One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.