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I gave this book to a friend. When I asked him how he liked it, he said, "Well, I have a crush on the author now. And I'm writing again." Seemed like a pretty good testimonial to me.

The only books I can remember seeing in other girls' hands were assigned reading. Anyone reading a book had to have a highlighter poised over it to make it clear that this wasn't reading for pleasure. Celebrity gossip took up all remaining time. Relevant magazines were popular. Even then...

Here is my favorite story about Thoreau, from Moncure Conway's Autobiography: Then there were the huckleberrying parties. These were under the guidance of Thoreau, because he alone knew the precise locality of every variety of the berry. I recall an occasion when little Edward Emerson...

"You'll never get married if you read so much."

War and Peace, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, The Scarlet Letter, 1984, Grapes of Wrath--Yes, these were a pleasure to read. I think the difficulty with literary classics is in metaphor. Light reading usually isn't figurative. It's perfectly suitable for when you're not in the mood to ponder...

One way to use the month of high-pressure, goal-oriented writing is to bash out a first draft. There's no time for editing, no time for looking back, for the voice of doubt, the self-censor. When it's over, you've written a whole novel! It will suck, but then you'll have NaNoEdMo.

I'm OK, You're OK is a classic, and the early chapters do lay out a cogent program for looking at personal interactions. I concur with the recommendation. The later chapters, however, when he applies the program to specific aspects of modern life, show old-fashioned thinking and some...

The Norton Anthology of Poetry. I take my desert island fantasies seriously. I really would like a long time to contemplate poetry--its intensity and precision, its universality. When I read a poem, I need to absorb it before I can go on. An island sojourn would be prefect.

You know the expression "certifiably insane," but have you ever wondered what a certificate of insanity looked like? Well, it looks like this: Mari (signed up yesterday)

I am currently enjoying A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson--a book I first learned about at this site. Very readable, wide-ranging, and up-to-date--it's state-of-the-art popular science.

The possibility of having a wide choice of books with me at all times is tempting, I admit. Especially when I travel, I weigh myself down with so many books, I'm practically transferring my library with me. At this time, however, the handheld screens just aren't eye-friendly enough, though...

Fellow book-lovers, we're looking at the future right here. Anyway, based on what you've liked so far, I recommend Little Women and House of Seven Gables.

A couple of possibilities occur to me. First, I know that I embellish books in my memory. I improve them in my mind. Or, to be more precise, I turn a phrase here and there so that the book matches more closely the way I like to read. Therefore, when I reread, the books are not as good as I...

We're not settled enough yet to take on the responsibility of pets, but we love animals. When we visit friends, we're pretty up-front about being there to play with their pets. We also volunteered at a zoo for a while. We washed elephants and shoveled up after camels. I want a pet...

Well, any disappointing waste of paper bums me out (actually, it makes me get angry and throw it across the room); but I think I avoid the burnout you're talking about by having several books going at once. If I'm having too much of a good thing, or conversely, if a book I hope to finish is...

I can certainly understand the feeling, though I happen not to put the books off. Instead, I put energy into finding more books like the ones I didn't want to be finished with. And I mean a lot of energy. I'm sure our fellow members who are librarians can attest to how urgently some people...

The failure to include "Mad Girl's Love Song" in the Collected Poems, even in its "definitive" list of juvenilia, since the poem had already been published and was known to her biographers as one of her favorites, is one indication that the book is unreliable. There is no one-stop shopping for...

As my luck would have it, the anxiety dreams about forgetting to go to class even though I've been out of school for three years are always the most realistic.

Her complete juvenilia has never been published.