Over 30 years ago, I read Helen Hooven Santmyer’s “And Ladies of the Club,” a doorstopper of a book chronicling life in a small Ohio town from the post-Civil War era to the early 1930s.

Sometimes life seems too short to read every novel and author on your list. Oftentimes, I tend towards classics and literature. After all, you only live once so why would I not go straight to the greats?

In a remarkable book that combines eco-poetry, poetic prose and personal and scientific information by award-winning African-American ornithologist and professor at Clemson University, J. Drew Lanham, birds are the major focus, with Lanham even giving us a semi-humorous list of rules for birders.

On the first Saturday of June, my friend John and I were just leaving McKay Used Books in Manassas, Virginia, when I spotted a woman young enough to be my granddaughter seated at a table topped by a couple of piles of books.

Perhaps like many people, summer is a time for me to finally read those books I’ve been wanting to get to. While this summer began with determination to dwindle the stack of my “to-read” books, that stack has ended up bigger than smaller.

Every once in a while, I find myself engrossed in a book that suddenly delivers my ignorance to me on a silver platter.

Local author Anne Jobe and editor Christine Reed will host a special reading at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 22, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. 

If Monica Wood’s “How to Read a Book” were a painting rather than a novel, it would be a triptych, one of those three-paneled works of art often hinged together so that it can be closed or displayed open.

There are always seasons in life when you feel the need to get away from your day-to-day, and I have found myself in just such a season.

Local author Jim Costa will present his new book, “Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants,” at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 8, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva.