Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

If poetry is what is called “a sealed book” to you, begin by reading Hazlitt’s famous essay on the nature of “poetry in general.” It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt’s essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal....

• AllConsuming - "books that are mentioned on weblogs"
• aNobii - "create, share, and explore booklists"
• Bibliophil - "keep track of your books in a customized library"
• Booktribes - " read it, love it, share it"
• Bookswap
• Bookswellread - "your free online book journal"
• ChainReading - "book tracking made easy"
• ConnectViaBooks - "the social network based on books"
• Douban - "discover books, music, people"
• Good Reads - “what your friends are reading”
• Gurulib - "organize your home library"
• Lib.rario.us - "catalog your...collection...commune and orate"
• Listal - "list [and rate] the stuff you love"
• MediaChest - "track books, CDs, DVDs, and games"
• reader2reader - "share opinions about books"
• Reliwa - "share your books, music, and opinions"
• Shelfari - "create a virtual shelf to show off your books"
• ShelfCentered - "[search,] organize...makes wishlists...share with friends"
• Squirl - "catalog, organize and share...practically anything"
• Stuffopolis - "keep track of your stuff"
• Zestr - "keep track of your books, movies, music, and games"

• Total number of bookstores in the state: 188 (122 independents, 68 chain outlets)
• Metro-Atlanta chains: 22 Borders/Waldenbooks; 5 Barnes & Nobles/B Daltons
• Georgia’s ranking of bookstores per capita among all States: 27th

…What a precious thing free or cheap interlibrary lending is for virtually every student, scholar, and recreational reader in the United States.

…The average American probably doesn't know it, but interlibrary lending in the United States costs…about $22 to borrow a book and $12 to lend one, according to statistics from the Association of Research Libraries.

That adds up to a transaction cost of well over $30 for each volume. Even when patrons at private or public libraries in the United States are asked to pay for the service, the charge is usually minimal and doesn't go far toward actually offsetting the true cost of the practice. For the most part, libraries silently eat the costs.

The significance of that sacrifice goes largely unnoticed. It isn't the sexiest line on a library budget. But there is something profoundly democratic, surprisingly compassionate, and deeply civic in sharing our national resources in this manner.

The monetary sacrifice of the loan, along with the relinquishing of a physical book that represents a considerable investment on the part of the providing library, is even more astonishing during an era in which we hear daily reports about budget cuts to public, school, and research libraries in every state. The American Library Association notes that cuts in library funds that have been announced in the media in the past four years have been immense, amounting to about $188-million. Libraries are hardly in a position to waste money by serving distant patrons and taking the risk of never getting their books back.

And yet, they do.

…The exchange of books between public and private institutions in the United States isn't a quid-pro-quo system, either. Just because Harvard lends more than it receives doesn't stop it from participating. University libraries like mine borrow more than they lend, and yet resource-sharing groups generally don't blackball us from membership.

The system works precisely because it helps everyone. If too many libraries withdraw from the sharing systems because they believe they are incurring more costs than benefits, the system falls apart.

Interlibrary lending only works when, in some fundamental way, libraries consider all of us to be their patrons. They must have the foresight and the imagination to see that all knowledge in some way, someday, will serve everyone. What goes around may, both literally and figuratively, come around.

According to some oft-cited statistics, 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them and 80% of American families did not buy or read a book last year.

Bloom Syndrome: a condition in which the sufferer is unable to read any work of literature unless it is deemed Significant by Harold Bloom and which often results in the reader losing the will to live/read, crushed under the weight of canonical imperatives. The Syndrome develops gradually with the sufferer firstly accepting the notion that some books are better than others, placing undue emphasis on books which have won prizes or been favourably reviewed by The Clever People in newspapers. This begins the descent into genre deprecation in which all romance/chick lit is dismissed as unreadable, followed gradually by an inability to stomach any fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers and finally, mystery novels (these are the last genre to be abandoned because Clever People occasionally admit to reading them as a guilty pleasure). Thereafter sufferers quickly develop Classic monomania, a state of mind in which the literary tastes of the now emaciated reader have become so distorted that she can take only small doses of books endorsed by His Bloomness as being Works Of Genius. If left untreated, the Syndrome can result in a fatal loss of the love of reading.

Treatment consists of persuading the deluded patient that the world will not end, her brain will not rot, her blog readers will not scorn her, if she reads a book for pure pleasure irrespective of the name on the cover or what The Clever People think of it. If this can be achieved then small doses of light reading should be administered at frequent intervals. Care should be taken not to expose the convalescent reader to any over-hyped contemporary fiction as this may cause a serious relapse. Once treatment is deemed successful, and the reader has regained her zest for life and reading, all infected copies of The Karamazov Brothers will need to be burnt to avoid subsequent re-infection.

"Calm and simple delight. Any childhood lover of books remembers that wave of relief and exaltation that would buoy you the moment you realized you could return to a book you'd been living deep inside for days. So that you would climb back in, as into a cardboard-box fort, and close the cover behind you like a door. Such is one common encounter with what American essayist Sven Birkerts calls ‘deep time’ - that clockless, borderless psychic state whose inhabitants have dual citizenship and can live out in the world with others or deep in the collaborative, fantastic world of books. Adults are not barred from that state, but it takes real time and peace to get to the border, and for adults such commodities are scarce. Birkerts argues further that the speed of our lives has accelerated to the point where even for children the experience of ‘deep time’ grows rare."

• the relatively small number of adequately-stocked, adequately-staffed and conveniently-located branch libraries;
• the non-uniform and inconvenient-for-many hours that AFPL libraries are open for business;
• a customer-unfriendly online library catalog and a feature-starved, non-interactive library website;
• the lack of a clear, quick way for computer-owning cardholders to electronically request the purchase of a book (or nonbook item) - and the absence of prompt, reliable feedback on the disposition of such a request;
• the lack of year-round ordering of books that results in inordinate delays in books and other items being added to AFPL's collections;
• forcing card-holders to wait a minimum of three days for an item to be transferred from one library branch to another;
• the lack of a drive-up/pickup option to get hold of a library item without finding a parking place and getting out of one's car;
• the incredible cumbersomeness of obtaining an interlibrary loan item, and the lack of publicity about ILL;
• the library's unwillingness to offer library patrons an affordable (or free) books-by-mail service.

I've done the math and here's the bottom line. If you want consistent artistic bang for your buck, skip the movies, forget the theatre and turn off your TV set. Instead, read a book. More specifically, read a novel. More specifically still, read the kind of novel that publishers call “trade fiction.”