We watched as he built this strange, beautiful community of lunatics and dreamers who, every November, write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. NaNoWriMo, as it's called, now has hundreds of thousands of participants all over the world, writing writing writing.

Oleander Girl is a coming of age novel in the best tradition, with a heroine who is both infuriating and endearing, and most importantly, brave.

Janigian's perceptive and sometimes gripping novel brings together some of LA's many tribes -- African-American, WASP, Korean, Armenian, Jewish -- into an emotional and intellectual conflagration that mirrors the burning and looting that the city suffered.

Seeing the world through the eyes of another is truly one of the most seductive aspects of writing -- and reading -- fiction.

What's key about communicating is the formation of meaning. And that doesn't happen on the page. It happens in the mind of the reader. That's who you have to care about, and that's where you do your work as a writer.

The surest way to kill the aliveness of our characters is by insisting that they always make sense. When we follow the labyrinth of most conversations, we discover one constant: people always want something.

What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than with a novel inspired by a real-life hero who risked her own liberty to ensure America finally made real the ideals illuminated in the Declaration of Independence?

Spurious seems committed to solving the paradox of one who has committed his life to thinking, to understanding, but on any given day would rather play Doom on his cellphone.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk time-warps back to the excesses of the Bush administration in following the titular protagonist, and the seven surviving members of Bravo Squad, for one afternoon as they receive a heroes' welcome during the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving Day football game.

If the phenomenal demand for Fifty Shades of Grey tells us anything, it tells us that female readers actually do want real sex in their books and they'll buy it if they know it's in there.

Often beautiful, often sad, The Rhythm of Leaves illuminates the way that both war and blind patriotism can cause lasting and irrevocable harm. And Murry Taylor, a man unafraid to take on new challenges, has proven himself a success yet again.

Nevertheless, the technology addiction cannot be ignored as a competitor to reading. Indeed, some prognosticators may be right in citing the eventual rise of the tablet as a device of choice for everything under the techie sun, including reading.

Sara Paretsky is a game-changer. In 1982, Sara came out with her first V. I. Warshawski novel, Indemnity Only, now celebrating its 30th year in print...