I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian.

Incapable of conjuring up any facial expression that she did not learn from watching television, Jessica Alba plays a brilliant scientist who inadvertently acquires the ability to make herself invisible. This is not a gift Alba seems particularly comfortable with, as the last thing she needs is to be heard but not seen.

Martin Scorcese is probably America's greatest living director, and while he is not a titan like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or Federico Fellini, he is certainly consistently more interesting than Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola or Woody Allen. Even a failure like Gangs of New York or a curiosity like The Aviator is more interesting and ambitious than Munich, The Black Dahlia or Scoop.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.

I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian.