Sometimes it happens this way. I decide I need to read a book – not put it on the TBR shelf to grow musty for two to five years to never, but really read it – and (as in this case) I put myself on the local library’s hold list for it. It comes my turn, and I go to the library and pick it up off a special shelf where it’s been filed under my name. I take it home, and I go back to reading the books I’ve been assigned, for work, for a living. I read another 6, 8, 10 books; some of them are really good, and I get involved and distracted. I interview a few authors, which is often, not always, engrossing. I go online to renew this book that I haven’t made time for yet, and find that – of course – someone else is on the hold list, behind me in line. I have to turn it in in four days. If you have forgotten this about me, I am a librarian. I’m no longer employed as such, but that blood pumps through me still.
So I put down the book I had just begun reading, for work, with a deadline. That book, by the way, offered an epigraph by the author of this book. And I pick up All Over But the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg.
Bragg blew my mind with My Southern Journey (which will publish in two weeks or so; look out for my review then), and although I’d heard his name before, I never knew that he would be a writer to reach into me in such a way, to pull on me and make me nostalgic for a place that is not my home: foreign language words like fernweh, sehnsucht, saudade seem to touch on it. Bragg’s travels capture me; how will I ever go back to that other book, let alone my life, when this is done?
pagesofjulia 
I loved what I read of his Jerry Lee Lewis bio, my loan was up before I could finish but I’ll get it again, what language! What pictures he writes!
I know! That is very much it. I haven’t made it to the Jerry Lee Lewis one (lots to catch up on) but I’m sure it’s wonderful.