A few people have asked me to join the daisy chains of listing favorite books, and things I’m grateful for. Total silence on my part. It took me a while to sort of figure out not listing books.
I think it’s that I connect books and context in ways that are part of their significance for me. James Baldwin somehow suffuses my life at moments expected and unexpected, the essays above all, but Sonny’s Blues, and some of the novels at times. 
I developed food cravings while pregnant all those years ago, but I also found
myself devouring every word by Edith Wharton I could get my hands on.
Or being a student wandering rather aimlessly around Europe reading Penguin editions – Alberto Moravia, Amis pere, and not Penguin, but volumes of the Alexandria Quartet on trains, and on Ibiza when it was only mildly decadent.
At a black lit. conference at Yale years back, we passed around the single copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God that was available to us, and looked at each other with “wild surmise.” It’s like that.
As for gratitude: beyond all imagining.
VARIETY . SPICE . LIFE 