Ramona Koval's By The Book is about reading, living and the authors that have written themselves into her life: from Oliver Sacks to Oscar Wilde, Christina Stead to Grace Paley. It is about learning to read (and asking her mother to buy her a copy of the Kama Sutra), about love and science (and her childhood ambition to be Marie Curie), about arctic exploration (and her ruminations on what part of a husky she would eat if she had to), about poetry...