The voices in this anthology, i.e., Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Anthony Trollope, E.M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Frederick Douglass, Emily Post, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Malamud, and many others, describe the excitement of first learning to read and remind everyone of the unique companionship offered throughout life by books. The anthology contains selections from diaries, letters, plays, and books written over the last 2 centuries that reflect the individual's relationship to the act and skill of reading. The anthology is divided into six sections, each with a short introduction. In Part I, "The Young Reader," the literacy narrative is presented--recollections of first decoding the words on a page and the memories of exactly where and when this act occurred; in Part II, "Sorts of Readers," styles of reading are looked at--skipping, "slogging through the boring parts," forgetting everything, forgetting nothing, and "addicted serial reading." Part III, "Reading Aloud," contains reactions at being read to by another person--both pleasant and unpleasant reactions; Part IV, "Reading Ahead," includes some of the voices lifted now in argument, grief, and/or exaltation at the presence of electronic media in reading lives. Part V, "Queen Lear," relates experiences that reading has sometimes provided: of escape from humble beginnings, from oppression, from physical disability, from madness, for example; Part VI, "The Privileged Pleasure," is a celebration of the activity that makes lives better and sometimes possible. (NKA)