Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you’ve sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing salt into the cuts. Imagine having to set out on your own into a terror-filled world when you’re six years old. For Shelley Stewart, these were just the opening blows in a life that is all the more inspiring because of the horrors that set it in motion. He shares his experiences in a new memoir, The Road South, which he co-wrote with Nathan Hale Turner Jr.

Born in the Rosedale section of Birmingham, Alabama, Stewart had little going for him at first beyond the ability to read well and a sense of compassion that kept him from turning mean and bitter. Living where he could including a brief but idyllic residence with a white family Stewart managed to stay in school, reunite with the brothers from whom he had been separated following his mother’s death and lay the foundation for a successful career in radio. In the pursuit of that career, Stewart became a vocal champion for civil rights and a friend of such musical up-and-comers as Otis Redding, Gladys Knight and Isaac Hayes. Now the owner of Birmingham radio station WATV and vice chairman of one of the largest marketing and public relations companies in the South, Stewart recently retired from half a century of being on the air. Except for a few eye-opening weeks in New York City after high school, a disheartening stint in the Air Force and brief professional forays into St. Louis and Nashville, Stewart has remained a resident in the city of his birth.

"I don’t have any psychological residues from the past,"  Stewart says, speaking by phone from his office in Birmingham. But then he amends this assertion by admitting that he has developed an aversion to certain fashionable excuses for failure. "Abuse, race, homelessness,"  he says, ticking them off one by one. "I realized I had gone through every darn one of those categories."  While he speaks with quiet confidence, his voice has none of that unctuous, overbearing tone that so often afflicts the self-made. In fact, there are moments when he seems truly astounded that his life has turned out so well.

Stewart says he began talking openly about his background in the early ’90s after he was invited to speak at a Birmingham high school. On his way to the auditorium, he overheard a student remark, "Look at him. He’s from a bigshot family, and he’s come here to tell us something."  Instead of giving his prepared speech, Stewart looked out at the skeptical faces and began talking about his past.

"I didn’t write The Road South for anything more than to help and inspire others,"  he says. "If just sharing my experiences matters that you don’t have to hate, that you don’t have to give up, that you have to respect and love yourself, that you must be educated in order to communicate with others then maybe [the book] won’t be in vain."

Stewart credits his first grade teacher, Mamie Foster, with endowing him with the self-worth that kept him going through the darkest times. "She pulled me to the side,"  he recalls,  "and said, ‘There’s something different about you. You can do anything you want. Just continue learning.’ " Despite doggedly following her advice, Stewart was heartbroken when his high school principal failed to recommend him for a college scholarship, even though he had top grades. Many years later, though, Miles College corrected this injustice by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Even when the worst abuses were behind him, Stewart’s road remained bumpy. Becoming a popular disc jockey with both white and black fan clubs did not shield him from the racism institutionalized in the radio stations where he worked. His marriages never lived up to his hopes. His brothers never put into practice the examples of thrift, hard work and self-improvement he set for them. Most disappointing, he confesses in the book, was his inability to create the kind of warm and close-knit family he longed for as a boy.

"I still drive back into Rosedale now and then,"  Stewart says.  "As a matter of fact, I’ll be doing a book signing in a store that’s located 200 yards from where my mother was killed."  Sixty-three years past that awful event, the author says he remains upbeat and committed to the benefits of interdependence.  "I can’t help myself without helping someone else,"  he insists. "That will be my belief as long as I live."

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo" warned of the consequences of a U.S. failure to respond to "the threat that already exists." The name of that threat, unfamiliar to most Americans at the time, would become a household word in a few short months.

After the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, this and several other pre-9/11 columns included in Friedman’s new book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After Sept. 11, seem shockingly clear-sighted and prescient. They offer glimpses into the future that seem to surprise even Friedman himself. "Man," he says, sounding bemused, "there are lines in those columns that are prophetic. In terms of what happened, I was paying attention."

Since Sept. 11, as regular readers of his twice-weekly column know, Friedman has, if anything, been paying even closer attention. "I’ve been on a really unique journey," he says. "I’ve been to Pakistan twice, to Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel."

Probably no one else—journalist or diplomat—has pursued the complex threads of this story as relentlessly as Friedman. In fact, when we speak by phone, Friedman has just returned from Tehran, Iran, where he was exploring one of the recurring themes of this collection—the need to wage and support a war of ideas in the Arab Muslim world.

"I really try to get the point across that when we start calling people the ‘Axis of Evil,’ we miss the complexity of these societies and the number of potential partners we have inside these societies who share our world view," he says."We have to make sure we’re inviting these people into our future. Ideas matter. We can kill bin Laden, but somebody’s got to kill bin Ladenism. Somebody’s got to kill the ideas that not only nurture him, but create an environment in which so many people tacitly support him. We can help, but ultimately the Arab Muslim world has to do that itself."

As a result of such views—as well as his years of experience in the Middle East, first as a reporter for UPI and then for The New York Times—Friedman "gets a huge amount of email from the Arab Muslim world." Parts of those messages he reprints in the third section of Longitudes and Attitudes. That section is comprised of a series of diaries he kept between September 2001 and June 2002. The diaries make for fascinating reading because they contain anecdotes and analysis Friedman was unable to include in his regular columns, offering a behind-the-scenes look at issues Friedman is writing about and personalities he meets.

One of the surprises in these diaries is how many of Friedman’s contacts and correspondents are Muslim women. Another is the pointed description of a little power play by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that very nearly leaves Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Friedman stranded at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Still another is an eye-opening portrait of the new Russia.

But most interesting of all—in the diaries and in the collected post-Sept. 11 columns that form the bulk of this book—is Friedman’s probing examination of Saudi Arabia. Probably the most important question motivating Friedman’s unique journey during the last nine months has been why 15 young Saudis were involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"The Arab Muslim world is going through a hard time," he says, "and I have a lot of sympathy for them. They’re struggling with, and in some cases failing at, modernization. That’s because of three deficits that have been building up there for more than 50 years. I’m quoting here from a U.N. study that’s just come out that says it’s a deficit of freedom, it’s a deficit of education and it’s a deficit of women’s empowerment. Thanks to these three deficits they’ve dug themselves a really deep hole."

The dark side of all this, Friedman writes in his diaries, is that it leads to what he calls the "Circle of bin Ladenism, which is made up of three components: antidemocratic leaders, who empower antimodernist Moslem religious educators to gain legitimacy, who then produce a generation of young people who have not been educated in ways that enable them to flourish in the modern world."

Opinions like this—and equally direct criticism of actions by President Bush, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat—have earned Friedman some powerful detractors. About this, Friedman is philosophical: "Being a columnist is not a friend growth industry. If you’re going to do this job, you have to pull the trigger on people, sometimes on people you like. If you’re not ready to do that, readers can smell it at a hundred paces. . . . A column is like currency, and you can really debase your own currency. I guard zealously the integrity and quality of the column every bit as much as the secretary of treasury does the integrity and quality of the U.S. dollar."

So while his critics may have grown more vociferous, Friedman’s popularity has also grown and changed since Sept. 11. "Before 9/11 the CEO read me; now his secretary reads me, too," he says. "Twice I’ve had bicycle delivery boys stop me on the street in Washington and comment on something they’ve read in my column. . . . This is not in any way exclusive to me. After 9/11, Americans understand that foreign policy is now a real life-or-death matter. It’s about the world their kids are going to grow up in, and as a result, they want to know what’s going on."

And, according to Friedman, what’s going on remains pretty dark. In his first column after Sept. 11, 2001, Friedman called the attacks the beginning of World War III. Although personally an "innate optimist who is constantly looking for solutions," Friedman stands by his initial assessment.

"Some big events, over time, end up being smaller than they first seem," he says. "My view is that 9/11 will turn out to have been bigger than it first seemed and it seemed—pretty big to begin with. It is a huge event in terms of the degree to which it will change our habits, our politics, international relations and the long-term internal discussion in the Arab Muslim world. As I say in the diaries, on 9/11 a wall of civilization was breached that we could not imagine would ever be breached. And the long-term implications of that are just enormous."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

“I can not live without books,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. Avid readers Sara Nelson, Nancy Pearl and Michael Dirda happily share the celebrated statesman’s sentiment. From tales of childhood to thoughts on Tolstoy and Twain, a trio of new books by these literature lovers reflects the perks and quirks of their page-turning obsession. Recreation for some, therapy for others, books can enrapture, enrage, envelop and amaze as these talented authors demonstrate.

“Books get to me personally,” says New York Observer publishing columnist and self-proclaimed readaholic Sara Nelson. “When things go right, I read. When things go wrong, I read more.” In her new book, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (Putnam, $22.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0399150838), Nelson takes the reader along for a year’s worth of literature and life, offering funny, wise commentary on the ways in which the two intersect. Nelson, who had originally intended to select 52 books for 52 weeks of reading, says her plan fell apart almost immediately. “In reading, as in life, even if you know what you’re doing, you really kind of don’t,” she says. In week one, she set out to read Ted Heller’s Funnymen, a book about stand-up comics, while staying in a Vermont home once owned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Heller’s gags didn’t play well in the snowy, somber setting, says Nelson. From that point forward, she says, books seemed to choose her as much as she chose them. So Many Books, So Little Time is jam-packed with memorable moments, including the unlikely writing lessons gleaned from culinary bad boy and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Perhaps most memorable of all are Nelson’s musings on a reader’s right to stop reading a book he or she doesn’t like: “It’s the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion,” says the author. “The moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.'” For the record: Nelson now allows herself to toss disappointing tomes at page 20 or 200.

For many, reading is escapism. For writer and Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, books were nothing short of salvation. Raised in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Detroit, Pearl says her family defined dysfunction long before the label came to be. “All I knew then was that I was deeply and fatally unhappy,” says Pearl, author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason. During childhood and early adolescence, Pearl sought refuge at the Parkman Branch Library, where friendly librarians introduced her to books resonating with realities far brighter than her own. “It is not too much an exaggeration if it’s one at all to say that reading saved my life,” she says. Providing recommendations and revelations for more than 100 categories of books, from “Road Novels” and “Russian Heavies” to “Fabulous First Lines” and “Food for Thought,” Pearl’s approach is direct. The author of several professional books for librarians, including Now Read This, she highlights some of her favorite scribes in the category “Too Good to Miss,” offering an eclectic assortment of authors, including Robert Heinlein and Jonathan Lethem. With its short, snappy chapters, Book Lust is a must for any serious reader’s bedside table, a literary nightcap sure to prompt sweet dreams. “All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book,” lamented steelworker Eugene Dirda about his son Michael, a shy, bespectacled boy who preferred the pages of Thoreau to dating or sports. From humble beginnings in the Ohio rust belt town of Lorain to a top post at one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, Dirda’s world has always percolated with words. Both witty and wistful, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (Norton, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0393057569) pays homage to a bookish youth spent in small-town America. Woven throughout the text are references to books and authors who inspired, intrigued and rankled Dirda, who is now Senior Editor for The Washington Post Book World.

Dirda gives a grateful nod to the educators and friends who influenced him in his early adult years. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist also makes peace with the man he considered impossible to please: “I forgave my father everything: He could be overbearing and worse, but his soul-deadening labor gave me the time to read and to know that my life would be privileged compared to his.” Books, it seems, can also offer redemption. Allison Block writes from La Jolla, California.

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day’s horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived since moving from the Midwest in 1996 with her then husband and her children. My response was to take some time off and read novels that had come before. She started with The Tale of Genji, a novel written in 11th-century Japan by a woman of the Heian court, Murasaki Shikibu.

"I did it as a form of escape," Smiley says. "But serious novels don’t allow you to escape; instead they ask you to reconsider what you were thinking about in a new way. I found it incredibly efficacious to read The Tale of Genji within a few weeks of the World Trade Center attacks." Indeed, Smiley found the exercise so helpful that she decided to keep going. "By the time I had read a couple more novels, I thought, boy, I should keep track of this and start thinking about this as a project."

Smiley’s project became to read 100 novels that more or less spanned the history of novel writing. "I immediately realized that I was not qualified and also didn’t care to compile a One Hundred Best Novels list. What I really wanted to see was what a given 100 novels some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them congenial, some of them uncongenial would teach me about the nature of the novel, so I let the list be constructed in a serendipitous way."

The result of Smiley’s reading and thinking is the astonishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a book that is interesting, provocative and insightful in so many ways that it is impossible to name or catalog them all. But, at the very least, even the most casual novel-reader is certain to find pleasure in dipping at random into Smiley’s 13th and final chapter in which she writes brief, knowledgeable, sometimes funny, often surprising essays on each of the 100 books she read.

"Certain books on the list really were revelations to me," Smiley says. "I loved them in every way and they were books that I hadn’t known of before. One of them was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, which was a great favorite of Charles Dickens. Another was Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It’s so much more interesting than you think it’s going to be. Yes, it’s pornographic but it’s also a political treatise. It’s fascinating politically; it’s fascinating artistically. I really enjoyed it, though I was shocked by it. And I thought The Once and Future King by T.H. White was a wonderful, wonderful book that ought to be revived."

In the other chapters of the book, Smiley explores with compelling energy what a novel is (answer, in brief: a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist) and who a novelist is (to begin with, a reader). She examines the history, psychology, morality and art of the novel; its blend of narrative forms and its relationship to human history. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel also includes two brilliant chapters of advice for novel writers, three if you include her case history of the composition, publication and public reception of Good Faith, which she began working on again as her novel-reading project progressed.

Smiley, who is best-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres and for Moo, her send-up of life at a large Midwestern university, is remarkably perceptive and generous in her views of other writers’ work. She doesn’t, for example, write about good and bad writers, but instead about congenial and uncongenial writers.

"All relationships that you have with authors are essentially instinctive," Smiley says in conversation. "They are forms of friendship or kinship that are based on something not quite conscious, some instinctive response to some quality of that person’s sensibility. Since reading a novel is essentially a private experience, who am I to say that while I love The Once and Future King and you love Ulysses, you’re wrong and I’m right?"

Which is not to say that Smiley avoids offering opinions on who she finds congenial (surprisingly, Daniel Defoe) and why (to oversimplify, because he was so adept at going from the practical to the spiritual and entering the consciousness of so many different types of characters) and who she finds less than congenial (Henry James, because "he thought he was the boss of his characters and his job was to control and dominate them.").

And while the book is in no way autobiographical, Smiley infuses it with the full range of her sensibilities -her concern for the craftsmanship of the novel, her politics, psychological insight and moral vision, and her aesthetic concerns, for example – the core values, so to speak, of who she is as a writer.

Ultimately the views that Smiley expresses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel offer readers and writers alike a path to liberation, primarily because Smiley believes there is no such thing as the perfect novel. "Every artistic form tends in one direction or another," Smiley says, "and the novel tends toward excess, toward compendiousness, toward being about everything. And excess and perfection don’t mix." Which of course means there’s room in the world for all kinds of novels.

More importantly, Smiley thinks that the novel remains central to democratic Western society. "You cannot read a novel and have an opinion about it without feeling yourself free and also as having a right to your own opinion," she says. "So I feel that the novel has radically democratized Western consciousness simply by giving us the opportunity in our own bedroom to say, oh, I agree with this. And I don’t agree with that." Remember that the next time someone asks you why you’re wasting your time with a novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

His landfalls include Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, The Promised Land, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, On the Road and The Feminine Mystique.

No mere desert island collection of personal favorites, this baker's dozen met a higher standard as what Parini calls "nodal points" that either moved nascent intellectual currents forward or changed the direction of American life and thought. "This is an X – ray of the American spirit," Parini says. "These books either consolidated ideas long in place or shifted things and caused a pivot in the road."

Only a few of Parini's selections were obvious, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "I would say that book invented the American language," Parini says. "Twain had such an ear for how Americans talk that I really think he transformed how people actually spoke to each other. It's also a book about race in America, the westward journey, about lighting off for the territories and independence. It's everything. It is the great American novel."

Others took Parini completely by surprise. "I never thought I'd include Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock. I kept asking people what they would consider the most important books in their life, I must have asked about 100 people, and over and over again, people said, 'Well, the book that changed my life was Dr. Spock because I kept it by my bedside and raised my children by going back to it and back to it.' It transformed the way children are raised in America."

Some choices, such as The Federalist Papers, helped shape our vision of America almost without our knowledge. "There's a great book that nobody has read. It's endlessly cited and often misquoted and misunderstood," says Parini. "So much of what we think is in the Constitution is not in the Constitution, it's in The Federalist Papers."

By contrast, it was only by sheer accident that the manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation, a journal of Pilgrim life written by William Bradford between 1620 and 1647, was discovered in an English library after being lost for 200 years. Had it not been reintroduced in 1856 and enthusiastically embraced by a nation on the cusp of the Civil War, it's highly possible that President Abraham Lincoln might not have felt compelled to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

Important American fiction, including Moby – Dick, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, didn't even make Parini's appendix list of 100 more books that changed America, where instead you'll find The Sears, Roebuck Catalog, The Whole Earth Catalog and Jane Fonda's Workout Book. Don't novels change nations?

"They don't," Parini says. "Nobody reads novels and has their life transformed. They work on the consciousness, but very slowly; they don't have earthshaking effects."

An exception: Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"Road novels are a big part of American novels," Parini says. "The idea of two buddies getting in their old jalopy and taking off cross – country for California and just experiencing the pleasures and terrors and adventures of the road is a real American story."

That the most recent title in the Promised Land short list is Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique speaks volumes about the modern ambivalence toward the written word. "It's frightening but true," says Parini. "For example, how many people write real letters anymore? Publishers endlessly complain about the fact that novels no longer sell very well. There really is not much audience for real books anymore."

Which makes guidebooks like Promised Land all the more relevant today.

"We are the United States of Amnesia. It's like when you have an Alzheimer's patient that you're talking to and you have to keep supplying memory as you're talking to them. That's one of the things this book is doing, supplying the memory of a nation, re – igniting the memory of a nation."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Last year, blogger and writer Lizzie Skurnick set out to revisit a few of her favorite young adult novels. She chronicled the experience in Fine Lines, a weekly column on Jezebel.com. The series was a hit: hundreds of women (including me) had their memories jogged or saw old favorites get their day in the sun. Now, the columns have been turned  a book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Reading Shelf Discovery feels like attending a high school reunion and reminiscing about the best of your teenage escapades with a particulary entertaining friend. Skurnick's witty, conversational and insightful summaries of novels like Flowers in the Attic, Bridge to Terebithia, The Little Princess and Little Women are supplemented by a sprinkling of guest essays from writers like Jennifer Weiner, Tayari Jones and Cecily Von Ziegesar. The collection reminds women of a certain age how the literature we read back then helped us understand our lives—while at the same time explaining that a pig bladder could be the best toy ever (Little House in the Big Woods), the Met was a really cool place at night (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler) and that you should never, ever trust your long-lost twin (Lois Duncan's Stranger With My Face).

BookPage talked with Skurnick about teen crossovers, desert islands and why she hasn't read Anne of Green Gables in a web exclusive Q&A.

Fine Lines got an amazing response. Were you surprised that so many other women remembered your childhood favorites?
The success of Fine Lines is very much a question of a happy meeting of circumstance. On the one hand, you have the rise of the web, which makes it easy to categorize and find fellow obsessesives in just about anything. On the other, you have this generation of women coming of age who've been busy with college and grad school and jobs and families and are suddenly like, Wait—what happened to that great book by Lois Duncan I loved? Oh, here it is for 2 cents on eBay! I did know that this was more than a moment of kitschy nostalgia. It's more that we're only just now grown up enough to see how important to us these books were, and we have the means to have the conversation.

Teen or young adult books that crossover to find adult audiences are all the rage these days (Twilight, the Hunger Games). Do you think this is a new phenomenon?
I think they're an unsurprising development in a society where everyone young wants to be old and everyone old wants to be young. But I rather like some entries into new genre—when you marry the sophistication of an adult books with the absurd fun of YA, basically you've taken an adult book and given it a plot, something a lot of adult books could use. Putting a sophisticated twist on a children's story is a bit trickier. (Disney has been putting double entendres to good use to make their product palatable to parents for centuries.) But if you simply raise the stakes—no pun intended—on a children's story by adding adult histrionics, the results are a little more uneven.

A related question: what do you think YA books offer adults that their intended audience might miss? And vice versa?
Well, I'm not sure I'd say "miss" as much as I'd say each audience is taking away what they need. I can't speak for any particular reader, but I know, as a child, I was much more interested in the small details that showed what people were thinking and feeling. I still remember so well that, in Nicholas and Alexandra, the Empress yells, "Abdique! Abdique!" when Nicholas abdicates–speaking French, not Russian, even as the autocracy crumbles–though why I remember this, I cannot say. Now, I can barely remember the characters' names—I'm much more interested in what people are doing. Adult readers moving some of their bookshelves over for YA may be impatient with the fact that you often only find a decent story–a real story, with an arc and everything—in adult genre writing, not literary fiction.

If we're talking about what children miss when they read adult books, I can safely say, pretty much everything. (What does it mean, technically, to abdicate, after all? Thank God in those pre-Wikipedia days I had a good dictionary, not that I used it that often.) But when you read an adult book as a child, you're doing the literary equivalent of listening in on your parents' fight–you understand the drama, though you have no idea what they are talking about.

Is there a book you revisited that turned out not to live up to its memory? 
There were two books out of the nearly 100 I read doing this book that I found I couldn't enjoy as much as I had as a child. The first was Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, which was truly one of my favorite books when I was 8—I must have read it 30 times—and which I remembered as this enormous opus. In fact it's a very slim book with only a few scenes. And it's a good book, too—it's just that's it's actually written for a child. That was instructive to me, because it showed how reader age-agnostic so many of these other books really are.

The second was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I think that book may have actually been too important to me at a certain point in my life to make it decent to return—I wrote a column about how I felt like I was a dotty old aunt spying on a bunch of girls when I tried.

Is there a YA classic that people would be surprised to learn you hadn't read?
There are so many! But I'll give two shockers: Anne of Green Gables (gasp) and most of Nancy Drew. I'll stop there before I alienate anyone else.

Shelf Discovery deals mostly with novels from the 70s and 80s. What do you think is the identifying feature among books published during that time?
I think because they pre-date this idea of teenage girls we have now, the feature they share is that they all resist easy categorization. On the one hand, you have these hilariously inner-directed, wildly curious girls, like Harriet (of Harriet the Spy), of course, but also The Westing Game's Turtle or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's Claudia. Then you have these historical survivalists, like Island of the Blue Dolphin's Karana or The Witch of Blackbird Pond's Kit. Then you've also got Lois Duncan's cadre of ordinary girls suddenly wrestling with supernatural powers, or Norma Klein's Upper West Side sophisticates, who may or may not have lost their virginity but don't hang the idea of their girlhood on it. Even Beverly Cleary's novels are always questioning what being a girl is for—what's good or bad about it, how we can thrive but also protect ourselves in the world. (Fifteen is really quite a provoking novel about what it's like to like a boy.) Madeleine L'Engle manages to pull all of these factors in and add intergalactic time travel. 

I think that the feminist movement influenced so many of those novels (as it did women's midlist fiction of the period, like that of authors Marge Piercy or Alix Kates Shulman). There's a far more mutable attitude towards sex and sexuality, what growing up really means, what women are supposed to be and what women are becoming. I also think that so many women had the opportunity to write and publish on a large scale for the first time, so you have this flood of stories about girlhood, about family, about divorce, about marriage. Why these books get steered into YA and the stories in Goodbye, Columbus do not, I can only (ungenerously, I'm sure) speculate.

Do you still read fiction aimed at teens, and if so, do you think it has changed?
I actually signed up to judge a YA fiction prize this year to get a closer look at what is happening. From what I have read, it seems sophisticated in different ways and innocent in other ways (for lack of a better comparison, I'll say it's like "One Day at a Time" versus "Gilmore Girls") while so much of what's interesting seems to be taking place in genre works rather than the kind of realist narrative I'm used to, like Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, for instance. 

I do think what's changed in literature is what's changed in society: now we have this idea of what teenagers are and should be—movies, stores, TV shows, schools of therapy, books are dedicated entirely to the question. When I was growing up it was Meatballs and friendship bracelets and you were pretty much done. I can't help but thinking the books of my era were devoted to releasing teenage-hood from this opaque prison (look at Paul Zindel!) while now they, like so much else in our lives, are about what happens when you live under a microscope with a pre-determined idea of what you should be. Is it better to have someone assume you're a juvenile deliquent or assume you should speak five languages and be interested in the plight of the homeless? I don't know.

It's clear from your essays that these books helped shape the way you think about the world. Do you think kids get the same benefits from books today?
You would have to talk to the kids today 20 years from now and see if Twilight has damaged them as much as 9,000 pundits seem to feel it will! But I think reading at a young age is almost always world-shaping—it's a very intimate experience, after all, one of the only ways to look deeply at another world when you still barely know your own. One practical change is that the books themselves are a quite a bit more expensive—the books I read growing up cost anywhere from 95 cents $1.25, and it was a big difference when they started going up to $4.95. I think it's unlikely that technology will make books cheaper for children—and it shouldn't, because author should be paid for their work–but I do hope it can make books more available and accessible. 

If you had to pick one book featured in Shelf Discovery that everyone should read, what would it be?
I've made it my official campaign position for this book tour that I'd like everyone to buy and read Berthe Amoss' Secret Lives, a wonderful book about a girl growing up in turn-of-the-century New Orleans trying to find out the truth about her mother's death. I forgot the title for years and was only able to actually locate it through the powers of Google four years ago—I don't want that to happen to anyone else.

What's the most surprising thing you have learned from a book?
There's so many: that the Czar and Czarina spoke French at home, of course; that red abalones are the sweetest; that you can nick off enough metal from bullet shavings to make another bullet; that you have not converted a man because just because you have silenced him. (I could keep up with the references, but there are really too many.)

Who would you rather be marooned on a desert island with: Laura Ingalls or Sara Crewe?
Oh, that is so hard! Sara would be fun because she would tell stories, but you get the sense she'd be kind of useless hauling wood and might waste away from a disease if you weren't careful. Laura you'd just fight with, because she'd be as bossy as you are. Can't I just go with Karana?

What's next on your reading list?
I just moved and donated half of my books, a process during which I unearthed a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett I've been meaning to read for years. Then Wharton, Summer, and then A Summer to Die, which my friend Elizabeth has insisted I write about, and maybe Seventeenth Summer, just to stick with the theme. 

There are a lot of confused would-be writers out there—a fact that no one knows better than our own Author Enablers, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry. Both published authors in their own right, they've now compliled some of their best advice in Write That Book Already!, a compendium of tough love and savvy advice for writers of all stripes. We asked Sam & Kathi (hey, after 5 years we're on a first-name basis) to share a few of their #1 tips. Want more? Read their book already, or check their column in every issue of BookPage.

What is the #1 reason writers should buy your book?
Write That Book Already! provides an accessible, no-nonsense, complete overview of the publishing process from inspiration to backlist. We also include insight and personal stories from other authors and publishing professionals, a handy glossary of publishing terms, tips for getting through the rough spots, and a laugh or two.

What’s the #1 myth about getting a book published?
That becoming a published author will automatically make you rich and famous—or even just make it possible for you to quit your day job. The vast majority of published authors also do other work to make a living.

What’s the #1 thing that keeps someone from writing the book they’ve always dreamed of writing?
It’s tough to maintain the discipline and confidence required to go the distance. Some writers have trouble getting a manuscript completed; others have trouble with the business end, i.e. the hard work of finding a publisher.

What’s the #1 question you get from prospective authors?
“How do I find an agent?” The funniest question came from a middle-school student who wanted us to do his homework for him.

What's the #1 way to tell that you're meant to be an author?
You love reading, you can’t stop writing, and your lifelong fantasy involves a book cover that says by You, the Author.

What is the #1 skill prospective authors should have (besides, ahem, the ability to write)? 
The discipline to keep at it day after day over time, no matter what distractions come your way.

What's the #1 way for an author to reach #1 on the bestseller list?
Oprah. Just call her up. And please, put in a good word for us.

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and I’ve tried to keep it up. Sometimes I don’t make it, but usually I do. Usually I go beyond that.”

As if that’s not enough, Conroy also usually tries to complete five pages of new work handwritten on a yellow legal pad each day. On a good day he’ll put those pages on the steps leading up to the office of his third wife, novelist Cassandra King. She’ll leave her pages on a pillow near where he reads after dinner, while she goes back upstairs to work.

“Sandra’s the first wife I’ve had who has not complained that I have too many books. We have books in almost every room,” Conroy says, turning away from the phone for a moment to confirm that with Cassandra, who says, “Everywhere!”

“These books mean a lot to me,” Conroy continues. “I love them. I like to handle them. I can look up from my desk and see walls and walls and walls of books. It’s an extraordinary beauty for me.”

Conroy’s love of books is the subject of his beautiful, passionate and often funny new memoir, My Reading Life. The new book’s title, however, is just a tad misleading. Readers will quickly discover that for Conroy there is no real separation of his reading life from his writing life. Or of his reading/writing life from his lived life, for that matter.

In My Reading Life, Conroy forcefully advocates the pleasures of reading books as different as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; he pays eloquent tribute to reading mentors like his long-suffering mother, Peg Conroy, high school teacher and friend, Gene Norris, and the writer and teacher James Dickey; and with remarkable—even courageous—openness, he reports his insecurities and charts the sometimes harrowing emotional and intellectual path that has made him the writer and person that he is.

“One of the things I can’t do is not expose myself,” Conroy says. “Some people do not like that about my writing, but I can’t help it. I write with emotion and I write with passion. I’ve caused such pain in my life with these stupid books. . . . My father [a Marine fighter pilot] went nuts when The Great Santini came out. My teammates in My Losing Season were absolutely horrified when I was writing that book. And my college [The Citadel] went nuts when The Lords of Discipline came out. But I’ve gotten used to that, I think.”

In My Reading Life, Conroy sometimes shines a bright, critical light on himself, but he is usually generous and wide-ranging in his enthusiasms for other writers. He may not like the company of writers (“I stay away from other writers if I can. They eat their dead.”), but he sure likes their work. “I can pick up a book and I can enjoy anything. I enjoy mysteries. I blurbed a romance novel. I end up reading a lot of people’s books because I still blurb. I like to always blurb first novelists because it’s hard to get blurbs then. I couldn’t get any when I was a first novelist, and I remember that.”

Conroy is also an avid reader of nonfiction. “I have an abiding interest in nature, so I like nature books. I’ll read a biography of anyone. What I like about modern biography is that they do the childhood. That’s the part I’m most interested in because usually you find some secret of what ignited them, what set them off.”

Conroy even offers appreciative words about books by writers who have personally offended him. In a chapter about attending his first writers’ conference, Conroy tells of looking forward to meeting Alice Walker because he likes her novel Meridian. Walker, however, rudely snubs him—apparently, a friend explains, because “she has a thing about Southern white men.”

But being Southern and, more importantly, being a Southern writer, is essential to Conroy’s sense of himself. “There’s something phony about my whole life. The reason I embrace being Southern, the reason it fills my heart with joy every time I’m called a Southern writer, is because I grew up feeling like I was nothing, like I had no home, had no place I could call my own. We didn’t own a house; the government gave us housing. We moved almost every year. I went to 11 schools in 12 years. When Dad was dying, he gave me a thing that shocked me because it showed that I’d moved 23 times from when I was born until I was 15. So when they call me a Southern writer, I am delighted because they are identifying me with a place.”

Still, Conroy says, Southern writing has changed appreciably since he began writing. “When I started out as a Southern writer, we were all boys. There’s been a fabulous influx of the girls, the daughters of Flannery O’Connor, the daughters of Eudora Welty. They have come roaring in and that’s been a great thing for Southern writing.” After his wife, he says, his favorite Southern writer is Janis Owens, who “has written three wonderful books” (My Brother Michael, Myra Sims and The Schooling of Claybird Catts).

In fact, Conroy regrets that his new book does not include a defense of another Southern woman writer, Harper Lee, who has recently taken flak in some quarters. “I wish I’d written about that,” Conroy says, “because in To Kill a Mockingbird she gave us —and by us, I mean white Southerners—models to live our lives by. I think that for people like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, me and other Southern liberals, that book had a huge influence on us.”

Yet for all his delightful championing of other writers, Conroy remains insecure about his own work. “I’m always surprised when somebody likes what I write,” he says at the end of our conversation. “Someone told me they were visiting a writer’s house and he took them back and showed them his office and said, ‘Here’s where the magic happens.’ I roared with laughter when I heard that. I thought, my God, it must be nice to have that. But that gift was not given to me.”

Maybe not that gift—but as My Reading Life amply shows, Conroy has many other gifts to share with readers.

Stanley Fish just might be America’s most famous professor. His columns for the New York Times routinely receive hundreds of comments, and he has published 12 books, including How to Write a Sentence. This slim volume—clever as it is informative—documents Fish’s love affair with language and guides readers in their own pursuit of clear writing. BookPage caught up with the professor for his take on writing mistakes, favorite authors and how sentences can save us.

You write that you appreciate fine sentences as others appreciate fine wines. Do you have a favorite?
My favorite sentence is the one by Swift that I analyze in the book. I admire it for its efficiency, its apparent simplicity and its extraordinarily quiet brutality. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.” (Did he really say that?)

Who is the intended audience of How to Write a Sentence?
I had multiple audiences in mind. I’m speaking in part to the universe of composition teachers, many of whom have been seduced by what I call “the lure of content.” I hope to persuade some of them to pay serious and extended attention to forms. I also write for those who find themselves taken with a sentence they read or hear, but don’t quite have the vocabulary to describe and analyze the source of their pleasure. And I am writing for the even larger audience made up of those who fear the act of composing, and feel that writing something coherent and efficient is a task immeasurably beyond them.

I want to tell these readers that they can do it, perhaps not as well as a Jonathan Swift or an Oscar Wilde or a Virginia Woolf, but in a way that brings the satisfaction that attends any act of mastery.

When did you first discover that language has the power to “organize the world” and that sentences can “save us”?
I’ve always thrilled to the power of language, but it was only when I studied classical, medieval and renaissance rhetoric in graduate school that I discovered a world of verbal effects and the ways of codifying them. Almost everything I have done both in my academic work and in my public journalism has emerged from my study of rhetoric.

When I say that sentences can save us I mean that in a world where projects often go awry and situations are almost never neatly and finally resolved, the existence of sentences that move confidently to their destination and provide, for a moment, a definitive summing-up is something of a miracle, and one we can have recourse to at any time.

What is the most common mistake your students make in writing sentences?
All of the mistakes that students make stem from a failure to realize that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships; that is, a structure every component of which relates in a rigorous way to every other component.

You give examples of how to write sentences like Henry James, Tana French and other authors. Is every author imitable? Can you learn to write like Faulkner?
It depends on what you mean by “like Faulkner.” If you mean can you learn to write sentences that communicate both the power and the anguish of Faulkner’s, the answer is not very likely. But you can learn how to write sentences as long and as involuted as Faulkner’s, while learning how to maintain and extend a basic structure of thought for many clauses and phrases. Learning to do that won’t make you Faulkner, but it will make you a better writer.

You refer to “virtuosi in the art” of crafting sentences. In your opinion, who is at the top of that esteemed group?
Ford Madox Ford, especially in The Good Soldier, every sentence of which is a marvel.

I spent many hours in high school diagramming sentences for a course titled Modern Grammar. You write that Gertrude Stein found this activity “exciting”—but my 14-year-old self found it quite taxing. Why should students make the effort to diagram sentences?
When Stein says that the experience of diagramming sentences is exciting, what she means is that the experience of everything falling into place in a complex structure is exciting because it gives you a glimpse into the possibility of achieving a kind of perfection, even if it is perfection on a small scale.

Do all devoted readers have the capability of being good writers, too?
All devoted readers have the capability of becoming better writers because they are devoted readers; whether they become good in some strong sense of that word is another matter, but better is good enough.

Author photo by Jay Rosenblatt.

While writing his delightful biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims gained a new appreciation for this childhood classic and its eccentric creator.

Do you remember reading Charlotte’s Web as a child?
Sadly, I didn’t read it in childhood, for two dumb reasons. First, I saw the cover and thought that it was about a girl and I wasn’t reading much about girls at the time. And second, I decided that I didn’t like the name Charlotte—although later my beautiful niece Charlotte changed my opinion of the name. So I was a teenager when I actually read Charlotte’s Web—and fell in love with it even at that late date.

I loved your vivid descriptions of young Elwyn’s adventures in barns and outdoors. What led you to write about his childhood in this almost novelistic way?
For me the theme of the book is the unpredictability of creativity. To recreate the unusual way that White’s imagination responded to the natural world, I had to take him out into it. His letters and essays provide all kinds of texture about his daily life, so I started with those. I also built on them from my other research and my own observations on numerous visits to Maine. For example, if White mentioned watching coots and loons on the cove, but didn’t describe them, it doesn’t matter; I’ve seen them there many times myself.

Your subtitle refers to E.B. White’s “eccentric life,” but he was a pretty successful writer and editor. What makes him so eccentric?
He was very successful, yes. I think that from early childhood White simply had to go his own way. The word eccentric comes from two Greek words meaning “off center,” and he was that way from birth. In young adulthood he was already nostalgic; he looked for nature in the city; he enjoyed being a husband and father and stepfather, but he spent most of his time in the company of animals. So by eccentric I mean, I think, that he was unconsciously original.

Why were Don Marquis’ stories about Archy and Mehitabel such a pivotal influence for White?
Marquis is at his best in these antic poems and sketches about a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach in the Jazz Age. White read them when they were new, starting in 1916 when he was a teenager, and fell in love with Marquis’ combination of skepticism, humor and compassion. He kept reading them. Then in 1949 he was asked to write an introduction to them, and rereading the whole series helped kick-start Charlotte’s Web.

What was it like visiting the Whites’ farm in Maine? Did it look like Zuckerman’s barn?
Yes, it did. I found it surreal and thrilling. I enjoy literary pilgrimages; I’ve visited Green Gables and Darwin’s Down House and even the original Hundred Acre Wood. But walking through E.B. White’s barn, and hitting my head on the rope that Avery and Fern swing on, and seeing the barn cellar looking very much like Garth Williams’ illustrations of Wilbur’s home—those moments made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

E.B. White’s wife Katharine seems like an interesting and accomplished woman. Did she love farming and animals as he did, or was this something she tolerated in him?
Katharine White—she was Katharine Sergeant Angellwhen White met her, before her divorce—was a fascinating woman. At The New Yorker she was brilliant and formidable as editor of John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and many other important writers. She liked animals and country life, but my general sense is that she agreed to move to the farm in Maine because she wanted her husband to be happy. Only later did he realize how much she sacrificed to move there.

I’m trying to imagine a connection between Charlotte’s Web and White’s The Elements of Style. Is there one?
Excellent question. Each represents White’s commitment to lucidity, to the elegance of simplicity, and demonstrates his argument that “style” is not a goal to be achieved but a side effect of a writer’s authenticity. Each book also began as a return to the past—to caring for animals in a barn as he had in the stable of his childhood; and to a favorite Cornell professor, William Strunk, whose homemade-style chapbook had come to White at an impressionable age, just as he became a busy undergraduate journalist on the Cornell paper.

You talk about the barnyard as “sacred space” for White. What can we learn from life in a barn?
White claimed that Charlotte’s Web is a straightforward report from the barn, but of course he himself was very sentimental about it as a place in which he had spent many great hours in contact with the most elemental aspects of life, with hunger and birth, with growth and death. He saw it as a miniature cosmos, but also as a place where he had always been innocently happy—on his own, nurturing an animal, minding his own business, thinking his own thoughts.

Is Charlotte’s Web still relevant for 21st-century children?
Very much so, I think. First, of course, it’s a wonderful story, a mix of humor and lyricism and heartbreak; and it was one of the first children’s books to deal with death, the great taboo for so long. But also, over most of the world, especially the United States, the second decade of the 21st century is far more urbanized than the mid-20th century, when the book was published. As I researched E.B. White’s drafts of Charlotte’s Web, I realized that as much as anything else he wanted to immortalize a sense of natural rhythms—days, seasons, birth, death. What could be more relevant for our nature-starved children nowadays?

There’s nothing more to romance novels than a mullet-sporting hero, a giddy heroine and a happily-after-ever—right? Not if you ask Sarah Wendell, better known as “Smart Bitch Sarah” from the popular (and hilarious) blog, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. On her website, Wendell critiques and gushes over plot lines, motifs and character development in romance novels. Her first book on the subject, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, has been assigned in courses at Yale and Princeton. Released this month, her new book—Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels—explores how romance novels can inform our thoughts on courtship, self-confidence and modern relationships.

Wendell answered questions for BookPage about falling in love with romance novels, her research for the book and why the genre gets a bad rap.

In your book, you explain that the first romance novel you read was Midsummer Magic by Catherine Coulter.  What about that book got you hooked on romance?
Ah, Midsummer Magic. It’s a bit difficult to explain all the reasons I love that book because some of them rest on the fact that, despite being published in the late '80s/early '90s period of historical romance, it has some points that make is distinct from the established tropes of romance at that time. This was the era from which the much-abhorred term "bodice ripper" came to be, and bodices were indeed ripped, and ripped often. I loved this book because it showed a hero and heroine who were sympathetic. I knew what was motivating each of them, even as they did some boneheaded and somewhat dastardly things in the name of preserving their independence.
I loved how strong the heroine was despite her limited options at times. I loved how determined the hero was to do the right thing, even when it was really awful. I had no idea there were strong and independent-minded characters in romance. Once I read one, I had to read more.

Even though the happy ending is a known conclusion, the journey to that happy ending is always different, and in the hands of a skilled storyteller, that journey is worth experiencing every time.

Why are romance novels so addictive? Even when we know the hero and heroine will get a happily ever after, we still keep turning the pages, again and again . . .
I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One: Real life does not come with the happily-ever-after guarantee. It’s wonderfully reassuring and frankly uplifting to read narratives where, no matter how bad it gets, you know that everything will be okay in the end. Two: Even though the happy ending is a known conclusion, the journey to that happy ending is always different, and in the hands of a skilled storyteller, that journey is worth experiencing every time.

What do you think is the most common misconception about romance novels?
That they’re not intelligent, or that the readers are not either. Romances are smart, insightful and valuable, and the women who read (and write!) them are just as intelligent and savvy.

In your interviews with some of the genre’s biggest authors, did you learn anything that truly surprised you?
Oh, yes. Robyn Carr’s comments pretty much summed up the book in four sentences. Eloisa James shared incredibly touching stories from her readers, as did Toni Blake. Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts, Christina Dodd and Theresa Medeiros explained the ingredients to a successful courtship in ways that revealed the strengths of their own stories but their very complex understanding of the genre and its role in women’s lives. The writers I interviewed absolutely understood how important romance fiction is to the women who read it, and the ways in which they expressed that understanding surprised me, but in an absolutely good way!

If you could wake up in a romance novel, what kind would it be? Regency? Western? Paranormal? . . . Harlequin Spice?
Can I be in a Regency house party with lots of long walks and really good meals and games and gossip? That would be fun for many weeks of entertainment. I don’t know that I’d love the foundation garments, but I’d survive!

You have read a lot of romance novels. (Care to guess how many??) After all those books, are you still learning lessons about love, intimacy and relationships from your reading?
I don’t think I can guess how many total! My gosh, I would forget a whole dozen or more. But yes, even after many, many, many romances, I am learning about courtship, intimacy and respect from the novels I read. Each novel presents a new account of how to fix what might go wrong, but more importantly, each one reminds me how fortunate I am that I am loved, and to make sure to demonstrate my own feelings to the people I care about. As Theresa Medeiros says in the book, “Never stop courting your spouse.” That’s some excellent advice right there.