Roy Blount Jr. at Harvard Book Store

Roy Blount Jr. will be reading from Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South at First Parish Church Meetinghouse on Wednesday, May 16, at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available at Harvard Book Store.

On Saturday mornings, we need a Roy Blount Jr. fix. We're addicted. If he's not answering questions in NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me in his warm, avuncular, Southern-fried voice, we get crabby. We don't know why, but we love hearing him make the stab at the Bush Administration or a dirty joke in that voice. It's not just Southern - it's like a warm sweater. So he could be reading from a VCR manual, and we'd still want to hear it.

His latest, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, is a compilation of columns that focus on how the North views the South. Blount is an expert in this topic, as he is a "Southern Man" who happens to live in Massachusetts and Manhattan. (You could argue that, if he splits homes there, the only Southern thing left in him is his accent.)

But he's honest about it and admits that he "hovers between Northern and Southern." The exerpt available at NPR really does travel from North to South and back again, and he can't make up his mind which he is - but that's all right with him.