Read The Book

An interview with Gayle Bragg, founder of Book Nooks book club. How did your club get started? My daughter was in Stevens Forest preschool, and a lot of the moms and I would get together afterward while the kids were playing on the playground ... and we would talk about everything, including books. ... And [we realized that] we really missed having intelligent conversation with other women that went beyond diapers, etc. Does your club have a structure to it? Did you start with any rules?

An interview with Lorraine Morgan, member of Chat `N' Chew book club. Does your club specialize in a certain kind of book? Our ages in the group range from - the youngest person is probably 37 and the oldest is about 57 ... so it's made for a real wide scope as far as what books people are picking. For a while there, we were picking Oprah's [Book Club] books, and I suddenly thought they were a little whacko. ... They're ultimately about somebody conquering evil or terrible circumstances.

"You have to feed your brain and your body," said Danny Weaver, a sixth-grader at Sykesville Middle School.For Danny, books are "brain food.""Reading gives me something to do," he said."Sometimes, I pretend I am a character in my book."To share his enjoyment, Danny drew his favorite literary character on one side of a grocery bag and wrote a book review on the other.The bag will be on display at Martin's supermarket in Eldersburg until a clerk sends it home filled with a customer's purchases.

The photograph is known as Pandora in Blue Jeans, although no one knows who coined the phrase. Grace Metalious sits at her Remington typewriter, dressed in blue jeans, of course, but also a plaid flannel shirt and sneakers, no socks. It is the summer of 1956. She is 31, a New Hampshire housewife, a mother of three, the wife of a high school principal. She drinks too much. In eight years, she will be dead.Metalious clasps her hands to her face, as if contemplating the next sentence in the novel she has called her fourth child, "The Tree and the Blossom."

An interview with Jenny Leopold, facilitator of the book club at Florence Bain Senior Center in Columbia. What is your role as the book club's facilitator? I'm a [former] English teacher, and I taught high school and college English, and now I'm at home with [my own] kids. ... I absolutely love working with this population. Seniors are just the best students ... and I think that they think of me as their teacher [even though] they are a group of women who have been active readers their whole life.

You've seen the movie, now read the book - for free! The movie is Spider-Man 2, which opened Wednesday and pulled in a record-breaking $40.5 million, meaning plenty of you were there. And if that's not enough Spidey to satisfy you, simply truck on over to your friendly neighborhood comic-book store today and take advantage of the third annual Free Comic Book Day. If the store is one of thousands participating in the nationwide promotion, you can walk away with a comic book - Spider-Man is one of about 30 titles being offered - without plunking down a cent.

NBC's Today show, ABC's Good Morning America and Live With Regis and Kelly all started their own high-profile TV book clubs recently after Oprah killed off hers. But meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people quietly continued doing what they had been doing, Oprah or no Oprah: getting together to talk about books. Reading a good book is fun. But nothing beats reading a good book and then getting into a lively discussion about it. Rachel Jacobsohn, author of The Reading Book Handbook (Hyperion, 1998)

The good folk of Savannah, Ga., are generally under awed by the power of the sword. In his famously pyromaniacal march to the sea, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (see opposite page) was bargained into leaving their city entirely unmolested . But the pen! Now, there is righteous might.If you are not aware of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," by John Berendt (Random House. 388 pages. $24), you have been woefully neglecting book chatter for a year or more. First published two years ago next month, it has reportedly sold 715,000 hardcover copies, leading best seller lists for almost 90 weeks.

THERE WERE so many opportunities to reject Bret Easton Ellis' novel "American Psycho."There was the moment when the manuscript first landed on the editor's desk at Simon & Schuster, its pages filled with Armani ties, silk pumps, severed heads, nail guns, Bottega Veneta briefcases, mutilated corpses, microwave cannibalism and fabulous stereo equipment. There was the day when its editor gave excerpts from the most violent chapters to the editorial board, or the weeks when women at Simon & Schuster first read the novel and were appalled by its graphic descriptions of sexual torture-murders.

My wife and I have this little vacation ritual. The first thing we do upon arrival, even before arguing about where to have dinner, is to figure out how long we could stay.In other words, if we sold off everything -- the house, the cars, the kids, even my complete collection of Gene Pitney 45s -- how long could we hang on to a little piece of paradise before the money runs out?This shows, of course, a tremendous degree of shallowness. You wouldn't expect that from my wife, a teacher after all, whose job it is to mold the youthful flower of our nation.