Dr. Seuss sketched the spiritual background of my childhood — particularly in books such as If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra! As a kid, I loved weird beasts, and each of these books featured a menagerie of goggle-eyed, fanged, tufty mammals with...

This book is a hymn, I hope, to a composer I love and to the power of music in general. It began when my interest was piqued by the idea of a symphony considered so important that it was transferred onto microfilm like some dossier in a spy novel and...

I can’t stand Little Women. Sure, I know Louisa May Alcott’s book is a classic of children’s literature; Henry James called her “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.” But as a romantic-hearted young teen, I couldn’t bear to watch the March girls’ sunny, youthful dreams squashed...