Virginia Book Notes

Despite America's increasingly mobile society, a Southerner's move to New York remains a major cultural undertaking, and it's one that Jane Borden describes with hilarity in her first book, "I Totally Meant to Do That" (240 pages, Broadway, $14).

Borden grew up in Greensboro, N.C., went to boarding school in Virginia and college in Chapel Hill, N.C., all stopping posts along the way for the perfect Southern belle.

But consider this episode from her senior year in high school, in which she played Miss Bessom in Shirley Jackson's adaptation of her story "The Lottery."

"Our director said to smile and project. Apparently, I understood that to mean grimace and shout. I'd have been hailed as a star had the stage directions for Miss Bessom read, ‘played as a man with hearing loss and hemorrhoids.' … Bottom line: I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag if it were made of me-sized holes."

There's much more, and just as funny, in Borden's account of her transformation from belle to hipster.

A memoir in essays, "I Totally Meant to Do That" will find a place in the hearts of any Southerner who has lived in the North. Part cautionary tale, part celebration, it establishes Borden as a worthy successor to Fredericksburg's estimable Florence King.

History can be found throughout the Old Dominion, but one of the state's wealthiest regions is the Northern Neck, the birthplace of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Robert E. Lee, among other notables.

In "Historic Sites in Virginia's Northern Neck & Essex County" (290 pages, Preservation Virginia, Northern Neck Branch, $40 hardcover, $24.95 paperback), editor Thomas A. Wolf describes 460 historic sites, including grand plantations, more modest early homes, churches, schools and courthouses in Essex, King George, Lancaster, Northumberland, Richmond and Westmoreland counties.

Complete with 445 photos and 36 maps, it's a valuable guide to day (or longer) trips to the area, a resource for armchair travel and a source of memories and learning for longtime residents and newcomers to the region.

Wolf is a retired official of the International Monetary Fund. He serves on the boards of Preservation Virginia's Northern Neck Branch and the Society of the Lees in Virginia, and he is vice president and editor of the annual journal of the Northumberland County Historical Society.


Also:

John Rozema, who lives in Southside Virginia, has written "The Stories I Never Told You" (320 pages, Pleasant Word, $19.99), his account of finding God and bringing him into his life.

Father and daughter Roger Bruner and Kristi Rae Bruner of Glen Allen have teamed up on "Found in Translation" (369 pages, Barbour Books, $9.99), a work of Christian fiction.

Patricia Keen-Diaz, a former resident of Hampton who now lives in Portsmouth, has completed her memoir, "Odd Road to Kabul" (286 pages, Bucko and Chicky Publishing, $37.33). Told through a survivor's perspective, it has been 40 years in the making.

The second edition of "Profiles of Virginia — History, Statistics, Demographics for 759 Populated Places in Virginia Including Comparative Statistics & Rankings" (500 pages, Universal Reference Publications/Grey House Publishing, $149) has been published.