Reading is hard. Seriously, reading is hard. I don't mean hard in the sense of working your way up and down the sometimes-impenetrable prose of James Joyce's Ulysses; I tried it myself, got lost somewhere on page two, and never went back. But Joycean labyrinths aside, as someone who has devoted his life to reading and writing, I've always enjoyed the physical act of reading, the communing of writer to reader via words. In particular, I love reading the often-forgotten books a