Dementia took the mind of Bruce Jenkins’ mother, but it could not erase their shared love of words. “Take a book, and read to her just as she read to you.”

“Even at fifty, I feel the stirrings as strongly as a young shepherd boy who dropped everything he knew, crossed the desert, and ultimately found his  heart’s desire.” Musings on books and dreams by Michelle Terry, inspired by Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

From classic summer reads to powerful poetry, creative nonfiction, and art books, TED speakers provide you with a mammoth reading list for the next couple of months.

J. K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on June 26, 1997. The blog of the National Library of Medicine’s historical collections celebrates 20 years of Harry Potter with a series of posts, a curated collection, and lectures.

Logan Goldberg reflects on how we need a world with fiction: “And maybe we need a world wherein we escape from our outside influences and pour ourselves onto the page, and then show those pages to anyone willing to give them a chance.”