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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and I want to begin by saying, who says you can't go home again?

A.M. Holmes was on the show with her very first book of stories, the safety of objects.

She now has 30 years later a new book of stories called Days of Aw. I would like you to tell

what the Days of Aw are. So the days of awe are the 10 days

between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish religion. And it's a time of contemplation,

and it's a time of making peace and reparations, really, and preparing oneself for the next year.

And I was fascinated by that as a notion

because I also think we're living in a very strange time

and there's lots of meanings of the word awe.

And so it's terror and epiphany in many ways.

Aw and terror.

That's what we offer our enemies.

And it's terrifying because that was once our relation to God, yes?

Absolutely.

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