If you like reading about visual art but don't like spending the considerable sums required to build your own library of vintage exhibition catalogues, feel free to borrow from another collector.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined a process known as ‘experience-taking’, a phenomenon that sees readers experiencing the emotions, thoughts and values of fictional characters in the books they’re reading. The researchers found that, after participants (all students of the university) had read a story in which a central character overcame obstacles in order to vote, said participants were much more likely to vote in a real world election several days later.

Interestingly, experience-taking only seems to work when readers are able to forget about and forgo their own self-identity whilst reading. As a way of discouraging one group of the experiment’s participants from forgetting about their own self, the researchers made them read in a cubicle in front of a mirror. The members of this group were significantly less likely to undergo the experience-taking process.

“Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.” Celebrated Italian novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary critic, and list-lover Umberto Eco has had a long fascination with the...

Following what has become customary hysteria, and seven-figure sales, at the release of a new Haruki Murakami novel in Japan, his growing English-language fanbase can expect to read the translation of his latest next year,  the Ashai Shimbun reports.

Shikisai wo Motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, Kare no Junrei no Toshi ("Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage") hinges around Tsukuru Tazaki, an isolated 36-year-old man struggling to overcome the trauma of rejection by his high-school friends years earlier. Like its title, the novel's opening line might not sound like obvious bestseller material: "From July of his sophomore year at college to January next year, Tsukuru Tazaki was living while mostly thinking about dying." But, like all of his books since the nostalgic love story Norwegian Wood captivated millions of readers in the 1980s, it has been an immediate commercial success.

It was met with a rapturous welcome on release in Japan on 12 April, where fans queued to be the first to read the book, in scenes reminiscent of Harry Potter releases in the UK. It has reportedly sold more than a million copies in Japan since publication.

Though William Shakespeare regularly dominates surveys of the greatest literature of all time, he remains a surprisingly controversial figure of literary history — while some believe The Bard profoundly changed modern life, others question whether he wrote anything at all. Doubts of authorship aside, one thing Shakespeare most certainly didn’t write is the cult-classic Star Wars — but he, as Ian Doescher brilliantly imagines, could have: Behold William Shakespeare’s Star Wars (public library), a masterwork of literary parody on par with the household tips of famous writers and Edgar Allan Poe as an Amazon reviewer.

As spectacular as it is that the Internet gives potentially everyone on the planet a voice, the unfortunate part is that it actually gives potentially everyone on the planet a voice — especially the people who tend to do little more than bitch about every little thing that they happen to read, hear or see out there in the wide, wide world (for proof, see anything Yelp-related, ever).

In this case, The Morning News has focused on that "read" bit, and in particular, on one-star Amazon reviews given to books that are widely considered to be classics — and for terrible, horrible, no good, very stupid reasons.

Say, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, for instance:

“I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this “Turkish Delight”! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank.”