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Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown shares with Renee Montagne the best things she's been reading lately: on the growing pains of ambitious companies, working in your PJs and how losing your job can mean finding your life.

India has an exam for virtually every government job — no matter how small. The Railway Exams, given to aspiring guards, ticket collectors and drivers, ask a surprising variety of questions — difficult questions. Competition for jobs on the railway is extreme — by one account there are 20,000 applicants for one ticket collector job.

Writer Judith Shulevitz started observing Shabbat because of her own ambivalence about the traditional weekly day of rest. Her own experiences with the ritual — as well as its larger historical context — are examined in her new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

At the massive central Florida retirement community of 80,000 residents, the lines blur between public and private, civic and commercial, real and fictional. There are no residents under age 19, everything is golf-cart accessible — and it's all owned by one developer. But the residents like it — it allows them to retire to a life free of irritation.

Mosab Hassan Yousef's father helped found Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization. But Yousef chose a different path — working with the Israeli intelligence group Shin Bet.

The Iranian-American journalist was imprisoned in Iran, interrogated, tried and eventually released. But the controversy continues. Saberi says she confessed to her crimes in order to get out of jail but asserts that she did nothing wrong. Her new book Between Two Worlds is an account of her time in captivity.

In 2008, historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive motor-neuron disease. For the past several months, Judt has been writing a series of essays for The New York Review of Books, charting life in what he calls a "progressive imprisonment without parole."

Sarah Rose's For All the Tea in China tells the story of how Britain hijacked control of the 19th century tea trade by transplanting production of the popular drink to India.

Simon Johnson is co-author of the book 13 Bankers, about how deregulation and Wall Street's relationship with Washington contributed to the financial crisis. Johnson says there's no virtue whatsoever in huge banks

In One Nation Under Dog, journalist Michael Schaffer argues that the $43 billion industry that's grown around our obsession with our pets is more a reflection of the society we live in than anything else.