The Year in Books

Whew, I just survived a harrowing grocery shopping expedition. When I got to the store, the parking lot was almost empty and the store was a ghost town. I thought I'd timed it perfectly. And then hordes of people suddenly descended on the store, buying enough groceries to survive the entire winter and with their whole families in tow -- generally stopping dead still in the middle of aisles to contemplate their purchases. Because the store had been utterly dead mere minutes earlier, it wasn't ...