The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.