The twelve essays in this edited collection examine the experience of reading, from the late medieval period to the twentieth century. Central to the theme of the book is the role of materiality: how the physical object - book, manuscript, libretto - affects the experience of the person reading it.

The twelve essays in this edited collection examine the experience of reading, from the late medieval period to the twentieth century. Central to the theme of the book is the role of materiality: how the physical object - book, manuscript, libretto - affects the experience of the person reading it.

On May 9, 1830, fourteen year-old Daniel O Connell Jr., son of the "Liberator," left his comfortable home in Dublin to attend the Jesuit college at Clongowes Wood in County Kildare. Thus began a three-year correspondence between Danny Jr. and his mother, Mary O Connell. Bursting with love and affection, illness and death, politics and scandal, these letters allow a brief glimpse at the relationship between mother and son in nineteenth-century Ireland. In addition, this collection documents a portion of an important juncture in the political career of Danny s father Daniel O Connell. Returned for Clare in the 1828 by-election, the "Liberator" took his seat in 1830 as the first Catholic Member of Parliament, and for the next several years focused his attention on the parliamentary business carried out in London. This collection of letters between mother and son is doubly valuable, because it not only offers insights into both the ordinary social history of nineteenth-century Ireland, but into the extraordinary and exciting political history of parliamentary politics and of Daniel O Connell as well."

For seventeen-year-old Flannery Fields, the only respite from the plaid-skirted mean girls at Sacred Heart High School at is her beloved teacher Miss Sweeney's AP English class. But when Miss Sweeney doesn't show up to teach Flannery's favourite book, Wuthering Heights, leaving behind her purse, Flannery knows something is wrong. The police are called, and Flannery gives them everything - except Miss Sweeney's copy of Wuthering Heights. This she holds onto. And good thing she does, because when she opens it, it has somehow transformed into Miss Sweeney's real-time diary. It seems Miss Sweeney is in New York City - and she's in trouble. So Flannery does something very unFlannery-like: she skips school and sets out for Manhattan, with the book as her guide. But as soon as she arrives, she meets a boy named Heath. Heath is British, on a gap year, incredibly smart - yet he's never heard of Albert Einstein or Anne Frank. In fact, Flannery can't help thinking that he seems to have stepped from the pages of Bronte's novel. Could it be? With inimitable wit and heart, Mary O'Connell has crafted a love letter to reading, to the books that make us who we are. Dear Reader, charming and heartbreaking, is a novel about finding your people, on the page in the world.