“Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.”
— Wallace Stegner

I have just finished reading a book that was like taking a class by an enlightened professor. In this case the “professor” is award-winning author Janisse Ray and her book is titled “Journey In Place: A Field Guide to Belonging” (Amazon, 2025, 231pgs).

 “The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.”
— Patti Smith

This is going to be fun. I enjoyed reading American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author and photographer Patti Smith’s new memoir “Bread of Angels: A Memoir” (Random House, 2025, 267 pages). Smith, who has fused rock music and poetry in her 12 recordings over the years and who is the author of 11 books, now at age 78, is still rockin’ and rollin’ and scribbling some mighty fine biographical prose.  

In my younger years, I read Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny” and “Marjorie Morningstar,” but somehow neglected two other bestsellers, his World War II saga “The Winds of War” and its sequel, “War and Remembrance.”

Inspired after reading David McCullough’s tribute to Wouk in “History Matters,” I recently picked up a paperback copy of “The Winds of War” from the public library and am three-quarters of the way through its 836 pages of small print.  

Recently, my mother gifted me “A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures” (Canterbury Classics, 2013, 540 pages). While I’ve read “A Christmas Carol” many times, I was pleasantly surprised to find Dickens had written plenty more festive tales just like it. 

In a review written in 2013 of John Williamson’s “Stoner,” Tim Kreider snagged the attention of  The New Yorker readers with this title: “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard of.”

This year, when my friend Anne introduced me to “Stoner,” I still belonged to the ignorant crowd. I’d never heard of the man or his book. Given the title and its publication in 1965, I immediately assumed “Stoner” featured hippies and potheads.

If you go to a child’s birthday party and bring a book as a present, you may not win the most popular present award. 

Having been invited to the party of a little girl I know, who was six turning seven, I decided to forego the popularity part and I headed to my local bookstore.

As author Thomas Rain Crowe discovered during his own long journey from Western North Carolina to California to Europe (and with due respect to another Western North Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe), you can go home again. Crowe did.

Thanksgiving morning. I awoke to the sounds of my upstairs neighbor scurrying about, most likely getting things together for whatever he has planned for Turkey Day. Nearby Russ Avenue is oddly quiet. Nobody is heading to work. The incessant construction has ceased for the day, too. 

Georgia poet and author Rupert Fike and I lived in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1970s in a time of social renaissance and spiritual awakening. He was with a core group community of some 300 young activists and idealists. The earliest beginnings of this community go back to San Francisco and a weekly meeting called Monday Night Class.

The Christmas season, dreaded by some, beloved by others, especially children. Already you’ll find houses festooned with lights and yards dotted with inflatable Santas, “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” on the radio and grocery store shelves stuffed with cards, chocolates and holiday cookies.