Recently I had the opportunity to speak by phone with writer and podcaster Jennifer L. Scott. The author of the Madame Chic books — “Lessons from Madame Chic: 20 Stylish Secrets I Learned While Living in Paris” was the first — Scott is as delightful a conversationalist as we might expect, witty, thoughtful and easily given to laughter.

Glass half-full or glass half-empty?

For the past 20 years, we’ve heard from academics, some politicians and various commentators that America is a deeply racist society. In response, some colleges, the federal government and certain corporations require employees and students take instruction in DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion.

In a book written in a first-person, vulnerable and intimately entertaining narrative oral storytelling voice, Ken Smith takes us through his entire life — of youthful globe-trotting adventure and hardship, to an eventual life of self-sufficiency and spiritual awareness in Scotland.

Over 30 years ago, I read Helen Hooven Santmyer’s “And Ladies of the Club,” a doorstopper of a book chronicling life in a small Ohio town from the post-Civil War era to the early 1930s.

Sometimes life seems too short to read every novel and author on your list. Oftentimes, I tend towards classics and literature. After all, you only live once so why would I not go straight to the greats?

In “Stories I Lived to Tell: An Appalachian Memoir” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 152 pages), 89-year-old storyteller and writer Gary Carden spends much of his time revisiting his youth and childhood.

As part of my gifts for Father’s Day this year, my daughter bought me a book. She apologized before handing it to me, saying “It’s really terrible and silly, and I almost didn’t give it to you.” 

Editor’s note: This first part of this review was published in the July 24 edition of The Smoky Mountain News The evidence is clear that social media is not healthy for girls under the age of sixteen.

In a remarkable book that combines eco-poetry, poetic prose and personal and scientific information by award-winning African-American ornithologist and professor at Clemson University, J. Drew Lanham, birds are the major focus, with Lanham even giving us a semi-humorous list of rules for birders.

On the first Saturday of June, my friend John and I were just leaving McKay Used Books in Manassas, Virginia, when I spotted a woman young enough to be my granddaughter seated at a table topped by a couple of piles of books.