My mother, Ricki Waldman, taught me to love books. In my house we were not athletes, we did not have hobbies. We read. Voraciously. Constantly. We even had periodic "reading suppers," in which we would all sit silently around the dinner table, each immersed in our own book, paying scant attention to our food. My husband finds the idea of a reading supper horrifying - shouldn't people talk to one another over their meals? Yes, I tell him, but secretly, when I'm in the middle of a particularly delightful novel, I long for my childhood when no one expected you to put down The Wind in the Willows...