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.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

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.

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life.

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom. . . . [A] mordant minor masterpiece. . . . Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts.

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies." pg. xvi

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.