Michael Chabon did it. He did it in 2000, at Christmas and during the week after. He did it with his fantastic novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay . I was never the same afterwards. I've always been a reader and from a very early age. I devoured books. I reread favorites like The Hobbit ; in fact, I read an illustrated version of that novel so much in elementary school that my copy fell apart. I read series; at one point, I had read all 60 or so Hardy Boys books that had been published by 1980 or 1981. I was a library volunteer in middle school and checked out as many books as I could. When I was in college in the early 90s, I would take a weekend to plow through a book, ignoring my homework. By the time the late 90s rolled around, I wasn't reading as much as I had. I was spending much of my free reading time devouring comics, another lifelong passion. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay changed all that. I don't remember when I first heard a...