I’ve been a subscriber to A Word A Day for at least twenty-five years. If you love new words, I recommend it, and it’s free though they are open to contributions in appreciation for the new words you learn. Sometimes a word strikes a chord as one did this last week. The word was “heightism.”

Out today in book stores, Dan Gemeinhart follows up The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise with Coyote Lost and Found. Coyote, still sharing the grief from the loss of her mother and two sisters with her father Rodeo, has just begun settling in to her new school and a new normal for life when she finds a box containing her mother’s ashes. She and her father must come to terms with whether they are ready to scatter the ashes.

In South Mississippi, we can hardly wait for our two or three weeks of winter to be over. I’ve been watching carefully for any signs of spring. Watching for a pot that will never boil, as the old saying goes, has nothing on watching for a bud to bloom. To distract myself, I decided to have some fun as I try my hand at a bit of flamenco.

Shelly Read sets her debut novel, Go As a River, in the mountain town of Iola, Colorado. The setting, which is based on a real happening when the town was destroyed by dam construction in the 1960s, joins the story like an extra character. Protagonist Victoria’s life is heavily influenced by her location beginning in 1948 when she is seventeen.

My bald-headed son Mark stopped by our house on his way to his home next door. With a twinkle in his eye, he put a grocery sack on the counter and said, “Now, I’ve paid my debt.” As I pulled a carton out of the sack, we were both transported to the days when he was a teenager with a head full of hair and a bottomless stomach.

My friend Cheryl Mathis and I have long shared fangirl status for books by Gary Schmidt so she let me know that he had a new book out. Back in September, I checked out The Labors of Hercules Beal from my library and saved it for my birthday treat for myself.

The first blueberry book came to my attention when I was in my early teens and my mother took a “Kiddie Lit” class at Ole Miss one summer. To help make that possible as the oldest daughter in a family of six, my reward for sister-sitting, housekeeping, and cooking chores was the stack of books she brought home.

Why would I stop after reading the first third of a book to see if my local library had the first book by an author who is new to me and put it on reserve? I’ll tell you.

No, not the Oscars, Emmys, Super Bowl, Nobel – I’m talking about really important awards given early each year by the American Library Association for distinguished books in children’s literature for the previous year and for lifetime achievement awards.

Unusual wintry precipitation that kept her at home and off the road in Kilgore, Texas, sent our family archivist looking for the picture of a memory. The location was an even less likely setting for the white stuff than Kilgore, and her shared picture also brought back memories to me.

Vera Wong begins with a dead husband, an ignored tea shop, and a grown son who shuns her help and advice. Jesse Q. Sutanto begins his humorous cozy mystery, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, with her discovery of a dead body in the shop when she comes down from her upstairs living area.

If you’ve read (and remember) what I’ve written in January before, you know I don’t make new year’s resolutions. I do like the idea behind the Roman god for whom the month is named as he looks back and then looks forward with a key in his hand to unlock the doors of the future. In this blog, I look back at 2023 and forward to 2024.

The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day is listed for 10 to 14-year-olds. The bottom number is not that bad, although I would have devoured it before I was ten. I think this generation has some nerds-to-be like me who will, too. The “to14” needs to be eliminated altogether and replaced with “and up.”

The whole episode started with a lie. My daughter Anna and I have enjoyed working jigsaw puzzles together since she was “knee high to a grasshopper” to borrow a Southernism. I sent a text with choices of puzzle preferences when I knew she was coming for the holidays.

Joseph has lost his staff. The moss on the manger roof is splotchy. The donkey has no ears and the cow only one of her horns. Since the nativity scene came from Sears and was inexpensive in the first place, why don’t we just replace it?

Early in the twentieth century, a little Jewish boy surveyed his neighborhood in Brooklyn. Already, he had an interest in cultures not his own. Peeking into one church with stained glass windows, he reported seeing a lady with a shawl over her head holding a baby, tenderly and sadly.

As promised in my last blog, I write a companion piece with a recommendation for a particular edition of A Christmas Carol. Responses from that blog indicate that I am not the only one who makes this reading a Christmas habit. Those who know me well have added to my collection with many renditions of the book which leaves me choices each year.

I have two related books that need a review for your reading pleasure during this season. My dilemma was which to do first. I finally decided to do the newest first since you will already recognize part of the other.

Sometimes one thing leads to another which leads to another and another and on it goes – and never truer than with books. I was introduced to Ann Patchett books in 2005 when I read Bel Canto, her fourth novel and first breakout success, and in 2007 when I read Run. At this point, I remember little about either except that I enjoyed both.

My friend, Kimberly Willis Holt, posted a happy memory about a trip she and her sister took with their father to cut a Christmas tree of their own. That triggered a not-so-happy memory of finding one with my sister.