The author is the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill , and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only thing in her apartment that she had not read at least twice. This title recounts her lifelong obsession with books.

This history of reading goes from the earliest examples of the clay tablets and cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to today's digital revolution. It argues that it is the demands of the reader, acting alongside the will of the writer, that is the evolutionary motor of literary genres.

Features none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. The consequence is surprising, mildly shocking and funny.

Long before there were creative writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says the author. She aims to present an inside look at how the professionals read and write.

The inspirational tale of eight women who defied the confines of life in revolutionary Iran through the joy and power of literature.

A new book by America's leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom's manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This book is a story of: a girl; an accordionist; some fanatical Germans; a Jewish fist fighter; and quite a lot of thievery.

Explores how our brains learnt to read. This work presents a discussion ranging from the history of the earliest known examples of written language, to whether reading online really is making us 'stupider', and why dyslexia can be a gift.

Meggie loves books. So does her father, Mo, a bookbinder, although he has never read aloud to her since her mother mysteriously disappeared. They live quietly until the night a stranger knocks at their door. He has come with a warning that forces Mo to reveal an extraordinary secret - a storytelling secret that will change their lives forever.

Whether they're a work of wacky imagination, a piercing insight into social and cultural traditions at the time of writing, or simply a absorbing story, this work features these stories that have come about out of people's desires to communicate a story, a message or a lesson.

What would you find if you went back and re-read all of your favourite books from childhood? Francis Spufford discovers both delight and sadness, in this memoir of a boy who retreats into books, faced with a tragedy in his family.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go . In this book, Dr Seuss celebrates the joys of reading, encouraging young children to take pride in their budding reading abilities.

As an editor at Esquire , AJ Jacobs had built up knowledge of celebrity trivia - and the cure was going to take a long time. While others read a broadsheet at the weekend, or become casual newsnight enthusiasts, Jacobs elected to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Part assemblage of trivia, part journey through adulthood, this is fun to read.

Contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. This work challenges those who ever felt guilty about missing some of the Great Books to consider what reading means, and how we absorb books as part of ourselves.

A volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events - elicited by the author's reading.

The Rights of the Reader grew from celebrated French writer Daniel Pennac's experiences of teaching in challenging schools. This is a translation of this edition.

All the animals are very curious when a mobile library arrives and soon they can't wait to learn about this new something called reading.

Six people five women and a man meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable under the ...

Leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary, and a quest.

Offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries. This title conducts a library tour that extends from the author's childhood bookshelves to the 'complete' libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google.