You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Maureen Howard, the author most recently

of a lover's almanac, published by Viking.

She's the author as well of natural history, expensive habits, grace abounding before my time,

Bridgeport Bus, which has recently been published in

paperback by Penguin, and not a word about nightingales. She's the author of the memoir as well,

Facts of Life. Now, I have an interesting experience of Maureen Howard because, you know,

sometimes it's in the process of reading an author that you

come to understand the work. And I felt that with this new book, a lover's almanac, that I had

begun to enter the world of Maureen Howard. And I wanted to ask you, yet again, as in natural history, the book

is interested in taking in into its web, many bits of information, almost as if the world

of the human is played against the world of the solar.

And the question of what is mechanical and what is human seems to be being asked

as juxtapositions are made in the books.

How do they get written?

What is the process?

Because they're so multifaceted.

Well, the process is really one of web, and as you suggest, a field that I'm playing in

...