By Gwen S. Clarke

That Etch-a-Sketch under our Christmas tree with its disarray of metal filings is the perfect metaphor for my head at holiday time. Is it the chaos of four generations under one roof, with an age span of more than eight

decades? Throw in a precious great-granddog, shedding a substantial enough eddy of fur in her wake to knit a whole new Shih tsu.

It’s enough to turn one into a professional reclusive librocubicularist. I can’t even find that word in the resident dictionary that’s so gargantuan it has a table and a lamp all of its own. Now I need to know the word for the phenomenon where you’re looking into a mirror that shows you looking into a mirror that shows you looking into a mirror, because that was my immediate sensation when author Christopher Morley introduced that word to me, while I was reading in bed. I think he made it up, but I’m glad he did. It means one who reads in bed, he tells me.

An hour of librocubicularism seems to generally cure anything that ails me. I can thank Christopher Morley for the book in which he coined that word, exactly a century before it hit me between the eyes this past holiday season.

Morley’s PARNASSUS ON WHEELS was originally published in 1917, and refers to the horse-drawn wagon that an idiosyncratic little book huckster takes over the back roads of old New York countryside. (Maybe the original Bookmobile?) It proved to be a real potato chip of a book – one that’s delicious, quickly finished, and leaves you craving more.

Happily, I found its sequel in a used edition of Morley’s THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP. Originally published in 1919, this 1955 copy has charming pen-and-ink illustrations that flesh out the mental images of bookseller Roger Mifflin and the rest of the characters, as well as their stylized turn-of-the-century surroundings.

Jodi Picoult’s SMALL GREAT THINGS was the next book to fall into my hands. I learned after a few nights of anxious, exhausting dreams that, despite it being a great read, written by a masterful hand, it was best relegated to the armchair, and an earlier hour. In a five-page author’s note at the book’s end, Picoult says that four years into her writing career, she knew she wanted to write a book about racism – a project she was forced to table for 20 years, until she could find a story line with characters who rang true.

In this story of a male white-supremacist pitting himself against the African-American female nurse who was present at the death of his child, Picoult brings a maturity and balanced empathy gained over those intervening decades. Reading the book required big gulps of time, separated by sufficient distractions to walk away and abandon the characters to the void of a bookmarked page.

As a writer, I continue to be amazed at the scope of Ms. Picoult’s subject matter. Being knowledgeable enough about any one subject to write a whole book must require months, even years of research. While countless successful, even scholarly writers find and draw from a given specialty, she runs the gamut from miracles, to kidney transplantation, Asperger’s Syndrome, professional search-and-rescue, and beyond.

Lest all of those topics lend themselves to molar-grinding angst, Jodi Picoult throws curve-balls of unexpected humor out of left field, like the line in KEEPING FAITH about the “died in the wool Southern belle who wore her religion like a Kevlar vest.”

Of the 13 Picoult books that I’ve read or listened to in the past 11 years, I’ve found a few “pickles” (creative-writing-class speak for flaws), but who can expound for so long about so many topics and not occasionally stumble? There are more of her books on my round-tuit list, but first I’m going to break my own rule and re-read John Kennedy O’Toole’s wonderfully titled A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES.

Ah, who was the first to say: So many books; so little time?