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Are we all reading less these days?

That’s not what the level of book sales in the UK suggests – 2007 was a record-breaking year in terms of the amount the British spent on a good read.

You may have one final objection to marking
books. You can't lend them to your friends because
nobody else can read them without being distracted
by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want to lend
them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual
diary, and lending it is almost like giving your
mind away.

If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's
Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist
Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a
copy. You will lend him your car or your coat --
but your books are as much a part of you as your
head or your heart.

It begs the question: What are those characters doing? Students should imagine the different possibilities. Does the protagonist rant and rave? Or does she remain eerily calm, delivering the lines with an icy gaze? The reader makes those interpretive choices.

So, get comfortable in that director’s chair. Remember, to appreciate the dramatic literature, a student must imagine the cast, the set, and the movements. That is what makes reading dramatic literature a challenging yet invigorating experience.

Unlike fiction, a play does not usually offer a lot of vivid detail. Typically, a playwright will briefly describe a character as he or she enters the stage. After that point, the characters might never be described again. Therefore, it is up to the reader to create a lasting mental image. What does this person look like? How do they sound? How do they deliver each line?

Many students relate to movies rather than literature. In this case, it might be fun to mentally cast contemporary actors into the roles. What current movie star would be best to play Macbeth? Hellen Keller? Don Quixote? For an entertaining class activity, instructors should have the students work in groups to write a movie trailer for the play.

Let’s get the first thing straight. People who have come must go. People must know where they’re going, otherwise the world could not be conducted on a sane basis. The streets would be full of people just wandering about, wouldn’t they? Wandering about and having useless arguments with people who know where they’re going.

I was very struck in this section to similarities to this theme which comes up later in 20th century literature in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.

Hyperion recently made a leap of faith when it reportedly paid $6.7 million to acquire the rights to “Last Lecture,” a book to be based on a talk given at Carnegie Mellon University by Randy Pausch, a 47-year-old computer-science professor who has terminal pancreatic cancer. Videos of the lecture — or parts of it — on YouTube and elsewhere on the Web have been viewed more than 6 million times.

Robert Miller, president of Hyperion, said he believed the book would sell even though prospective readers can see the core of its message online. “A book has a chance to have a timeless quality that’s different from a speech given in real time,” Mr. Miller said.

Sometimes the world of reading is opened up by a book that goes down easy. Mr. Bennett said he chose “The Pursuit of Love” for his fictional queen because it happened to be the first adult novel that he read for pleasure. He said that for him, as with the queen’s character, the book was a stepping off point into more heavyweight literature. “There are all sorts of entrances that you can get into reading by reading what might at first seem trash,” Mr. Bennett said.

And certain books that become phenomena — like those in the Harry Potter series or “The Da Vinci Code” or, to a slightly lesser extent most books recommended for Oprah Winfrey’s book club — can, in tempting people to read in the first place, create habitual readers. Perhaps more often, however, those readers just wait for the next “hot” book.