Confession time: I do not love magazines. I work for one (you're reading it), write about them in my Street Librarian column, and use them frequently. But I do not love them. I love rivers, trees, birds, humans, the sky, water in all its forms, libraries, and . . . books. There, I've said it. There's still nothing like the magic of the right book at the right time. And nothing like the pleasure of discovery.

At 17, I dropped out of college and my education commenced. For the next few years books were my best friends. I recall discovering the novels of Yukio Mishima, shelved in my hometown library under H for the author's real name, Hiraoka. I remember seeing a book with Charles Bukowski's acne-pocked face on the cover in a modular bookstore in Iowa City, buying it, reading it, feeling enthralled. I remember, thanks to Bukowski, being turned on to the wild picaresque novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

I devoured Crime and Punishment in the dark basement of the Loras College library, turned up Arthur Rimbaud in Dubuque, learned that Jack London (an author whose writings, like Bukowski's, have been massively popular outside academia) wrote more than The Call of the Wild, and met countless more friends, each special somehow.

Reading these books, and others through the years, changed my life. Perhaps even saved it. They posed questions, proffered maps, rang alarms, and shone light in dark places. In his zine, For the Clerisy, Brant Kresovich posits that some people read for comfort, consuming books like drugs, seeking satisfaction. Others, he asserts -- and he is one of them -- read to explore, to awaken, and to get outside themselves. I recognize myself in both types.

At their best, books connect us somehow. The Stone Reader, a 2002 film by Mark Moskowitz, describes the filmmaker's quest to learn more about the author of a novel he started reading in the '70s, when it was published, and then put down for 25 years: The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman. When Moskowitz returned to and finally finished this book in the '90s, he was powerfully moved but could find nothing else Mossman had written. Moskowitz wondered who else had read the novel, who simply knew about it, and whatever became of its author. In this shaggy but fascinating film, Moskowitz interviews literary scholars, agents, authors, and publishers, with whom he talks about 'one-hit wonders,' first books, and how someone reviewed so favorably in The New York Times Book Review could go missing.

Moskowitz's journey takes him to the University of Iowa, where he finds the professor to whom Mossman's novel is dedicated. When this professor connects the obsessive reader with the elusive author, some questions are answered, but a few more are raised: Is a book a failure if it has reached and moved just one reader? What book do I now most need to read? What does it say about this documentary, mostly about male readers and writers, that it is dedicated to two mothers 'who taught us to love books'? And what does it say that the story is conveyed via film and DVD instead of print?