In this lumpy, unsentimental and ultimately very sad memoir, Joe Queenan writes that as a teenager he dreamed of making "a living by ridiculing people," and it didn't seem to matter all that much where he went to college, since "one couldn't actually major in satire or invective."

Imagine Sarah Dessen as a fourth-grader, sitting in her family's living room. "I had a little typewriter, and I'd sit and type up my stories and put them in a folder," she recalls.

Book review:The term "bookworm," which dates back to Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, has never been a very flattering description. In her new book "Enchanted Hunters," Harvard professor Maria Tatar tries to reclaim voracious reading as a marvel, not an escape.

Book review:Pick up any high school physics textbook. Turn a page or two, and you will find a mathematical equation. College texts have equations on virtually every page.

Summer brings thrillers, summer brings beach reading, summer brings James Patterson -- as do winter, spring and fall.

John Hart had me at "I've."

Reading Denis Johnson's new thriller, "Nobody Move," one almost senses the author luxuriating in the wanton pleasures of pulp fiction.

As a 4-year-old, Walter Kirn had a kindly adult mentor who taught him that knowledge was "a way to assess your location, your true position, not a strategy for improving your position."

I once covered a Billy Graham crusade unlike any other: Several hundred students began chanting "bull hockey" or words to that effect.

The world is not short of presentations making "the business case for sustainability." What it does lack is actual sustainable businesses -- because no such business exists.

Though never famous in his lifetime, outfielder Archie "Moonlight" Graham was immortalized in "Field of Dreams," the 1989 movie based on Ray Kinsella's novel, "Shoeless Joe."

As a debut novelist, Todd Johnson tells me, he's a bit of a publicity nightmare.

Book review:What historian Bernard A. Weisberger called "the Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography" began in the early 20th century with the writings of the first professional historians trained at Columbia University.

Book review:When the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns crashed and burned in little more than a week in March 2008, it became a harbinger of the credit crisis that snowballed later in the year and led to the global financial meltdown.

Book review:In his introduction to "That Infernal Little Cuban Republic," Lars Schoultz compares Cuba with the neighbors across the street who irritate you.

Books:When I teach Introduction to Writing Short Fiction, I tell my students that if their story makes me laugh out loud or cry real tears, they get an "A."

Book review:For more than a generation, few words in American public life have been uttered with such contempt as liberal.

Mysteries:Typically, the new mysteries of March and April are a little like spring training baseball games: appealing enough if you're a true fan, but little noted nor long remembered an hour after they're finished.

At the start of Patrick Somerville's magical debut novel, a very pregnant Marissa Bishop makes a request.

On March 15, 1781, at Guilford Courthouse near present-day Greensboro, Lord Charles Cornwallis's army of British regulars and German mercenaries defeated an American force of Continentals and militia commanded by General Nathanael Greene. "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody" is the first book-length account of battle.

The Weave Room:The first poem ever uttered may have been an occasional poem.

Tim Gautreaux's fine new book could be mistaken for a conventional crime novel. "The Missing" features the kidnapping of a precocious child who has a beautiful mother, an alluring singer on a riverboat.