Tales from the Times

Although The New York Times isn't known for publishing sweet human interest stories, the paper does in fact report on plenty of soft subjects: there are stories about the food editor who befriends a chicken in his Queens, NY backyard, the five-year-old who takes his mother's car for a joy ride, the program that encourages feeding squirrels peanuts on the grounds of the White House and the""wheelchair love"" blooming at a Long Island nursing home. Most of these tales are perfectly suited for bedtime reading, as the average length of the chapters is three pages and the articles are often breezy in tone. Many of the paper's well-known writers are included in the collection, among them Elisabeth Bumiller, William Grimes, Jane Gross and Charlie LeDuff; they write on subjects ranging from animals to sports to""faraway places."" The stories, which appear without dates and with little or no commentary, feel as if they're presented in a vacuum, offering readers a radical change from the paper's usual in-depth, multi-layered approach.