Stories!

Two of my favorite books this year are story collections. Going Away Shoes is Jill McCorkle's heart-rendingest, funniest, most satisfying work yet. If you've ever taken care of an aging parent, been divorced, remarried, tried to blend families, if you've ever been at the mercy of a plumber on Christmas Eve or dated an imaginary boyfriend, and even if you haven't, these stories are for you.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing is the first book by Lydia Peelle, one of the "Five Under 35" writers honored this year by the National Book Foundation. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, these stories are bleakly beautiful and haunting as high lonesome music. I loved them AND the red boots Lydia wore to her reading in Raleigh.

In memory of my father

Today would have been my father's 77th birthday. Here he is in Germany in 1956, the year I was born: Max M. Church, 24-year-old U.S. Army cryptographer. From him I inherited a wide forehead, blue eyes, and a tendency toward fiction.

Please, not the blog.

I love words. I love to hear them spoken, read aloud, sung, whispered. I love to hear them being tapped out on computer keys, or typewriters, when there used to be typewriters. I love pens and pencils on paper, and erasers. I love the hushed, holy sound of a book being opened, a page being turned. I love words that sound like what they mean. A word I do not love is "blog," which sounds like a sickness -- lethargy, stuffy nose, churning stomach. "Oh, no, she's got the blog."