Our Little Secret (2025)

This is a solid if unexceptional romantic comedy that does exactly what it is supposed to, and it does it pretty well. It is set in the holiday season and it is family friendly, so it could be something to watch with the relatives if your family traditions veer away from sports and into movie viewing. Here's how it goes. Avery, a successful business consultant with her own firm who is meetiAs luck would have it, Avery and Logan, who had been best friends since they were kids before dating throughout their teens and twenties, and people thinking they had what it takes to go the long haul. That came to a screaching halt ten years earlier, the same year Avery’s mother passed away, because Avery was choosing grad school far away over making her relationship with Logan, and they haven't had contact since, even though their family's live near each other. Now, these two have to get through a four-day holiday weekend with Cam and Cassie’s ultra-snooty parents, Erica and Leonard. The result is a perfectly executed marriage-remarriage style screwball comedy, with new relationship twists and decidedly wacky situations thrown at Avery and Logan every ten minutes. It all turns out more or less the way you might hope it would, with some added whip cream and cherry on top along the way.

Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynn Olson

I heard about this book on the Parnassus Bookstore Friday video series, "It's New To You"--which if you haven't checked it out, you should. There is so much to know about authors and books, and this bookstore is a treasure, to be sure, and every week they highlight a handful of books, so even a voluminous reader like myself can be overwhelmed with the choices. This one highlights the work of women during WWII. The book is about one person, but there is some attention to what happened after France surrendered to Germany, in terms of having no organized resistance to begin with and how it organically grew ad what the barriers were, all of which I did not know and had not thought about. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, married, mother of two, slender, blond and barely in her 30s. Over the course of World War II, Fourcade built a network of agents across occupied France. They collected intelligence on the movements of German U-boats, on supply shipments sailing in and out of key ports, on which of the bridges into Paris were mined. They were frequently captured by Nazis (in Fourcade’s case, twice) and, in some cases, escaped (again, Fourcade’s record: 2-0). The book does have a bit too much of "this happened and then this happened" rather than straight ahead telling the story, but it is a book that highlights a forgotten woman of history, who while spying, also had a third child in 1943, and was altogether forgotten by history--but survived to see France restored.

City Sampler: 100 Modern Quilt Blocks by Tula Pink

I got this book as a present almost about the time that it came out. I looked at it and thought Wow, there are a lot of tiny pieces of fabric in each of these 100 blocks--hard pass. Fast forward to the present when I have been in a Modern Quilt Guild for 18 months, and I know more about scraps and the process of making textiles and the very commendable trend of using ALL your fabric, mix that with one of my friends who quilts is now making her second one of these (she is over 75% done with it in fact) and voila, I am thinking why haven't I made one of these. The book is essentially mostly the blocks--with pictural directions for sewing and written instructions for cutting (I am on my 4th block and I have already made a mistake in cutting, so this is not going to be a breeze), and then various designs for assembly to finish it out. You can make this with scraps and that is my intention--my sewing table, which doubles as my dining room table seating 14, is a total mess, but this is well done and I think it will be fun once I get the hang of it. I also love that something so long buried can be resurrected again.

The Deam Hotel by Laila Lalami

I really liked this. It is a combination of what the extreme of AI might be as well as pushing the limits on what is going on with ICE in the United States--that heavily armed men are covering their faces, not wearing badges and snatching people off the street without any accountability and disappearing them. The later is happening and the former is a what if scenario. Sara Hussein seems unexceptional: she’s a museum archivist, married and mother to young twins. She once had an argument with her husband Elias after he impulsively part-exchanged the family Toyota for a Volvo. Sara sees herself as a person who “couldn’t possibly be considered a member of the lawbreaking classes”, until the moment at the airport when an officer informs her that her “risk score” is too high, and sends her to Madison, a California women’s retention center. This isn’t punishment but risk management, for anybody considered likely to commit a crime. Every citizen has a risk score, extrapolated via algorithm from personal cloud data, from surveillance networks, and from the Dreamsaver – a widely used skull implant that delivers more restful sleep. The small print of Dreamsaver Inc grants the company rights to share the user’s dreams with the government. The author owes a lot to it being 2025 in America, where this all seems quite possible. The Secretary of Health and Human Services wants to eliminate vaccinations, obliterate health research, and put a tracking device on everyone, so it is just a hop, skip, and a jump to locking up people for their thoughts.

In The Shadow Of The Cypress (2024)

There has been a trend in nominees the Best Short Animated Film category for the Academy Awards that there is both less child oriented in content and they tend to run a lot longer than what Disney and Pixar produce, and this 2025 winner is an excellent example of that seeming trend. It is a vivid depiction of what PTSD is like to experience for the sufferer as well as what they are like to live with. The film begins with a Persian man, who is shown struggling with mental health issues. His daughter tries to intervene and comfort him, but without much luck. The man reflects on his past through vivid dreams and memories. His ship was damaged during the war and is in need of serious repair, adding to his stress. While he is experiencing this mental breakdown, a whale washes up on the shore near their home. They are without the resources to free the heavy marine mammal, but the daughter tries to comfort it by splashing water on it as it lays in the sun, and then spreads wet towels across its back to keep it cool. The father sees her efforts as hopeless, and offers little assistance. Later, however, he is struck with an idea – one that would sacrifice his ship but could free the whale. The film touches on many topics, including the environment, war, women's issues, and, most importantly, the dynamic between the father and daughter.

This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

I had two recommendations to read this book, one from Ann Patchett on her weekly videos from her bookstore, Parnassus Books, and the other was from a woman who I have shared reading loves with for 30 years, and so the double whammy rose this to the top of my books to read, that and the fact that I could not renew it--possibly stemming from one of the other of my two sources. It is set in rural Ireland at the time that a town is getting electricity. It is being added to the grid, and while there are a lot of things about that to be excited about, not everyone agrees that it is a good thing. They do have a point, those nay sayers. There are things that will change forever and there will not be an option to change that. The process of progress is the subtext here, what is lost and what is gained, and the inevitability of it, but the concomitant sadness about what changes and goes away. I did not love this book the way that my friend and Ann Patchett did, but it made me think a lot, and that, after all, is part of why I read, and in thinking I realized that it is a different sort of book, one that I do not seek out so much as be thankful that I read it.

The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

Sometimes I am good when it comes to picking out books and sometimes I am just plain lucky, and in this case it is the later rather than the former. I have been using a web site with murder mysteries pictured that are published each month in order to keep abreast of authors that I read routinely, but also to read authors that I do not know or have not read, but who have published more than one one book. The sad truth is that while I am getting older, so are the authors that I have been reading, along with my spouse, for the entirety of our relationship, and so I need to find new things to read. I really like the website, because it turns out I really need the pictures as well as the title to pay attention--I am constantly discovering that I am very visual and without it I have trouble paying attention, and it seems to be worse not better as I get older. So I am grateful it exists and that I found it, but the downside is that there is no information about the books beyond author, title and the cover--with a reference to the detective and which number in the series this is. So the good news is that I really liked this, and it is one of a series of books by the same author. He is long gone now, having published his first murder mystery in 1921, and this one is from the early 1950's. He was the first to write in this genre in Japan, and he has over 70 published novels, only 6 of them translated into English. The complexity of the mystery as well as the characters is right up my alley and I will read the rest of them, but I am most grateful to have discovered this author, and to know a little bit more about writing from Japan.

Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown

I have a myriad of lists that I work off of for "What To Read Next" and one of my resources is Reese Witherspoon's book club. The selections often have a slightly lighter tone and are almost all well written. Most importantly, I like them and often would not have found my way to the book another way. Not every book is a home run for me, and this one was a miss. It is well written, suspenseful, and I read tons of murder mysteries so the fact that a couple of people die is not a turn off for me, but it put me on edge in a way that I don't enjoy--I struggled to pick it up, and while it had a lot of good literary qualities, I was relieved when it was over. The story follows Maya, a Princeton alum returning to campus for her 10-year reunion and her younger sister Naomi’s graduation. But what should be a joyous weekend quickly turns tragic when Naomi is found dead. The police rule it an accident, but Maya suspects foul play. As she digs deeper into her sister’s final months, Maya uncovers a tangled web of lies stretching back to her own time at Princeton. The supper clubs and secret societies at Princeton play a role (I recently read Leigh Bardugo's book that featured the Yale equivalent and neither Ivy comes off well fictionally speaking) as does the influence that money has on what happens on campus. I would heartily recommend this if a suspenseful book is your jam, that you like it when the tension rises and the complicated relationships that can happen when you keep your college friends well into adulthood. The mystery part of it is less spectacularly done, but not too bad either.

The Many Coats Of Rachel Clark

I had the pleasure of taking a two days class with the quilter and garment maker Rachel Clark. I cannot emphasize enough how magical it is to listen to her talk about her creative process, the making of her coats and the origin story that they each have. Some of them stem from an idea that she wants to convey of celbrate, like her watermelon coat or her Obama coat. Some of them are the celebration of a fabric, like her Japanese fabric coat or her rickrack and polka dot coats. She brought a couple dozen of her coats with her so that we could examine them in class, be inspired by them, and when we got to the design process, we could see examples of directions we could go with the coat. The absolute best part, is just to watch her work. She sorted fabric for several people in the early design process, and then as people made some progress, she highlighted several directions they could go so that the class could benefit from those who were further along. I loved listening to her, and I would take another class with her in a heartbeat if it were offered nearby and I could swing it. She is someone who is fun to be with in person, but I watched a lecture she gave at QuiltCon, and she translates well to the recorded world as well. She is a treasure.

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

This is a fictionalized version of the story of Doctor Zhivago and the CIA's use of it--funnily enough, there is a non-fiction book about part of this story, The CIA Book Club that you can follow up with if you want the more factual version. This is two stories, one from the Russian side and one from the American side, and they are woven together. At the height of the cold war, the CIA ran an initiative known as “cultural diplomacy”. Following the premise that “great art comes from true freedom”, the agency seized on painting, music and literature as effective tools for promoting the western world’s values, and funded abstract expressionism exhibitions and jazz tours. But when it came to the country that produced Tolstoy, Pushkin and Gogol – a nation that, might value literature like the Americans value freedom (or at least we used to) – the focus was always going to be on the written word. And her subject, the part the CIA played in bringing Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece Doctor Zhivago to worldwide recognition, was the jewel in cultural diplomacy’s crown. In 1955 rumours began to circulate that Pasternak, hitherto known largely as a poet, having survived a heart attack and Stalin’s purges, was ailing and politically compromised but had nonetheless managed to finish his magnum opus. The sweeping, complex historical epic – and simple love story – that is Doctor Zhivago had been a decade in the writing under the most adverse circumstances imaginable: the imprisonment of Pasternak’s lover, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya; the death in the gulag of his friend and fellow writer Osip Mandelstam and the suicides of two others in his circle, Paolo Iashvili and Marina Tsvetaeva; constant surveillance and his own ill health. Because of its subversive emphasis on the individual and its critical stance on the October Revolution, no publishing house in the Eastern bloc would touch it. It was smuggled out by an Italian publishing house and this is the story of what happened to get it back into Russia. It is a well told story, and one that lays out why women who were of great use during the war and then discarded in the peace might have been tempted with becoming double agents for oh so many reasons.