Virginia Heffernan:

I’m not sure he’s developing an appreciation for books. But he is learning how to enrich his solitude, and that is one of the most intensely pleasurable aspects of literacy.

From last year's best-of:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Recently, Robert Darnton:

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? Would we not prefer a world in which an immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Last year, Alberto Manguel:

For the last seven years, I’ve lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.