I confess the whole reason I bought this book was the terrific cover art, which consists of three belly bands over a gold-embossed cover. The design was by Jordan Crane and is described here. All I could figure out initially was that it had something to do with writing, and that - and the cover - was enough to convince me to buy it. It turned out to be a series of previously-published essays in reading and writing that I learned a lot from. It had an essay on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (which got me started - after over twenty years - reading my Annotated Sherlock Holmes) and on the books that inspired the recent film The Golden Compass (which I promptly went out and bought on DVD and watched with Jamie and Grayson). It also had interesting sections on genre fiction and various other interesting subjects, all of which I enjoyed.