Mihai Parparita has written a greasemonkey script to integrate Gmail and Google Reader. Works brilliantly and much faster than any solution I have seen so far. Saves me having 2 tabs open. Here's a screenshot:

persistent.info/images/gmail-r ...

This is such an awesome script. Mihai is awesome.

Find "&view=list" in the script(without quotes), and delete to have the expand view.