Sam Briger

Author David Mendelsohn says having his 81-year-old father in the college seminar he was teaching on Homer's Odyssey led to an unexpected bonding.

Pamela Paul of The New York Times talks about her own new book, which chronicles every book she's read since she was 17 years old. Even if a work isn't great, she refuses to brush it aside cavalierly.

Cookbook author Julia Turshen says cooking should be flexible: "[Recipes] are kind of sold to people as prescriptions, these really precise things, ... but I think there's very rarely a wrong answer.