The following readings will be held at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva.

• Maria E. Lyons will host a reading and signing for her children’s book series, “Angelina The Adventure Cat,” at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 13. Lyons is a storyteller and educator with more than 30 years of experience in faith-based education and the arts. 

Though I had assured my Smoky Mountain News editor I’d deliver a real book review this week — my to-read stack includes biographies of Karl Marx and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a novel, two books of essays on education, and more — book-centered distractions in late May led me in a different direction. 

“In the new science, the new worldviews, we are not nouns, we are verbs.”

Rebecca Solnit’s book “The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change” (Haymarket Books, 2026, 149 pages) is something of a scholarly study and a personal prophesy. Is Solnit’s title for her book right that there may be a new beginning following a time of cataclysm, or are we at the beginning of the “end times” as prophesied in the Bible?

One May evening in Holt, Colorado, septuagenarian and widow Addie Moore makes her way to the home of Louis Waters, a widower also in his 70s. They’ve lived within a block of each other for decades, and Addie had always admired Louis’ wife. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Addie says she has a proposal for Louis.

One of the reasons I love writing book reviews is it keeps me from getting stuck in a loop of predictable reads. While I still read what I enjoy, I learn to enjoy what I read, especially when it isn’t a genre I would’ve picked up on my own. The book this time was a military fiction: Harry Crocker III’s “Kruger’s Korps” (Knox Press, 2026, 224 pages).  

When I was growing up, my father had a bookshelf with glass doors. Behind the delicate handles were elegant hardcovers, fairy tale collections with beautiful illustrations and sentimental classics, like “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy he had bought and read back in the 1970s. But he had another bookshelf, a doorless one, that made all its books far more accessible, attainable, but in some ways slightly less alluring.

If you want to feel how lucky you are, just read Brian Barth’s “Front Street (Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia)” (Astra House, 2025, 287 pages). Barth, with maternal roots in WNC going back eight generations and who is a freelance journalist who writes for National Geographic, The Nation, The New Yorker and others and who has won prestigious medals and awards, literally takes us in hand to some of the most populated homeless camps in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area of northern California, introducing us to a cast of characters, describing their personal stories, private philosophies and political activism in order to explain why the country’s current approach to homelessness has become at once cruel and ineffective.

In January, in the middle of the week-long subfreezing temps and the snow that froze into ice, one of my sons gave me a belated Christmas gift, Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Basic Books, 2015, 416 pages). Originally published in 1959, this account of explorer Ernest Shackleton and his 27-man crew and their long battle for survival in Antarctica sold moderately well, then took off with the public after its reappearance in the late 1980s. Many of you readers have likely read this tale of heroism and resilience, but I was a come-lately to its pages. 

Thomas Schlesser’s “Mona’s Eyes” is a slow motion read that will baffle readers looking for a conventional pathway to storytelling. 

Ten-year-old Mona lives with her parents, Camille and Paul, in Paris. One day, she inexplicably goes blind. Her worried parents rush her off to the doctor, but on their arrival Mona regains her vision. The doctor and staff of the hospital are baffled; the parents and Mona are terrified.

Ordering some item from a company like Amazon — a smock, a special coffee, cotton swabs, whatever — is quick, simple and easy. You place the order, and two or three days later, the package appears on your front porch. The same ease and speed apply when ordering your groceries from Walmart or the local food mart. You make a list, tap a key, arrive at the delivery time, put the groceries in the car and brush your hands off as a job well done.