Every few months or so I have to take the books lying in stacks on my nightstand and shelve them. About the time they accumulate to reach the one-foot mark, I realize I need to keep handy only what I am actually reading, not what I intend to read. You know what they say about the road to hell? Well, my nightstand is stacked with the same thing. So many books, so little time.

Despite my inability to get to it all, I have actually found a little time to read (or listen to) some good stuff of late.

The first is The Year of Magical Thinking. My friend, Lin, the chaplain I want handy if I have to face my own demise in a hospital somewhere, recommended it. Lin is the sort of person who looks into the eyes of stroke victims who can no longer talk and says, "I know you are in there." (The tear ducts that offer up saltwater in response suggest she knows of what she speaks.)

What is particularly significant to me about Lin's recommendation is the timing. She suggested this book to me when I was recovering from that clavicle-hip surgery that made my body ache and my brain feel like Swiss cheese. You remember that accident I had about six months ago that provided my first introduction to a wheelchair and a cane? Yeah, that.

Such trauma has a way of making one think more about loss and helplessness and death. And this book definitely looks at these subjects. Even though that may sound unappealing, Didion has penned a page-turner. She tells of how her husband dropped dead of a coronary while her daughter already lay on life support in intensive care. Oh. And did I mention the daughter was their only child?

This is the most significant work I have read on grief since I picked up C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed in college. Insightful. Profound. A reminder that "it is better to go to the house of mourning...." Magical Thinking won Didion the National Book Award. For good reason. Fantastic writing. But I'll bet it really stunk to live the story she tells.

I cannot stop thinking about something her husband noted: Episcopalians take communion; Catholics receive it.

We leave non-fiction to move to fiction. I just finished listening to Patricia Cornwell's Cause of Death. It was all right. But Michael Crichton's Prey on CD has left Cornwell in the dust. I listen to this only in the car, and today I tried to think up errands to run because I want to know, I need to know, if the protagonist's wife is going crazy because of some nanotechnology in her brain or if she is taking speed. I am currently about 200 pages into writing a medical thriller and this has brought fresh inspiration.

I also finished listening to Edith Wharton's, The Age of Innocence. Wharton won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for this book, which is a masterful exploration of desire and betrayal during New York's Golden Age. At that time, keeping up appearances was more important than avoiding the plague. The literal one.

The woman is flat brilliant. Because she writes such fantastic prose (and, okay, because my novel-writing prof in my PhD program requires this one), I have also been reading Wharton's book, The Writing of Fiction.

Her non-fiction style requires unpacking a rather dense suitcase, but the patient reader finds a fascinating comparison of short story with novels; descriptions of how narration and dialogue function; advice on plot and setting; handling the passage of time ... basically the tools the word-crafter needs. I leave you with her thoughts on creativity:

It has been often, and inaccurately, said that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist's mind, with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected, something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination.