Several years ago, when my children and grandchildren were gathering for a week at the beach in a house I’d rented, a good friend gave me a pre-vacation tip that put me in the winner’s circle with the grandkids. “Make them an ice cream breakfast,” she suggested.

It’s late Saturday afternoon, February, that hour before supper when the little ones go bananas, and the 5-year-old and his sister are driving you bonkers, to the point where you want to plop them down in front of the television watching “Arthur” while you slosh some red wine into a glass and smoke a cigarette, though you only drink wine with supper or in the evenings, and you gave up the cigs years ago in college. 

Many readers of The Smoky Mountain News, particularly younger adults, are probably familiar with Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL officer who is now renowned as a podcaster, speaker, and author. My sons and some other young men I know — and women too, for that matter — listen to his podcasts, and are inspired and learn from them.

Manon Steffan Ros is a Welsh author of more than 40 books, writes in the Welsh language and has only this fall published her latest novel, “The Blue Book of Nebo” (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021) which has already won several literary prizes in Wales. 

Sometimes the right book just comes along.

I was recently gifted with the loan of a book from my friend Lee Knight titled “Wilma Mankiller,” (TWODOT Books, 2021) written by journalist and biographer D.J. Herda. As a traveling lecturer for the Road Scholar Program, Lee had finished reading it and thought I might find it interesting.

To get the most out of out of James Lee Burke’s latest novel, “Another Kind of Eden” (Simon & Schuster, 2021, 243 pages), readers might want to first read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” Here’s a short synopsis that may help.

Good grief!

Let me say that again: Good grief!

Let’s kick off 2022 with a bunch of books.

In the years after the Civil War, train travel in America exploded. Rail lines soon crisscrossed the country, bringing travelers from San Francisco to New York, from Savannah to Boston.