Raising Kane (1971) By Pauline Kael - Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich both mentioned this book in their respective Citizen Kane commentary tracks, so I decided to pick it up. Surprisingly, it's not about Citizen Kane the movie, but rather Citizen Kane the event; Kael spends most of Raising Kane looking at the making of Kane and the people behind Kane rather than examining the movie and its parts in a vaccuum. Most of Kael's research is interesting, even though she does tend to go off on tangents about subjects that are only tangentially related to the film, like her preference of 1930s comedies over 1940s comedies.  Still, there's a lot of great stuff here, especially the material dealing with Herman J. Mankiewicz and his contribution to Kane's script, which usually amounts to a footnote in most discussions of Citizen Kane. Kael really should have sat down with Welles himself before writing this essay (he was still alive in 1971), but Raising Kane is still an interesting work, and not a huge investment at around 120 pages.

Raising Kane is online HERE in its entirety if you'd like to read it yourself (warning: horribly formatted).

The Maltese Falcon (1930) By Dashiell Hammett - Most of what what I've said about The Maltese Falcon can be found in my review of the film adaptation; since the book is practically identical to the movie, there's not much more to say.  But if you're looking to get into hard-boiled detective fiction, this is a good place to start--as is the movie, if you've never watched any film noir.  Hammett's prose is stylized, yet never flashy, and even though protagonist Sam Spade is the ultimate badass detective, Hammett gives him some vulnerability so he's not invincible enough to drain the story of tension.  It's easy to see why John Huston left so much of the book untouched.