Just did a live half hour on XM/Sirus radio between segments on malaria and potty training. : )

My book just got listed with “The Pianist”, “The Soloist”, and “Angela’s Ashes” as a “Great Book About Extraordinary People” for a library event called “Great Books, Great Libraries”.
Yeah, me and Ben Franklin, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King.

Finished the last of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series last night. What a wonderful set of books. I bought them all and have them lined up where I can see them. Alexander McCall Smith did a great thing putting those out into the world. He’s my hero.

I still haven’t managed to get a photo of Snowflake smiling (will keep trying) but I found these on the internet that show what he/she does.

This sweet guy/girl showed up on my porch Thursday and needs a nice home.
He/she seems to be a Great Pyrenees, beloved for being a guardian of livestock and home. Not a city dog.
To read about the breed and see more photos, click here:

Here they are again! One of the nation’s most hardy and charming and photogenic book clubs: Marylu, Jackie, Shelley, Renae, and Sally. Thanks for the photo Shelley.

If we forgive people, it allows the future to start.
Alexander McCall Smith

A dear friend sent me these photos of someone reading my book on the beach in Mexico.

This book really exceeded my expectations. It was the last in a pile of books I got from my mom as she cleaned out her bookshelves before a cross-country move, and our interests don’t always overlap so some of them have been not quite my cup of tea.

From the cover and back-of-the-book copy, I thought this might be kind of sentimental and horrible, but this memoir of a Washington DC lawyer’s return to her Appalachian hometown to work as the receptionist in her father’s rural medical practice was entertaining, funny, and full of compassion.

I don’t usually go in for “heartwarming” but this book has a lovely perspective on what it means to live as humans in community with each other, as well as a keen sense of the ridiculous. Hard to put down, easy to get caught up in.

It was also an interesting thing to read in the midst of the health care discussions going on in the U.S right now.

Review by Julia Silge on GoodReads.com

Real love can never be “unrequited” because real love does not envision any quid pro quo. Thus any aura of sadness or failure around the love life of an old maid is a misperception.