Dear Great Book Guru, My friends and I meet every week at B. Brown's for breakfast and a delicious breakfast it is! Well, last week someone mentioned a new book by the author Joan Didion that she said was very, very sad but very worth reading. Have you heard of it and would you recommend it -remembering that November is probably one of the darkest months of the year? Melancholy Reader

Dear Melancholy, My friends and I too have a weekly breakfast at B's and the discussions range from favorite books, to local politics, to the latest real estate deals. I'm sure before the month is over we will discuss Didion's memoir BLUE LIGHTS. The author writes about her daughter Quintana: her childhood, her adolescence, her early adulthood, and finally her much too early death. She looks back and in painful detail questions the many choices she made as a parent and wonders how she could have done things differently. Six years ago Didion wrote another memoir -THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING- which recounted the death of her husband author John Gregory Dunne and the year of mourning that followed. This newest book too is stark in its description of her grief, but there is a beauty, almost poetic, in her quest for forgiveness- forgiveness for being, in the end, only human. A hard read but worthwhile!