Of the many books read this year I enjoyed The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. Expansive and unexpected in so many ways, a story of India we don’t hear much about but also deeply grounded in our common human spirit. The Devil’s Half Acre by Kristen Green is a true story of Mary Lumpkin, enslaved woman by the owner of a slave jail in Richmond, Virginia. It is a remarkable story about the darkest, to date, part of American history. Have you ever read Naquib Mahfouz? Midaq Alley and Palace Walk are great reads. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.

Library book sales are an omnivore reader’s delight. Titles, authors, out of print – they are all there. My local library has one twice a year and this December I picked up Black Sun by Geoffrey Wolff, published in 1976 is a biography of Harry Crosby. You know, the guy who founded Black Sun Press in Paris during the twenties and published Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Hemingway and Joyce? It’s old money, World War I PTSD and possibly a bit of bipolar all rolled up in a short, dramatic and tragic life. Read on!