But the club has evolved to where we actually exchanged books this past Christmas. She presented me with the fourth edition of “Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia” and correctly inscribed it “to the best-looking man in our book club.”

My friend and her mother have longed referred to “Benet’s,” the classic encyclopedia of world literature. It gives short biographies of writers, plot outlines and character sketches from important works and definitions about a whole bunch of things, from myths to movements.

Sometimes, my book club partner just delights in turning the book open to any page and reading the entries. It is a great reference book — and an intimidating one, given all that I don’t know about literature.

In recent years, I’ve kept my own, simple-minded encyclopedia of sorts. I call it the “Mason Bee Book.” Haphazardly, I write in a narrow notebook the definitions of words I’m not sure about or passages that strike my fancy.

“Mason bee,” a solitary bee that builds its nest of clay, sand, mud, etc., is the first entry. Here are some others:

• “Washington often illustrates the cyclical theory of history — the theory that life is not one damn thing after another but the same damn thing over and over.” (George Will).
• Graven image: an idol made from stone or wood.
• Maureen Dowd on President Clinton: “He denies that oral sex (the second word of which is sex) is sex.”
• Copperheads: word used to describe Northerners who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.
• Rune: any poem, verse or song, especially one that is mystical or obscure.
• “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.” (Yogi Berra).
• “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” (George Orwell).
• Redoubt: any stronghold.
• This came from Mark Lane of Cox News Service in referring to Y2K preparations:
• “In primitive tribes and ancient cultures, the words for numbers go: ‘one, two, three, many.’ We laugh at their simplicity. We have developed to where we can design machines that count ‘1997, 1998, 1999, many.’”
• Publican: a saloonkeeper, innkeeper. In Ancient Rome, a collector of public revenue, tolls, etc.
• This was in Michael Buck’s letter to the editor in The Charlotte Observer: “People must understand that we are not accountable to a government for how we express ourselves.

The government and nation that the flag represents are accountable to us.

“When the right to express a view in an unpopular fashion is constitutionally banned, a freedom that the flag and Constitution stand for is taken away.”

The Mason Bee Book also notes that the fictional Irish saloonkeeper, Mr. Dooley, once told journalists at his bar “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”