We're so often caught up in the business of books - what's selling, which authors are getting plugged on TV and, oh yeah, why is sleaze-merchant Judith Regan getting raked over the coals today? - that it's easy to forget that reading is all about a private act.

It's a deliciously intimate activity that takes place between the covers, often in the bedroom, and, yes, it can be done in all sorts of positions. In other words, just like sex, it's filled with mysteries we may think about, but don't often discuss - a fact that I've found myself contemplating recently.

Today, giving Regan a well-deserved rest from the spotlight, here are 10 questions that have been dogging me about the special relationship between a reader and a book:

1. Why do we dread the first few pages of "getting into" a book? If you ask me, jumping into a new book is like diving into a swimming pool. You dread adjusting to the new temperature. Interestingly enough, once your brain has acclimated to the surroundings, you often dread getting out just as much.

2. Why is it so hard to stop reading a book that you hate? Sure, no one likes to be a quitter, but I think our obsessive need to plow through to the end is more about insecurity than work ethic. Reading a book is like being in a marriage. Once we're in it and it's not working, we keep thinking, well, maybe it's just us.

3. Why do we keep books we've already read, especially now that finding titles - even those out of print - is as easy as a click of the mouse? For me, holding onto favorite books is like building a 3-D scrapbook. Pick up the exact book you read 20 years ago, and you'll recall more than the story: You'll remember where you were - even who you were - when you read it. Download it off the Internet or check it out at the library? You might as well ask a cook to re-create a special dish without her stained recipe card.

4. Am I the only one who often finds herself trying to picture how the words would be arranged on the page when I'm listening to an audiobook? Funny, I never wonder how a book would sound out loud when I'm reading it.

5. Why do we think of "reading" an audiobook as cheating? Maybe for the same reason that we know stepping on a moving sidewalk isn't exactly walking: We're covering the same distance, but we're not working the same muscles. (Still, try separating me from my audiobooks and you'll find yourself working muscles you never knew you had.)

6. Why should we care what an author looks like? Blame it on the visual age of TV. Hey, if we're wrong, it's a safe bet TV's to blame for something else anyway.

7. Why do I feel like I can't be without a hefty dose of reading material, while others are content to stare blankly into the distance? I wondered about this recently while on a beach vacation. Joining scores of sunbathers laid out like rows of gutted fish in a pan, I noticed that though most weren't dozing, hardly anyone was reading a book. Not only weren't they reading, but they didn't seem to be listening to an iPod or even so much as working a crossword puzzle. What's going on inside these people's minds? Who are these blank-eyed, book-slighting bathers? Paris Hilton acolytes? Zen Buddhists? I can't say. But there's probably a book I could read on the subject.

8. Am I the only one who can't seem to put a great book down, even when I've come to the end of the story? Like a nicotine addict who's run out of cigarettes and starts looking for butts, I re-read the inside jacket flap, check out the acknowledgments, heck, I even read the part about the typeface being Helvetica. Imagine what would happen if I ever tried heroin.

9. Why do some people insist that a book remain pristine, while others feel free to manhandle their reading material until it looks as if it has been dropped in a mud puddle, run over by a semi and used as a training dummy for bayonet-wielding insurgents? I don't really know, but I told my friend Marty, who falls in the latter category, that she won't get her mitts on my books ever again.

10. And finally, if reading is like sex, are book lovers like nymphomaniacs? OK. I just threw that in to see if you were still with me.

But I bet Judith Regan would know the answer.

Patti Thorn is the books editor. thornp@RockyMountainNews.com 303-954-5419.