It's no shock when novelists work as journalists or professors before, during, or after their book-producing years. But some famous writers have held rather unusual non-literary jobs.

I write columns, Facebook posts (each blessed day), emails, sermons, but I am pushing the bolder of the book up the Sisyphean mountain with no discernible results.

To be so amused and enlightened by the political machinations of the Barchester clergy is priceless. But to do so for the price of a Taco Bell burrito makes this Kindle offer one of the best bargains around.

It would be a sin -- practically a capital crime -- to write off masterpieces because no one has the patience for the sentences Marcel Proust had the patience to craft so scrupulously.

I love books, but they foment torrents of guilt in me. I feel guilty about: the amount of money spent on them; the space they take up; the ones that rest unread while more come in as competition.