Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I'd have to figure out some other excuse.

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life.

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

Poison!" Grover yelped. "Don't let those things touch you or...""Or we'll die?" I guessed."Well...after you shrivel slowly to dust, yes.""Let's avoid the swords, " I decided.

It will take some time to adjust, but I promise you, this will be a real adventure for all of us.

Every time I converse with you, I feel closer to home

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.

Oh! Death! You are the savior of life.You are the shelter of life.You are the destination of life.You are the beginning and the end of life.You are the center of the circle of life.

You know what 'FEAR' stands for? It stands for 'False Evidence Appearing Real.' It's the darkroom where Satan develops his negatives.

Healing is the application of love to the places inside that hurt.

Africa is one continent, one people and one nation

God is a wild man...should you encounter him...hang on for dear life-or let go for dear life is a better way to say it.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.