The scent of books, their papery wings fluttering as you read...the amazing variety of books people secretly carry in their cars... the way that refrigerators, hosting stories of every kind, are actually a literary genre... the way we all make scurrilous moral judgments when surreptitously scanning other people's bookshelves... the subtle joy of reading a vast series of books... the pleasures of reading box scores and Ships in Port in the newspaper... the terrible epidemic of misplaced apostraphes in American life, thy the essay is the coolest, wildest literary form of them all... notes on Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tony Hillerman, Joseph Conrad, Cynthia Ozick, Jan Morris, William Blake, Andre Dubus III... the moist, moist delights of sea novels... a particular interview with the nonfiction author Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI... and much, much more that will make you laugh and snarl and ponder the endless pleasure of books and their creators. This is a book to enjoy, enlighten and inspire.