I once slept with a man because he gave me a copy of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Well, I'm not that easy, we did date, and he became my boyfriend, but let's just say that Murakami clinched the deal. Before you judge me, read the book. It's lyrical and...

My parents taught me how to read when I was three years old. More important than the sounding out of letters though, my father shared with me his passion for reading. Over the years, he demonstrated to me that books offer us solace and escape when nothing else can --...

Last week my friend, James, returned a book that he had borrowed from me... in 1991. In his defense, we hadn't seen each other in nineteen years. But through the wonders of Facebook, we were recently reunited online, and he sheepishly admitted that he had something of mine to return.

My sexual awakening came at the hands of John Irving, or his words anyway. Until then, everything I had known about sex had come from a religiously subtexted biology book called Wonderfully Made, which my parents dutifully gave me, and a church sponsored class called "You, Me and God Makes...