My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the ….

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me..

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, intern….

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of….

I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of associ….

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'..

Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire libr….

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all ove….

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait u….

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo..

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator),….

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning ….

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point..

when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know w….

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone.

One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emer….

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symp….

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknow….