But he'll eventually eat his words

The Library of Congress was created on this day in 1800.

"Every man with a belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race." -- Henry Miller.

The Devil made me read it

Today is World Lteracy Day.

"Books are the curse of the human race." -- Benjamin Disraeli.

We always dreaded reading it

Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) was born today in 1832.

"I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales." -- Harold Pinter.

Let us now praise confusion

American writer James Agee was born on this day in 1909. He died in 1955, after a couple of heart attacks.

His most famous book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work of photographs and prose about sharecroppers in Alabama. The book sold only several hundred copies until being remaindered, but it is now regarded as a 20th-century masterpiece.

He was also an influential film critic -- "Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people," he wrote about one film – and he is a credited writer on two great films, The Night of the Hunter and The African Queen.

In 1957 Agee's novel, A Death in the Family, was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Agee struggled with alcohol and other demons his entire life. "The mere attempt to examine my own confusion," he wrote, "would consume volumes."

Is that a slam on Oprah?

This is National Book Week!

"I hate books, because they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.