it’s dizzying, trying to retrace the winding roads you’ve traversed within one piece, ending up so far from where you started.’

Only last week I listened to Als being interviewed on the brand-new Rookie podcast, in their ‘Ask a Grown’ section. His friendship with writer and editor-in-chief of Rookie, Tavi Gevinson, seems really special. If you’re in need of something heart-warming, do read Gevinson’s letter in which she praises Als’s acceptance speech for last year’s Lambda Literary Awards. Reading both letter and speech made my own heart swell.

Jo Case is reading Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

I am a huge Jon Stewart fan. I watched The Daily Show regularly when he was host. I stopped watching when he was replaced by Trevor Noah – not because I didn’t like Noah, but because it wasn’t the same. Noah is smart and funny, sure, but he operates from a place of calm, centred, measured bemusement, whereas Stewart’s scalpel-snark was from a place of controlled anger and compassionate entitlement – not just on his own behalf, but on that of his vision of a democratic America. Noah works from a steady observational distance, within a broader global context: he grew up in apartheid South Africa, the child of a black mother and white (Swiss-German) father.

I’ve slowly realised, as I’ve watched YouTube snippets and heard Noah on podcasts, that he’s no less a talent than Stewart, just different. And that his distinctive viewpoint – that of an African man now embedded in the liberal heartland of an America now ruled by the far-right (and a president with little regard for following rules). Fact: Trevor Noah, unlike pretty much any other liberal voice, predicted Donald Trump’s presidential win long before the election. Why? Trump’s brand of brutal charisma echoed what he’d seen in African political leaders. (Listen to the New Yorker’s latest podcast for Noah’s eerily apt comparison of Donald Trump to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.)

This led me to Born a Crime, Noah’s memoir of growing up in South Africa, hiding out in the ‘white’ quarters of Johannesburg where he and his mother illegally lived, and staying in his grandparents’ two-room Soweto home. It was hard for me to come to work today: I just wanted to keep reading this incredible, beautifully written, completely fascinating book about an extraordinary life – albeit, one that was almost ordinary for his place and time. No wonder he’s unrattled by the seeming illogic of the current American political landscape. He was born illegally in a country whose government overlooked ‘logic’ to establish and maintain a system whose overriding purpose was maintaining the privilege of a lucky (racially selected) few, through controlling and demeaning the many.