The day after Thanksgiving, my father and I were running errands in Asheville—my hometown and favorite place, where, sadly, the good Lord suffers me only to visit two or three times a year. While plotting our errands, I said to my father "And I'd like to pop into Accent on Books for just a minute." He began to laugh. "Why are you laughing?" I asked, a tad defensively. "Just that wherever you go, there is always a bookstore in the offing," said he. Indeed. (Accent on Books, by the way, has a superb religion section, and a superb children's book section. On this run, I picked up Louis Weil's Theology of Worship.)

Speaking of wonderful bookstores: not long before Christmas, I was in Manchester-by-the-Sea, home of John Updike; when there, I like to go to Manchester-by-the-Book, a bookstore about which I can offer this highest compliment: even in this age of internet-book-availability, an age in which it is harder and harder for the true bookworm to walk into a bookstore and be surprised, I am always surprised by something at Manchester-by-the-Book. It was on my first trip there, some years ago, for example, that I discovered the food writer Helen Evans Brown. If you've not heard of her, I am excited for what you have in store. At Manchester-by-the-Book I was lured in by a 1958 set of three of her books, perfect little squares with wonderful covers whose stripes and flowers recall upholstery: A Book of Appetizers ("Like it or not, the cocktail hour has come to stay"; alas, Brown was wrong); Patio Cook Book; and Chafing Dish Book ("The revived and tremendous interest in the chafing dish will indubitably produce a spate of cookery books on the subject, as it did at the turn of the century").

After Updike's death, Manchester-by-the-Book received a good number of his books. The intricately annotated volumes have gone to a collector with money (that is, not me), but scattered throughout the store are volumes that Updike owned even if he did not annotate them. Now happily nestled in my Updike shrine are several of his volumes of Barth (cheek-by-jowl with Roger's Version, of course) and his copies of Henry Green's Loving, Living, and Party Going. Updike once wrote that Green's novels "give pleasure and instruct; moreover they give that impression, of an irreducible density and a self-possessed rhythm, that belongs to reality and its most ardent imitations in art. They live, in short, and like all living feed on air, on the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital."

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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