An essay by Margo Rabb in the New York Times discusses which books are the most stolen in bookstore across the country.   Apparently, the most commonly stolen book at Book People in Austin, TX, is the Bible, whereas at St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York, books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac are so often pilfered that they have been moved to a special case behind the counter.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Malcolm Gladwell, and Colm Toibin, among others, share their favorite books of 2009 in a recent feature in The Observer.

In the December issue of the Atlantic, literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks his top 25 books of 2009, among them The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, The Third Reich Trilogy by Richard Evans, and It’s Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun.

Cynthia Crossen of the Wall Street Journal discusses the “canon wars”–the debate over whether, and which, modern texts should be added to the works of literature being taught and studied within academia.  She also suggests several sources of classic book lists: Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, the St. John’s College Reading List, the appendices to Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel.

In a journal entry for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert writes that “books do furnish a life.”

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best-seller by James Could Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. It and the other books on the list have been rendered obsolete, so that his essay is cruelly dated. But I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was 14, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.

The article continues here.