My current little room reading is Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, written by Arianna Huffington back in the '80s. It's really thick and I'm only like 100 pages along, so this will be awhile at 2-3 pages per trip. You get a pretty good feel for the artistic environment of the Paris art scene in the early 20th century, though.
As an artist to some degree myself, I dig this sort of thing. Once of my fav movies is Henry and June, about writers in Paris in '30s-- a very sexy flick BTW.
~ Lyric ~