The Constant Reader

If you're looking for a good thriller I recommend The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a truly gripping police procedural/freelance tale about the corpses in the closet of a large Swedish industrial family. The oddly matched but effective "detectives" are a financial journalist and Salander, a tough waif with photographic mind and advanced computer skills. The result is a classic page turner. I was devastated to read in the author bio that Larsson has died since writing this--no more to anticipate.
And for something competely different, a quotation from a Tessa Hadley story, "She's the One," published in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
“She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding glass door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.”