Celebrating picture book month on my blog this month begins with a cookbook of all things! Each Monday of November will feature a different kind of picture book.

I love research as much as the next basic nerd. However, there are times when even those of us who fit this description get a laugh at things people choose to investigate and the results that should have been self-evident without a study. 

Heather Montgomery gives a warning at the beginning of Something Rotten that her book is not for squeamish souls, reckless readers, or the tenderhearted. Her subtitle, “A Fresh Look at Roadkill,” suggests a reason for her advice. 

Try googling “happy place” and you will come up with exotic places and crowded locations in expensive sites. Requirements to participate may include travel, money, and time. Maybe that works for some people, but not for me. 

Louise Wolfe, the Muskogee (Creek) protagonist in this novel, moves between her life as a high school senior in a school that is minimally diverse and the rich culture of her ancestry

Recently, my youngest sister had to send me this new word that for some reason made her think of me. Now, to start with, we were raised by the same father who loved few things more than to find an interesting new word so we both get this fascination naturally – along with a love of books and reading. 

Reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean put me in mind of the braids I used to do with my hair. 

Sometimes good things seem to happen to me accidentally – apparently most often in my garden. 

Who wouldn’t be sucked into a book that begins with a character named Styx who appears as if from nowhere, right in the local woods, with the possibility that he had been summoned like a superhero responding to a beacon of night by Caleb, the narrator. 

In an unexpected pleasure, granddaughter Marissa Lane sent a photograph she took on my birthday.

I always pursue an offer of a book by Kate Dicamillo so I jumped at the chance offered by Net Galley for an advance reading copy of Louisiana’s Way Home. 

It is time for the “not much ‘rithmetic” promised in my blog title with a look at the number seven.

Our de Grummond Book Group celebrates Banned Book Week by bringing a favorite banned book to discuss, and I chose A Light in the Attic.

I stumble across the oddest ideas while I’m researching for something entirely different.

A box of moldy documents that survived Hurricane Katrina, discovered in her mother-in-law’s attic, turned out to hold unexpected treasure for Whitney Stewart. 

I became intrigued with what constitutes a family as I sat one Monday morning in the outpatient surgery waiting room. 

Windows and mirrors seem to shapeshift as sixth-grader Merci lives wrapped both in her own family traditions and in the commonalities of middle school.

Death has come to Aunt Dee some 85 years after it was first rumored. This past Sunday, my cousin’s text read, “Aunt Dee has gone to be with Uncle Charles.”  

How could you not be tempted to read a book with a sentence on the cover that reads, “We all have demons. Clare wants hers back.”? 

The flurry of interest in Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood has brought back good memories.