• In 'Biography' of Thames, history flows like a river
From its gurgling origins amid pastoral calm at Trewsbury Mead to its broad embrace with North Sea swells some 215 miles to the east, the Thames is an endlessly fascinating river. Though nowhere near as physically impressive as continent-spanning streams like the Mississippi, the Amazon or the Nile, it is, mile for mile, easily the most storied river on the planet.

• Lost time a small price for pleasures of Proust
na recent Saturday morning, comfortably settled in my worn reading chair raked by winter sun, I finally finished "The Guermantes Way," volume three of Marcel Proust's seven-volume masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time."

• Lost time a small price for pleasures of Proust
na recent Saturday morning, comfortably settled in my worn reading chair raked by winter sun, I finally finished "The Guermantes Way," volume three of Marcel Proust's seven-volume masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time."

• 'Tis the season for Dickens to get his due
Christmas as we celebrate it today is brimful of Victorian traditions ? mistletoe, the holly and the ivy, plum pudding, turkey, travel to see family, and a heightened concern for the downtrodden and less fortunate. Each one of these familiar rituals is traceable to one man and a slender little Christmas book he wrote out of desperation and despair for his flagging reputation. Happily for the author, the book was a smashing success, and for many years its popularity in the English-speaking world was exceeded only by that of the Bible.

• 'Imprinting the South' offers precious glimpses of the past
n1932, a Junior League founder and former Mardi Gras queen named Marian Acker (later Macpherson) printed a collection of her etchings titled "Prints of the Past from Old Mobile." Her motivations were essentially antiquarian as she stated in her introduction, "I have not attempted to relate or depict history in detail, but only to preserve and keep intact some bit of the rare charm and color of Old Mobile."

• Despite flaws, 'Eden' keeps aura of grandeur
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay." Thus begins "East of Eden," John Steinbeck's 600-plus-page sprawling novel of love, greed, jealousy, corruption and forgiveness. Over a half century since its original publication, this gargantuan novel retains an astonishing grip on the culture ? witnessed by the fact that it is much-taught in high schools (my inspiration to finally read it was due to my daughter being assigned it in her senior class), it was an Oprah choice when the talk show maven reinstituted her book club in 2004, and a new film version is expected in 2009 (the 1955 movie starred James Dean and Julie Harris and a 1981 miniseries adaptation starred Timothy Bottoms and Jane Seymour).