Mr. Giles is a novelist and the former executive Hollywood editor of Vanity Fair. Anyone who’s published a book or tried to has had even indispensable friends and family tell them why they’re not ...

I acquire far too many books, usually under the theory that I will get to all of them someday, “someday” being the most elastic of reading time frames. Some of my somedays have lasted decades, and ...

All of us finish a great book and wish we could ask the author just one question. What did they really mean? How would they apply their advice today? With ChatGPT, I found a way to make that a reality ...

I hated my assigned reading in middle and high school. Hated All of it. I mean, I did it. I read every single book, story, or poem I was assigned throughout my many years of education, up until my ...

You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an ...

I research and write about happiness, so every year before Jan. 1, I ask people, “What resolutions will you make this year?” With reliable frequency, people tell me, “I want to read more.” Perhaps ...

“A writer,” Saul Bellow once observed, “is a reader moved to emulation.” But what if it’s also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to ...