This is a book about books, about the pleasures, passions, and rewards of reading, about authors who are dedicated to the act of writing, and readers who are devoted to the joys of words in the right order. Funny, moving, and beautiful, it features an eclectic selection from some of the world's finest writers, as well as sixteen full-colour paintings by artist and editor Bascove.

Italo Calvino If On a Winter's Night a Traveller

Lynne Sharon schwartz Ruined By Reading

Roy Blount ,Jr Summertime and the Reading is Heavy

Raymond Carver Reading Something in the Restraunt 

Mary Stewart Hammond Listening to the Radio

Karen Chambers Reading Goals

Charles Simic The Pleasures of Reading

Elizabeth Barrett Browning The library in the garett

Virginia Woolf The Back Bedroom

Umberto Eco How to Organize a public Library

Dororhy Parker Etheral Mildness

Roberton Davies Books Are For Reading

Anne Fadiman Never Do that to a Book

Muriel Rukeyser  Poem White Page White Page Poem

Billy Collins Purity

Wislawa Szymborska The Joy of Writting

Anna Akhmatova The Poet

Jane Kenyon Afternoon in the house

Rainer Maria Rilke The Notebooks of Maulte Laurids Bridge

Qin Zihao Seeds Of Poetry

Langston Hughes English B

Calvin Trilln  oppotunies in poetry

Pablo Neruda  Word

Jerone Charyn Word music

T.Coraghedssan Boyle This Monkey ,My Back

Edna St. Vincent Milliary If I Die Solve n t

Xi Murong Poetry's Value

Mary Gordon  My curtains:Snow Bound from having a baby,finishing a book

Jana Hirshfield The Poet

Joyce Carol Oates An Old Prayer

Margaret Atwood Psalm to snake

Steve Martin  A Word From the Words From The pureDrivel

Richard Wilbur The Writer

Fran Lebowiyt Writting :A Life Sentence

Calvin Triillin Sign  Writing

Audre Lorde Story books on a kitchen Table

Anne caston  The Book

Migfuel De Cervantes from  Don quijote

Maxine Kumin On Reading on Old Baedeker in schloss Lropoldskron

Katha Pollitt Lives of the Nineteenth-Centuary portesses

Kate Rudhin Reading Lists

Geoffrey O' Brien Prisioners

Vikram seth The Poet

Czeslaw Milosz And Yet t the books

James Seay Where Books Fall open

Elizabeth hardwick On Reading

Virginia Wolf  from The Common Reader

Marianne Moore  poetry

Rachael Hadas Teaching Emily Dickinson

Robert Pinsky Library scene

Derek Walcott  Love in the Valley

Jane Austen From Northanger Abbey

Carol Weston  Beacoming a Reader

Rita Dove Maple Valley branch Library ,1967

marcel Proust  from SWANN'S wAY

Ranndall Jarell Children Selecting Books In the library

Vickie Karp Watching The Commuters Read

Colette Inez Reading Tu,Fu,I Wait for My Husband 

William Stafford The Trouble With Reading 

Adrian Spratt The Vicarious Activity

Xi Chuan  Books

David Lehman  April 2

Josephine Jacobson  Gentle Reader 

Donald Hall This Poem

George Bradley 6*10

geoffrey O'Brien A Little Treatise on Ways of Reading

Billy Collins Reading Myself To Sleep 

Jorge Luis Borges Ars Poetica

Mark Strand  The Night , The Porch