Berry existed in the shadows of my literary awareness until I moved to Dallas. Here, he is as likely to make a Sunday morning appearance as Tolkien and Lewis. I noted as much in fall of 2023 when I reviewed Jayber Crow after my first visit to Port William.

I would describe myself as skeptical but thawing as I finished that book, uncertain about Jayber but already deeply attached to his world. “People don’t have what you would call their own business,” he says, trying to explain Port William.

Just more than a year later, I picked up A Place on Earth. Berry practices a deception at the start, lulling readers with rain and a card game and the gentle ways we needle people we adore.

But the Battle of the Bulge, an ocean away, has consumed one of Port William’s boys. Missing in action is the official designation. Mat “mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes. The others agree. So long as a man doesn’t surely know, he has to hope, and that is more difficult than to know the worst, surely.”

My heart started bleeding and hardly stopped for the rest of the book.

I think I would have gone to another novel next had I not won a book of Berry’s poems in a Goodreads giveaway!!!! (Winning a book is at least a two-exclamation mark event. Winning one by an author you love is easily four.)

The rare misses for me in Another Day were usually the multi-page poems. Isn’t that odd? That I love him in bite-sized servings and in the feast of a full book, but I turn my nose up at a portion spread over a handful of pages?

The collection, subtitled Sabbath Poems, spans from 2013 to 2023. A year might include 20 or more selections, or just a handful. Together, they pulse with his love of nature, of people, of God. “The world lives by its beauty in excess of need,” Berry wrote, and an “amen” escaped my mind, if not my lips.

Then, early this year, I picked up Hannah Coulter for a gathering of the ideal book group. We’d been assigned Jayber Crow, or, if we’d already read that, any other Port William selection.

I found Hannah Coulter to be as close to perfection as a book can get.

“This is the story of my life, that, while I lived it, weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my sense to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.”

Berry’s novels just get better the more time you spend in Port William and its surrounding communities. I had already had plenty of glimpses of Hannah in other stories and was ready to like her. Instead, I loved her.

I am grateful to have met Wendell Berry and grateful that, while he’s gone, I have many of his words yet to enjoy, or to enjoy again. Other people will be able to give you a thorough overview of his life and work. And I’m sure more eloquent tributes are already being written.

My contribution is simply to say it’s OK if you haven’t found him yet, as long as you do find him one day.

“This is the story of my life, that, while I lived it, weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my sense to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.”

Wendell Berry’s novels just get better the more time you spend in Port William and its surrounding communities. I had already had plenty of glimpses of Hannah in other stories and was ready to like her. Instead, I loved her.

She tells her story looking back from the end, and I laughed and ached and felt it all along with her through stages we have shared. As her telling passed where I am now, I found myself wondering if I could possibly learn from her experiences, or if that’s too much to ask of a fictional character.

Her father “was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them.”

You know from the beginning that Hannah is a widow. (And you may know, too, from other Port William stories.) But when Virgil is missing in action, Berry brings it up close and won’t let you look away.

Hannah was living with her in-laws at the time. “We knew always more than we said. One of us lying awake in the night would know that the others probably were lying awake, too. But nobody ever said so. In the daytime it seemed to me that we were all kept standing upright, balanced ever so delicately by our kind silence. Sometimes it seemed that one word, one outcry, would flatten us all.”

I love how Berry gently weaves scripture in. There are no awkward references and if you don’t recognize them, you won’t even know they’re there. But when you hear them and do know them, it’s a special kind of gift, like when Hannah was watching the river. “You see what it does, and you know that while the water is running down it is cutting back, it is wearing into the slope, making the hill low, and, somewhere, exalting a valley.”

Hannah’s children don’t follow paths she anticipated. “… if you have children, you shape your life according to expectations. That is arguably pretty foolish, for expectation can be a bucket full of smoke.”

But with them all gone, living their own lives, she feels safe to say she had good children. “I don’t mean that they weren’t lively and wide awake often enough when we were tired. … What I mean is, that they accepted our love for them and they loved us back.”

Her reflections on expectations – of children, of husbands, of life – are wise and worthy.

“Living without expectations is hard, but when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, hopeth all things. But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation. But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can’t bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.”

I wish Hannah could be my grandmam. But maybe instead I should wish to be a mom and grandmam like Hannah was.

(The rare misses for me were usually the multi-page poems. Is this odd? That I love him in bite-sized servings and in the feast of a full book, but I turn my nose up at a portion spread over a handful of pages?)

In Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013 to 2023, a year might include 20 or more selections, or just a handful. They pulse with Berry’s love of nature, of people, of God.

“The world lives by its beauty in excess of need,” he writes.

Aging is a frequent topic, not surprising for a man in his eighth decade. “It is no privilege to become the one living authority on your life.”

He is adamant without being strident about the recklessness with which people squander of the gifts of the earth.

“To ask for more than is given,

to take more than is given back,

is to have less, and finally

nothing.”

One poem references the “superfluous beauty” of birds.

“These so visible must stand for countless ones

and kinds easily overlooked or hard to see

or invisible. A world of words could not

describe this wordless world.”

I offer a few favorites in their entirety to draw you in. And I offer my absolution if you decide to skip one here or there. Just don’t skip the book.

XVIII (2013)

Young love grows older,

grows old, accumulates

burdens, losses, failures,

griefs, but also the history

of itself lasting through time,

and so transcending time

as an image of forever

ever keeping, never old.

IV (2016)

When I speak to you of love

I do not speak as I am

but as I am in love with you

which is better than I am.

XII (2016)

Sleep undefended in the dark

entrusted to the light that so far

has waked you to the morning

that (whatever the news) is singing.

Old Jack makes a comment, “which could be considered an insult, if anybody wanted to take the trouble. They know better than to take the trouble. Though the old man is willing for his remark to be taken better than halfway as a joke, they know that he himself takes it more than half seriously.”

I laughed indulgently at Jack and at all the others, indulging him.

Berry takes you out into the rain to look around town. There’s Wheeler, the lawyer. “Whether he wins or loses, Wheeler shines. Every point Wheeler makes has the clean sound to it of a good axe chopping into a locust stump.”

I smiled again.

And then Mat Feltner gets a letter informing him that his son Virgil is missing in action. The news travels as it must in a small town and the visits begin almost immediately.

Mat “mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes. The others agree. So long as a man doesn’t surely know, he has to hope, and that is more difficult than to know the worst, surely.”

My heart started bleeding and hardly stopped for the rest of the book.

Burley Coulter pauses multiple times to write a letter to his nephew, Nathan, who is serving overseas. His closing is perfection: “I think a lot about you, and a lot of you. Your Uncle Burley.”

In one note, he mentions forgetting his 50^th birthday had come and gone until his brother Jarrat reminded him. “It scared me, and then it made me mad, which made him laugh, which don’t happen every day.”

Mat does what he must, caring for the land, looking after family and friends, setting aside a plan to buy more land. He will not let himself hope that Virgil is coming home.

“This new work must be done for the sake of the land itself, and for the sake of no one he can foresee, someone who will come later, who will depend, then, on what is done now.”

Deep into the hoping days, he invites his daughter-in-law to join him for a walk. “She cannot, somehow, make her voice sound as glad as she is. But when he has helped her on with her coat and they are starting out the door, she puts her hand into his. ‘Now you’re talking,’ he says.”

Private grief and public are separated by a blurry line in Port William. Wheeler tries to comfort Uncle Jack by telling him there’s nothing anyone can do right now.

“But surely Wheeler knows better than to think that is any consolation. It is just the truth. And a man who is depending on the truth to console him is sometimes in a hell of a fix.”

I haven’t even mentioned Andy and Henry, come to stay with their grandparents. Or Aunt Fanny, who “when she zigs, she apparently gives no thought to the possibility that it might be better to zag.”

But ultimately, to me, this was Mat’s story. I ached right along with him, in the barn thinking about the pain he’s afraid he’s caused his children as he raised them. “You hope for a realization in them, finally, that the pain is given out of love, inept and blundering and blind and wrong as it can sometimes be.”

Stop now if you don’t want to know how all the hoping is resolved. But if you don’t mind knowing, read on for the (possibly) best passage in the book.

“Mat, when we’ve lost it all, we’ve had what we lost,” Margaret tells her husband. “Virgil, from the day he was born, I knew he would die. That was how I loved him, partly. I brought him into a world that would give him things to love and take them away. … I was familiar with the pain. I’ve had it in me all his life. … But I don’t believe that when his death is subtracted from his life it leaves nothing. … What it leaves is his life.”

I won’t put myself in the category of one friend, who calls Jayber Crow her favorite book. And I doubt I’ll be like another, who’s quoted Jayber in at least two sermons in less than six months. (My doubt is not connected to the certainty of me not preaching but to the question of quoting.)

But anyone who can write a sentence like this deserves my respect and some attention: “To walk up past the school while it was in session was like coming near a sleeping large animal.”

Jayber’s life as barber, gravedigger and church janitor is equally quiet and significant in his small town. He’s old now, remembering, considering, measuring the weight of his days and decisions. His story is about people and land and love and disgust, about what changes and what never will.

I laughed out loud when Jayber accepted a ride from a truck driver and quickly found himself in personal territory. “People don’t have what you would call their own business,” he said.

I kept feeling flashes of Willa Cather, a very good thing. I won’t be rushing straight to another of Berry’s books, but I also won’t be avoiding them anymore.

I’ll get to Frances Burney’s opening in a minute, but you need two details first, the only things I knew about Evelina when I started it: Jane Austen read it. It’s all letters.

(Yes, I know the word is “epistolary.” I feel fancier than I am when I write that.)

Most of the book is Evelina’s letters. (I do not envy that girl her cramped hand.) But Lady Howard opens the story with a note to the Rev. Mr. Villars. You’re given no context, no background, no family tree, no timeline. Just straight to this: “Can anything, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence?”

Admit it. You’re dying to know the bad news. And you already like Lady Howard.

Evelina lives quietly in the country with Villars, who has been raising her since her mother’s death. The circumstances of her birth are shaded and unclear, though her father lives.

Villars, who adds only a handful of letters to the collection, consents to send her to Lady Howard to expand her quiet circle gently and carefully.

Lady Howard has urged the decision. “When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a paradise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.”

I’m floored by both the wisdom and honesty of the good lady’s assessment.

For Villars, Evelina is the sun and moon, and it’s easy to suspect, from his early contributions, that you’re heading into a sweetness overdose. “Unblest with one natural friend, she merits a thousand,” he tells Lady Howard in the letter he sends along with his darling girl.

But then Evelina begins to speak and you a) realize why Villars loves her and b) love her, too. Not because she is celestial perfection but because she is 17 and she is leaving home and she is curious and obedient and enthusiastic and incautious.

She has not been long with Lady Howard when she’s invited to join the lady and her daughter and granddaughter in London. She writes to Villars, asking him to decide and offering no opinion, none at all, of what she prefers.

“However, pray don’t suppose that I make any point of going, for I shall hardly sigh, to see them depart without me, though I shall probably never meet with such another opportunity.”

How could he not let her go?

You begin to understand the quietness and closeness of her life up to this point when she writes to him even the details of preparations for her first ball. “You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. .. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell; for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.”

The adventures and connections Burney provides her young heroine in London felt almost Dickensian to me. Or maybe I should say his London feels Burnian. (Evelina was published in 1778, Pickwick Papers in 1836. And yes, if you’re wondering, he knew her work.)

Evelina’s extended family makes multiple unwelcome appearances in the city. She’s precious in her efforts to be kind in her reports back home. Mrs. Mirvan, for example, offered theater tickets and “she very politely invited Madame Duval to be of our party; however, she had a bad cold and chose to nurse it. I was sorry for her indisposition; but I know not how to be sorry she did not accompany us, for she is – I must not say what, but very unlike other people.”

Villars eventually agrees to let Evelina spend a few weeks with family members she has just met. “I never made a concession with so bad a grace, or so much regret,” he writes.

Even stronger than the Dickens vibes was the Austen jolt I felt when Mr. Smith entered a room and promptly inserted himself between Evelina and another young lady.

“O, I always study what the ladies like – that’s my first thought. And, indeed, it is but natural that you should like best to sit by the gentlemen, for what can you find to say to one another?” Make him a curate and I’d swear he was a young Mr. Collins.

You’ll have to read the book yourself to understand exactly who the Captain is, but right now it’s enough for you to know that he takes great joy in hounding anyone in whom he detects even a flicker of pretension.

Mr. Lovel unwittingly confesses to this same man, “I was a full half an hour this morning thinking what I should put on!”

“Odds my life, I wish I’d been near you! I warrant I’d have quickened your motions a little; Half an hour thinking what you’d put on; and who the deuce do you think cares the snuff of a candle whether you’ve any thing on or not?”

Mrs. Selwyn picks up her cue as if they’d rehearsed. “O pray, Captain, don’t be angry with the gentleman for thinking, whatever be the cause, for I assure you he makes no common practice of offending in that way.”

Burney is not Austen, but you can see what Jane may have learned, in part, from her. I didn’t see the monkey coming and I doubt you will, either, even with this heads-up. But if you like Austen, you’re going to like this book.

How I got here (public posts): Evelina is my second foray into the books Austen read and referenced in her own books and letters. Rebecca Romney made the introductions in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf and I had to find out what I’d been missing. My first pick was Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, which was fine.

Note: Links to posts include a mix of public and subscriber-only content. But every post includes at least a few public paragraphs to give you the gist. Feel free to poke around!

As much as I love to visit new places through the magic of reading, there’s a special kind of magic in a book whose streets and landmarks are home.

I’ve felt a flash of the spell when reading about places I’ve visited. The streets London, for example, in the Cormoran Strike novels, or the halls of The Met in All the Beauty in the World.

Bring it closer to home and the feeling grows stronger. I loved Virgil Wander as a story; my Wisconsin heart loved it as pure Midwestern truth. So picking up Sarah Damoff’s second novel, The Burning Side, three years after moving to Dallas was an absolute treat.

I enjoyed her debut, The Bright Years, which was set in Fort Worth. But this? This is my regular life now. The Dallas Museum of Art, Klyde Warren Park, highways packed with taillights. Tamales at Christmas. Spanish and English intermingled everywhere.

Damoff sealed the deal with a visceral aroma of my youth. April is sleeping in her childhood home for the first time in a long time. “Before opening my eyes, I can, incredibly, smell Juniper Breeze, from my high school summer job at Bath & Body Works.”

I once existed in a permanent haze of Juniper Breeze.

All of this – plus hearing Damoff speak in person earlier this summer – framed the story in a way that was really appealing, even though it’s more romance-forward than I typically read. What’s more, Damoff’s writing was even richer this time. (It stood out to me in her first book, too.)

Burning Side opens with a house fire and I found every word fresh and gripping and terrifying.

“Behind him, the front corner of the house begins to yaw, then a deafening crack.” Yaw? Brilliant. “The sight before them is mesmerizing, the fire a bright and beautiful terror.” And “the other side of the house stands unbothered, smug almost.”

(Damoff employs the two sides imagery subtly but frequently. Not too much, but purposeful. Artful, but not corny.)

Lower-stakes moments, shine too, such as when April and her sister are washing dishes after a family dinner. “I hand her a bouquet of forks.” I can see them. I can feel them. They’re dripping in my clenched fingers.

And Damoff has created people I would love to know. Leo could not have paid a higher compliment to his in-laws: “The Russos don’t entertain; they welcome.”

I learned from her talk that Damoff has lived with a family member walking into the shadows of dementia. Which explains why she understands exactly how it feels. I understand because I am losing my mom one day, one week at a time, and this is exactly how it feels: “This sickness is a hundred tiny deaths, so when is the right time to grieve?”

I’d like to raise my hand and say I don’t think any human being could last an August morning and afternoon at Klyde Warren, as April and Leo and their kids do. (But maybe that’s just because of this particular August we’re all currently enduring? 108 on Sunday, a mere 103 today?)

And I got stuck for too long on this short sentence: “I’ve never researched whether this is a thing, but I swear my dyslexia gets worse when I’m stressed.” Nah. April is a skilled and passionate tutor for kids who face the same challenge she does. There’s no way she never looked into the connection between dyslexia and stress.

But these are nits I’m picking. I’ll go back to the same thing I said after reading Damoff’s first book: This is work to be proud of.

Stick around here and you’ll get an earful about my affinity for writers who successfully put parenting into words. I’ll close with two moments from Damoff that might have left small scars on my heart.

Deb remembers thinking, as a young parent, that she would not always have to bear the brunt of her children’s agony. “But I didn’t understand the shape-shifting nature of parenting, that there will always be days when the clouds empty themselves with bellicosity. The rate of those days has dwindled, but the stakes are higher.”

So, so much higher.

And finally, this: “It doesn’t go fast, but it will have gone fast.”

But if you’ve read JK Rowling-as-Galbraith already, you’re going to want more for the same reasons I do: A mystery with a thousand threads that unfailingly catches you by surprise at the end, and genuinely interesting characters with backstories that are fully dimensional.

I hate to always bring up Harry Potter, but Rowling’s gift with creating complete worlds is at work in London again. It’s not only that the street and pub scenes ring true. Cormoran’s physical and emotional discomfort watching Joan suffer with cancer felt exactly true to his character. Robin’s family Christmas was so excruciating that I recognized it immediately from my own collection of cringe-worthy get-togethers.

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“A chalice on a dolly glides by.”

I knew from that moment that I was going to enjoy spending 10 years in the Met with him.

All the Beauty in the World isn’t art from a scholarly perspective or even an artistic perspective. It’s art through the eyes of suffering, art as an escape, art for everyone, including the hundreds of guards, like Bringley, who look at it day after day after day.

The Met collection includes more than 2 million objects (including 30,000 baseball cards – the single largest collection outside of Cooperstown; who knew?). About 7 million people visit the museum every year – “greater attendance than the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, and Nets combined.”

Bringley quit his job at The New Yorker to hide/work among beauty. He came for a respite and stayed for a decade.

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Why do I keep thinking the next one will be different?

I finished Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club and I’m asking myself (not for the first time) why I continue to pick up historical fiction.

But before I can assemble an answer, I get a text from a friend sobbing over the last 100 pages of Hamnet.

And there’s the answer: Here and there, someone like Maggie O’Farrell pulls off historical fiction so beautifully, so magically, so perfectly, that every average novel is worth cruising through to find that one.

Quinn knows how to pull you into a story. All the kudos for the appalling opening of Briar Club. I don’t know who could read that and then not read to the end for answers. (And that ending is pretty darn satisfying, too.)

Additionally, I have no quibbles with her research. Every detail I checked behind her back was right, from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to Maine’s first female senator and her lapel roses.

Here’s what it boils down to: I like historical fiction with just enough history to frame the fiction. I don’t mind a reference to, say, a natural disaster or a coronation. I can live with a character being present at a famous speech or in a crowd to witness an infamous crime. But without a light touch, it can start to feel like an info dump: Here’s every interesting, quirky historical fact that could be mined out of 1950 to 1954.

I also resent name-dropping. Yes, technically, Quinn doesn’t name the junior senator from Massachusetts. But his engagement, to a striking brunette named Jackie, a few booths over from where a character was having lunch – that counts.

You can argue it’s a set piece, a time marker, a way to make the story real. But observing the engagement did not further the plot or even apply to it in any way I could see. It was merely a lunch interruption to share a neato historical fact. And those are better for trivia nights than for filling out stories.

Worse than name-dropping: I actively dislike learning at the end, in an author’s note, that I was reading the story of a real person, only the details of that story were mutilated for the sake of the plot. Inspiration is one thing — and I know the tipping point is probably less clear-cut than I’m implying — but Quinn (and she’s not alone!) specifically describes using stories of real people and changing them. Gaaaaah! Please don’t do that.

And then there are anachronisms.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll reiterate that I trust Quinn’s research on facts. My issue is more with language and mindset. These are points less easy for me or Quinn, perhaps, to defend, but, for example, a mother declaring her daughter is “getting on my last nerve” took me right out of any story world I’d slipped into. Same with conversations about topics such as pornography, sexuality and complicated patriotism – I’m not saying attitudes like these didn’t exist at the time. But Quinn gives them a prominence and a breadth and a tone that feels wholly of this century.

I’d be inclined to spend more time with Quinn if she let her deft hand with story and pacing take the reins and applied history with a significantly lighter touch.

That said, here are four reasons I won’t stop digging around in historical fiction.

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell: This book turns the spotlight away from a famous man and onto the people in his orbit, about whom history can’t agree on even the most basic details (Anne vs. Agnes, for example). In her notes at the end, O’Farrell says she worked within the known framework, which is flimsy as a spiderweb. She does note, though, that not one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems makes any reference to plague. Was it, she wondered, a deeply personal omission? “This novel is the result of my idle speculation,” she writes.

The Boston Girl, by Anita Diamant: The main character, Addies reads her daughters the Little House books, even rushing to the store to buy a new one when it comes out. A new Little House?! Diamant beautifully weaves history into her fiction, grounding it with a dose of reality without ruining the spell of the story.

The News of the World, by Paulette Jiles: Time and place are defined and crucial in this story, but Jiles never leans too heavily on them, focusing instead on one perfect description after another. Simon the musician: “A yawn overtook him and he lifted the back of the fiddle over his mouth the way nonfiddlers would cover a yawn with their hand.” Kidd’s son-in-law: “The man was too big to be a human being and too small to be a locomotive.” A brigand on the road: “He looked as if he had combed his stiff yellow hair with a skillet.”

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel: Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy checks every box for the best historical fiction. My third review makes the case. Here’s part of it.

“I cried when Cromwell died. Cried to the point of needing to blow my nose. Twice.

“Mirror and Light is the final book in Mantel’s trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who became a key advisor (arguably the key advisor) to Henry VIII at the center of his reign.

“If you’ve read many of my reviews, you know I get pretty fussy about historical fiction. I want my history in one book and my fiction in another. The fact that I can’t stop raving about these three speaks to both Mantel’s research and her writing.

“After reading Bring Up the Bodies (the second book), I read a contemporary account from a secretary who served Cardinal Wolsey along with Cromwell. In it, I found the same Cromwell – smart, sardonic, unblinking – that Mantel delivers.

“I read her author’s notes to try to answer my ‘is it true?’ questions. And I found her answers deeply satisfactory. She sticks to the facts, fills in blanks based on the best research she can uncover and tells you, specifically, when she’s coloring outside the lines.”

That’s my kind of historical fiction.

The Mirror and Light is the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who became a key advisor (arguably the key advisor) to Henry VIII at the center of his reign.

If you’ve read many of my reviews, you know I get pretty fussy about historical fiction. I want my history in one book and my fiction in another. The fact that I can’t stop raving about these three speaks to both Mantel’s research and her writing.

After reading Bring Up the Bodies (the second book), I read a contemporary account from a secretary who served Cardinal Wolsey along with Cromwell. In it, I found the same Cromwell – smart, sardonic, unblinking – that Mantel delivers. I read her author’s notes to try to answer my “is it true?” questions. And I found her answers deeply satisfactory. She sticks to the facts, fills in blanks based on the best research she can uncover and tells you, specifically, when she’s coloring outside the lines.

So there’s the history taken care of.

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But I wasn’t sure my interest would last the length of a book. Paulette Jiles convinced me otherwise. The News of the World is a compelling story, beautifully told.

Captain Kidd travels through post-Civil War Texas, reading news from faraway places to audiences who pay 10 cents a head. So when he’s offered $50 in gold to take a girl with him on his route, it’s a windfall. Johanna was 6 when she was taken from her family by a Kiowa tribe. Now, four years later, she’s been rescued and needs to be returned to her family.

Only in her mind, the kidnapping has just taken place.

Kidd and a hotel proprietor listen to her howling in a locked room.

“But Captain! You’d think she’d be happy! … You’d think she’d be skipping about and clapping her hands! That sounds like she is about to stab herself! It’s operatic!”

“Young man, stop speaking in exclamation points. I have no idea what to do about it.”

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It’s my rest and my joy and my window on the world.

It’s my vacation and my inspiration and my escape from the world.

But sometimes? Sometimes life double-parks right next to your getaway car.

Sometimes your girl ends up in the ER and your boy needs help packing for college and your editor texts with a juicy assignment that’s due in three days.

And sometimes when the time is there, your head isn’t, and you read the same paragraph three times and still don’t know what it said. Sometimes when the time is there, your body isn’t, and you wake up as the book falls out of your hand.

Dry spells used to frustrate me. But these things in my way – they actually are my world. And I love and need them more than any getaway. Truly.

What’s more, I’ve hit these patches often enough in 50 years to know that they’re temporary. The four books languishing around my house, neglected (and possibly, in one case, dusty), the ones I genuinely am enjoying, they’re not going anywhere. They’re not mad. Their feelings aren’t even hurt. And I’ll finish them, and a dozen more, in the weeks ahead.

Dry spells aren’t forever.

(PS: Thanks for asking! My girl is OK now; my boy is settling in for his senior year; I got the story in on time.)

It’s a book that’s hard to classify, but the subtitle, “Notes on a Bright Continent,” goes a long way to help. To make his argument about the sweeping, and often incorrect, generalizations so frequently used for Africa, Faloyin puts together chapters that could each be stand-alone essays on subjects such as drawing borders, depictions in film, establishing democracy, and the fierce-friendly war over “true” jollof rice. Woven throughout is the theme of assumptions and the vitality and possibility and variety that exist to challenge them.

“For too long, ‘Africa’ has been treated as a buzzword for poverty, strife, corruption, civil wars, and large expanses of arid red soil where nothing but misery grows. Or it is presented as one big safari park, where lions and tigers roam freely around our homes and Africans spend their days grouped in warrior tribes, barely clothed, spears palmed, hunting game, and jumping up and down with ritualistic rhythm to pass the time before another aid package gets delivered. Poverty or safari, nothing in between.”

In fact, the continent is home to “… communities bursting with kin like mine whose idea of the wild is a small town still to be touched by a reliable Wi-Fi network.”

Faloyin weaves in pieces of his own story, but more to introduce ideas than to craft a memoir. He is funny and passionate in equal measures.

“I have three older sisters, which means 23 per cent of my life has been spent mourning the points I wish I had brought up in a long-finished argument.” (They appear in his acknowledgements at the end, too, and I laughed out loud: “To my sisters and day-ones: Vero, Temitope and Yewande. There is no doubt that I have been an exceptional younger brother to you all, and you have done well to reciprocate that love.”)

Faloyin is an editor for VICE; he was born in Chicago and grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. “I was raised to get up early for church and stay up late for election nights,” he writes.

“We are all the sum of a specific set of knowns and more subtle influences that clash, combine and occasionally curdle. They are the intangibles that drive our most honest intentions and shape the essence of our personalities – something that is often too intricate, too elastic and too personal to ever give full voice to accurately, however hard we try. …

“Being able to define yourself openly and fully is a privilege; it is a grace many take for granted. The ability to walk into a meeting or an interview, or to interact with a police officer, and be given the respect and opportunity to present yourself without pre-judgement, can be life-defining, life-affirming and life-saving.”

Tracing history through the continent, he helps you understand how that privilege was stolen from so many and can remain elusive to their descendants, who exist within accepted paradigms such as “Africa is poor” or “Africa is backward” or “Africa is corrupt.”

“ … you create a poisonously false narrative that permeates for generations, until the fiction becomes fact, which in turns becomes an infected shared wisdom steadily passed down – in schools, at family dinner tables, in words pressed into books, and in the images that populate our popular culture.”

Faloyin doesn’t hold back on hard truths, but he sets them adjacent to hope.

“The continent constantly surprises, because every country is just trying to make the best of – to put it mildly – an awkward situation.”

Each chapter uses specific examples from different countries, with people and places Faloyin brings vividly to life.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, for example, has the build “of a person whose chances you would fear in a fight against a sudden gust of wind. Kagame exudes the energy of a band’s backup tambourine player, or of a person carefully reads the terms and conditions before purchasing a candle.”

Lagos is a massive metropolis that will change you as you soak it in. “You will become possessed of a passion for using your outside voice at all times, regardless of location and in spite of circumstance – to welcome, to explain, to pray, to haggle, to wish someone well, to wish someone harm.”

He absolutely made me want to travel all over the continent.

“The only guaranteed equality in Lagos is Suya – small strips of grilled meat at once turbulently spicy and graciously sweet, sliced on the side of the road, served with a side of onions and thick slabs the northern Nigerian dialect Hausa, then wrapped in sheaths of newspaper and best consumed immediately after unwrapping, still hot, still coated in thick, burnt-charged smoke. Suya kisses every corner of Lagos life, because it’s cheap and unreasonably delicious.”

Turmoil kisses life, too, though. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know anything about the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where “Europe’s most powerful countries conspired to divide and devour an entire continent. The colonizers’ plans required many steps. The first of which was to draw a map.”

My knowledge of the colonial period wasn’t non-existent, but it might have been the next closest thing. The arbitrary lines that gave one section to Britain and another to France and another to Germany were shocking to me.

“The damage this caused can be seen by casting an eye down a map of the continent and observing the outlines of each nation. You’ll find an assortment of geometrical shapes that bear no relations to the topography, culture or languages of the land they apportion. Today, about 30 percent of all African borders are straight lines. Just long, straight lines, purpose-built to cut through everything in their way. Borders – a border expert will tell you – should curve around real mountains and communities and landscapes.”

If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, Faloyin will help you understand what it means when foreign leaders draw these straight lines through single communities or outline a space that pairs a small people group with a larger and then, for opaque reasons, put the smaller in charge. Suddenly the struggle of self-governance in newly independent nations makes a lot more sense.

“Some experts argue a strong, competent hand is what young, loyalty-divided nations require. Then again, strength is infamously hard to moderate forever. A human’s pool of morality is notoriously drained by unlimited power.”

Read this book for both its historical value and for knowledge that may well reframe your present perspective.

“There is a fundamental misunderstanding as to what is happening in this great expanse of land. This book aims to fill that void, while showcasing a deep and enduring love of the region – as a concept, as a reality and as a promise.”

But I don’t think you’d have to be a writer to feel the same.

For instance, some advice about critiquing a friend’s writing – “… you don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too” – would probably serve most of us well in relationships with friends and family, too.

I knew this book was going to suit me the minute I read the opening acknowledgements, which finished with a reference to her son: “Sam said to me the other day, ‘I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops,’ and this is the exact same way in which I love him.”

Lamott organizes the book almost like a workshop on the writing process, and, in fact, often references the workshops and conferences at which she speaks. She said there are plenty of books on writing but she thought there might be value in sharing the bits that might not be in the great books.

“For instance, I’m not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk. So I would simply recommend to the people in my workshops that they never start a large writing project on any Monday in December. Why set yourself up for failure?”

She mentions in most of the chapters the perceived glamour of writing (and probably all creative work!). “But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.” And this: “The right words and sentences just do no come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.”

Lamott insists on truth. There’s already a glut of work that sugar-coats life and people. “If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling.”

Her father’s first advice infuses much of hers. “‘Do it every day for a while,’ my father kept saying. ‘Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor.’”

So, there’s inspiration.

But also, I couldn’t stop laughing.

“People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here. They’d end up looking like I watered them with Agent Orange.”

Or this paragraph, about waking up in the wee hours and heading directly down the darkest paths.

“You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of your life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer.”

Reading Bird by Bird will make you love life more, look at books with a new appreciation and, if you write, perhaps set the bar just a little higher than you’ve set it before.

“It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.”

Were you to make presumptions about the reach of my writing, you might worry I’d offend author Richard Osman with such a statement about his murder mysteries. But you’d be wrong. The Impossible Fortune is irrefutable proof.

Osman rarely drops a ball juggling mystery, words and people. Witness the trifecta, when club members decide a criminal might have been angry when a bomb failed to go off. “‘You would be annoyed,’ nods Joyce. ‘I had to send my air fryer back because of the thermostat. They were very good about it.’”

But it’s always been obvious which part of the act Osman wants my eye on: I have loved Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim since I met them. I love the mystery of Elizabeth’s past, the gentle wisdom of Ibrahim’s counsel, Ron’s gruff façade and Joyce’s sweet clarity. Her daughter, Joanna, is getting married as this book begins.

“Joanna and I have different ideas about weddings; that’s to be expected. If we have different ideas about gluten, we’re going to have different ideas about most things.”

Joyce can’t stop finding places for the phrase “my son-in-law” and I can’t stop smiling for her. “Paul is lovely, not at all like the people Joanna usually dates who seem to be largely millionaires or Americans. Now, I have nothing against either millionaires or Americans, far from it, look at George Clooney, for example. But variety is the spice of life.”

As the last book closed, Elizabeth walked headlong into grief. A year later, her friends remain concerned. “Donna longs to be patronized and dismissed by Elizabeth once more.” But Elizabeth will not miss Joanna’s wedding. And while the bride is still dancing, Elizabeth has made an appointment for the next day.

“That’s the problem with going out. One thing leads to another and you find yourself going out again. Before you know it, real life creeps back in.”

She may recognize her own imbalance, but others do not. “Elizabeth sits completely still and waits. It can take a while, but if you are still long enough, they come to you. Fitful babies, zooming kittens, men with secrets. With nothing to bounce off, their nervous energy eventually seems ridiculous to them and across they trot.”

The story has Osman’s usual a) jostling collection of underworld enterprises and b) spectrum of criminals from lovable to despicable. One man discusses a three-person job with his employee. “Amazon deliveries have been the single greatest boon for professional hitmen. Everyone is always expecting one.”

The awkward truth: I can’t stop laughing.

There’s Jasper, with his houseful of ceramic cats. “‘I got one for Christmas once from an aunt,’ says Jasper. ‘And you know how over-enthusiastic one gets when one receives a disappointing present.’ Joyce nods. ‘Joanna bought me a water purifier and the grinning almost killed me.’”

Osman takes both long- and short-form approaches to humoring me. Here’s the lead-in to someone’s advice about swiftly taking out an entire crew. “There had once been Albanian gang who operated in and around Gatwick Airport. Three brothers. One an accountant, one a cage fighter and one a certifiable lunatic. Classic setup. All bases covered.”

I know this is nonsense. Also, I love it.

Here’s a shorter example. “How do bankers make their money? Joyce has often wondered. Ron once told her, but he becomes quite hard to follow the angrier he gets.”

But Osman uses his words to brutal and beautiful effect, too. “Elizabeth gives him a terrifyingly neutral look.” I would tell that woman anything.

And then, in Joyce’s diary entry about waiting for Ron to emerge from a mission: “Seagulls were circling in the sunshine. I do love their salty cries carrying on the breeze. It always lets me know I’m home.”

Which is precisely how I feel coming back to Thursday Murder Club.

If you don’t know the series yet, in brief: Four seniors meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room of their retirement community to puzzle over unsolved cold cases. Inevitably the sleuthing leads them into cases that are warm to burning hot.

Richard Osman writes a good mystery. He has a couple of signature moves that are lots of fun (though a little less surprising now in the third book).

But his best work is the four lovely people at the center of every story.

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The retirees of Coopers Chase are just as lovely in The Man Who Died Twice as in their original murder investigation. And I really think that’s why I’ve enjoyed these books so much.

Yes, Osman kept me guessing right up to the last moment (both times). Yes, he has a couple tricks up his writing sleeves (though he’s careful not to overdo them). Yes, he makes me laugh.

But mostly he’s created a circle of people that I actually care about and feel that I can know and understand. And that’s not something you usually get from a snappy whodunit.

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Twists and turns around every corner of the old convent, elderly sleuths who are absolutely delightful and writing that delivers, too. If you like mysteries that don’t take themselves too seriously, you don’t want to miss this one.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are The Thursday Murder Club, retirees who meet to discuss unsolved cold cases. Richard Osman gives each a nicely developed personality, which, for me, took this book a notch above a typical whodunit. Elizabeth, my particular favorite, never talks directly to the reader, but I loved the glimpses of her in Joyce’s journal entries.

They are all residents of a lovely English retirement village called Coopers Chase. “There are still sheep farmed at the very top of the hill, where the woodland breaks, and in the pastures by the lake are a herd of twenty llamas. Ian Ventham bought two to look quirky in sales photos, and it got out of hand, as these things do.”

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