Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear (Henry Holt, $25), to be released in February: Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mystery series has become my new guilty pleasure. Absorbing but not transporting, falling into a book that's like a good, warm bath. Dobbs novels are not heavy, not filthy and equal parts inviting and sedating. They should all end with a rousing rendition of Rule, Britannia. They're Masterpiece Theater in a book jacket.
Sweet Potato Queens night at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Jan. 10: Jill Conner Browne, Mississippi's czarina of the post-40 set, always drags a big crowd, and there's always more than a tiara or two therein. Browne will be on tour promoting her new book, American Thighs: The Sweet Potato Queens' Guide to Preserving Your Assets (Simon and Schuster, $23). Testosterone-bearers welcome but not really encouraged. (www.josephbeth.com. (859) 273-2911.)
A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, $35), to be released Jan. 13: It's being touted as the best Lincoln biography since David Donald's Lincoln in 1995. You know how you were glad that you'd read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals when it turned out that not only had President-elect Barack Obama read it himself, but that he seemed to be creating a cabinet around Lincoln's philosophy that the smartest people are those who just tried to defeat you? It's the responsibility of voting citizens to keep a Lincoln book on the shelf, and it's not as if the possibilities are limited. Still, this one looks like one of 2009's best bets.
The Lexington Public Library's Night of Literary Feasts, Jan. 29-30: This fund-raiser for the Lexington Public Library Foundation features dinners with 15 authors, among them Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, and Andre Dubus III, author of The Garden of Last Days. Prices are $150 to $250 on Jan. 30 and $500 for a deluxe event Jan. 29. The foundation suggests either thinking of it as a gift, or giving it as one. (www.lexpublib.org/foundation.)
Kentucky Book Fair, November. It's an enormously sweet annual event in Frankfort, and a great opportunity to run into not only regional authors, but fellow Kentuckians you haven't seen in months and sometimes decades. Hope springs eternal that organizers will figure out a way to organize the tables to make the aisles wider. The year that book fair sage Carl West stops trying to play practical jokes on attendees is the year that a bit of beloved Kentucky will die. (www.kybookfair.org.)
