On the lighter side of things, I recommend Umberto Eco's How to Travel With a Salmon. It is a collection of mostly short essays on society and life taken from a column he wrote. He writes of the epic adventure of trying to get a replacement driver's licence in Italy, of how to survive riding an American train, of coffee, and how to buy gadgets. In the essay on gadgets, just describing the contents of one of those in-flight 'magazines' is enough--you don't even need a punchline.

I had fun--and learned a bit about Italy. I don't know if Eco does his own translation or someone else does it for him, but whoever it is has good word sense.