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.

As we traveled home from family Thanksgiving in North Mississippi a few years ago, I was struck by the bleakness of the landscape. The memory of commuting to finish my last two years at Ole Miss brought back a vision of late Octobers and early Novembers that would rival anything New England in the fall has to offer.

Claudia in the Storm written by Denise McConduit and illustrated by Francesca Ficorilli, exemplifies the idea that an author who has lived through an event can write about it from that perspective in a way that draws a believable experience for the reader. While the book is fictional, it is set in New Orleans in the reality of Hurricane Katrina as the levees broke and the city flooded.

Evidently, inanimate objects may not celebrate 20 years the same way the rest of us do. At the twentieth anniversary celebration of the opening of the Oak Grove Public Library, my library card gave up the ghost.

Attorney Robin Lockwood begins her case with connections to some of the principal characters in the murder mystery Betrayal by Phillip Margolin.

Four years ago, we signed a check.

Four years ago, we received a deed.

The place was OURS,

or so we thought.

It’s a bonus when a good book plants thoughts that linger long after the book is finished. Our de Grummond Book Group recently read Jason Reynolds’s The Boy in the Black Suit. I will just recommend the book without reviewing it so I can get to the lingering thoughts.

I wish a belated book birthday to Anna E. Jordan’s Shira and Esther’s Double Dream Debut that came out on October 10. The author takes her own background to weave a story that becomes an enjoyable mirror for Jewish middle graders and a delightful window for those who are not familiar with Jewish customs.

My Facebook memory noted seven years. The boy was three and loved his bubbles. He also loved helping me cook even at that age.

Erica Bauermeister cites an epigraph before she begins her book, No Two Persons, and uses it as her basic premise.

“No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.” The Writings of Madame Swetchine, 1860.

In her wonderful family free verse collection, my friend Sharon Gerald recently posted a Facebook entry about daughters who had daughters in her heritage. I’m borrowing (or stealing) the idea with a bit of twist and only going back as far as memory takes me.