What's Maya Soetoro-Ng reading?

Maya Soetoro-Ng is the half-sister of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Soetoro-Ng, 38, teaches world culture, history and civics at a high school in Honolulu, where Obama was born. The Times caught up with her during a recent fundraiser for the candidate in Tampa. What is on your nightstand?

Sweetness in the Belly (by Canadian novelist Camilla Gibb). It's about this woman whose parents were kind of hippies and they died (when she was a child). She ended up making a life for herself in Ethiopia. It was a story about a woman who was living in between worlds, who was straddling two worlds, and that was interesting to me because of my family.

Adam Smith, Times staff writer