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There’s a wonderful joke about a Jewish guy in a confessional that can’t be repeated on a family blog like lct. In violation of every tenet of the Comics’ Code of Honor, I will give away the payoff here: “I’m telling everybody!”

Right now, I’m telling everybody about a marvelous new book I’m reading. It’s called Eat, Pray, Love : One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, a picaresque memoir of the writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s post-divorce search for pleasure, the divine and her attempt to strike a balance between the two.

This book has particular resonance for me at the moment, but it’s so charmingly written, so self-deprecatingly honest . . . just so damn human, really, that I can recommend it to anyone in any life situation.

Liz, you are my guru. And I’m telling everybody.

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Journalistic evenhandedness usually precludes me from hyping events before I publish my previews in the Erie Times, but I can’t hide my delight at the program next Sunday afternoon at Mercyhurst College’s Walker Recital Hall. Trio Solisti (Maria Bachmann, violin; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello and Jon Klibonoff, piano) will be joined by the extraordinary clarinetist David Krakauer for a program that will include Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tempest Fantasy. I’ve long been a fan of Krakauer’s wildly imaginative klezmer mash-ups (I’m listening to the latest, Bubbemeises – Lies My Grandma Told Me, as I type this), but he’s also a serious and accomplished concert music player. In the Moravec, he and his mates have a terrific piece to tackle. It’s music by a living composer that can stand with the dead masters for juicy melodies and compelling emotion and match them phrase for phrase. Anyone interested in how concert music can remain a vivid and engaging art form in the 21st century can hear the answer next Sunday. And right here in Erie!

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