Michael Dirda

Once upon a time, I sat in my mother's lap as she turned the pages of Golden Books, and I gradually learned to read.

Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.

On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.

In my own case, my folks didn't actually object to comics, as many parents did, but they pretty much felt the things were a waste of time.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

Any man's death diminishes us, but when an artist passes away, we lose not just an island but an entire archipelago.

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.