Approximately 20,000 murders occurred in the United States in 2023. These killings ranged in scope from gang battles to domestic violence. 

No book review today. Instead, some words about the importance of words — yours.

If you’re reading these words and live in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, or parts of Georgia and South Carolina, then you survived the Great Flood of 2024.  

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.

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.

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.” 

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.

Every once in a while, I find myself engrossed in a book that suddenly delivers my ignorance to me on a silver platter.

If Monica Wood’s “How to Read a Book” were a painting rather than a novel, it would be a triptych, one of those three-paneled works of art often hinged together so that it can be closed or displayed open.

Two novels, one a classic Western set in 1885 Nevada, the other centered on Barcelona and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil war, snagged my attention this past week. I was busy, but every time I caught a break, I was on the front porch, enjoying the May weather and turning the pages.  

A little over three years ago, a stranger in a coffee shop with whom I’d struck up a conversation excused himself from the table, walked to his car and returned with a copy of Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire.”

All of us, to one extent or another, make our way through a world of unexamined phenomena. 

It’s a complex world, and we generally glide through it without thinking too much of its parts and machinery. We all carry mini-computers in our pockets, but ask us to explain how we can look at the screen of our phone and read a newspaper from New Delhi, and the best most of us can do is shrug.

Anyone interested in the history of our country will benefit by reading “The Dogs of War: 1861” (Oxford University Press, 2011, 128 pages).

As often as not, I check out books from the library I never read. They sit on my dining room table or in a special pile of library books on the floor nearby, waiting to make my acquaintance.

It was another ordinary day when I swung by the public library on my way to town. I picked out a couple of DVDs I needed — “Groundhog Day” and “Ghosts” — and then drifted along the “New Arrivals” bookshelves, browsing the authors and titles.

“In the land of the blind,” goes the old saying, “the one-eyed man is king.” 

In Walker Larson’s dystopian fantasy, “Hologram,” Aaron Larson Castillian turns this adage inside out.

“Stand your ground! Don’t fire unless fired upon! But if they want to have a war, let it begin here.” 

— Captain Parker, Lexington Green, 1775 

That many Americans today suffer a disconnect from their past is beyond argument. Some of us have seen those man-in-the-street encounters where a reporter will ask questions of pedestrians — “What event do we celebrate on the Fourth of July?” or “Name the countries America was fighting during the Second World War” — only to be met with embarrassed shrugs or a blank stare. 

Cold weather means more time indoors, and more time indoors means more time for books. Here are three for the season of Jack Frost, sweaters and robust beverages.  

Suppose, like some of us, you find yourself needing a quick word fix. You’ve got the jones for something to read, but you’re so short on time that even a short story seems as problematical an undertaking as “War and Peace.” You want a dash of amusement, a dollop of entertainment, and you want it now. 

In a recent online search, I came across “Good Riddance, But Now What?” by that master of light verse, Ogden Nash: 

In his 1897 travel book, “Following the Equator,” Mark Twain wrote , “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

When I read certain online commentaries about the possibility of war with China, I smile. Not happily, but grimly. It’s a smile that shakes its head, baffled and in disbelief by the innocence and naivete of the commentators.

Most of us are always on the look-out for a means of escape from this crazy old world or from our personal trials and tribulations.

Don’t worry. We’re not going to explore the relationship of Mrs. Bennet with her daughters in “Pride and Prejudice” or the nature of Marmee March in “Little Women,” who prayed “the fervent prayers only mothers utter.”

He was good friends with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. He taught shooting to another justice, Elaine Kagan, and became her hunting buddy. When he was under consideration for the post of judge on the D.C. Circuit Court, the FBI conducted its usual background investigation, examining his bank accounts and tax returns, and interviewing several dozen colleagues and friends. These interviews confirmed his integrity, intellectual gifts, and charisma, and are filled with such plaudits as “delightful and sensitive,” “of unimpeachable character,” “a model family man … his reputation above reproach …” and “the government could not have a better candidate for a position as a judge.”

He was good friends with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. He taught shooting to another justice, Elaine Kagan, and became her hunting buddy. When he was under consideration for the post of judge on the D.C. Circuit Court, the FBI conducted its usual background investigation, examining his bank accounts and tax returns, and interviewing several dozen colleagues and friends. These interviews confirmed his integrity, intellectual gifts, and charisma, and are filled with such plaudits as “delightful and sensitive,” “of unimpeachable character,” “a model family man … his reputation above reproach …” and “the government could not have a better candidate for a position as a judge.”

April is the season when Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered before setting off to Canterbury and the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. “Oh, to be in England,” wrote poet Robert Browning, “Now that April’s there.” Later, T.S. Eliot added a different perspective: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land.” In her poem “Spring,” Edna St. Vincent Millay also looks askance at the fourth month: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” and then ends with “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill/April/Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”

Maybe it’s the mixed-up weather. The warmer temperatures have delivered a sort of raucous springtime mood, though Whatever the cause, a parade of books on all sorts of topics has passed through my hands, volumes taken from the library and from the pyramid of print on the floor of my study. Some I’ve read, some only browsed, but all deserve at least some garland of recognition. 

It’s always nice when the good things just keep coming.

It’s another one of those unremarkable winter afternoons when the outside temp is identical to the inside of my refrigerator, the sky is as gray as a friar’s habit, and the wind has just enough of a whistle to sting an old man’s cheeks.

This year, the women’s basketball team of Christendom College, a small school in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, includes a forward, Catherine Thomas, who has averaged 27.7 points and 14.8 rebounds per game. Those are outstanding percentages in any league, no matter its size.

This was a fine morning in the coffee shop.

Samuel Clemens, best known by his penname Mark Twain, is arguably the master of American novelists, with his great classic “Huckleberry Finn” along with such stories as “Tom Sawyer,” “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,”and “The Gilded Age.”

It’s 1969-1970, and the world is changing at a fierce pace. The civil rights movement grips America’s cultural arena, and the war in Vietnam is raging. 

Writers of fiction find themselves under several obligations. First and perhaps foremost, they must entertain their readers, enticing them to keep turning the pages. Doing so means creating believable characters who must get past some challenging hurdles, whether those involve love, war, nature, or other obstacles.

Whatever our political beliefs or affiliations, few of us, I suspect, will look back on 2022 with pangs of nostalgia, at least in regard to events in our country at large.

In her online article “World Happiness Report reveals the US has gotten happier in 2022,” Ann Schmidt relates that the United States moved from number 19 out of 146 nations to number 16 in its happiness index.

Take a broken-hearted, alcoholic English professor, some colleagues seeking his dismissal from the university, several women who desire him for different reasons, and a series of encounters in bars in Charlottesville, Virginia, and you have the basic ingredients of Victor Cabas’s tragicomic “Postmodern Blues” (Hypocrite Press, 2020, 170 pages). 

Mention the name C.S. Lewis to other readers, and they might recollect him in any number of roles. The younger set and their parents might mention him as a writer of children’s classics like “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”

If you’re looking for a gift for the holidays for that person in your life who enjoys reading about local history, folklore, and life in these mountains, or if someone you know loves whipping up different sorts of meals in the kitchen, then you need to hustle out and pick up a copy of Jim Casada’s “Fishing For Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir” (The University of Georgia Press, 2022, 336 pages). 

According to a recent U.S. News & World Report article, “The 15 Richest Counties in the U.S.,” five of these counties are next door neighbors to Washington, D.C. These are the bedroom communities for the capitol, the home of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and others who have their finger in the federal pie and tell the rest of us how to live.