Kneecap (2024)

I was in the midst of a lengthy vacation when the shortlist for the 10 categories that the Oscars release a shortlist for, and on the trip home I looked for movies on the plane that were on the list. I was so happy to see this was one of them--I like to try to see as many of the International Feature Films that I can get access to before we know what the final five that are chosen are, but am lucky if I can see a third of them. I feel like I am off to a good start this year. This is another movie set in Northern Ireland where the underlying message is the desire for independence from England. The vehicle of change is what is different--instead of revolutionary fervor mixed with guns and bombs, the thing that is inspiring young Irishmen in Northern Ireland is hip hop. Gaelic language hip hop. When Belfast schoolteacher JJ goes in his wife's stead to translate for a youth who professes not to speak English, he not only does the translating, he also spirits away his notebook--which includes a sheet of LSD hits as well as chronicling invovlement with drug trading. What he doesn't expect to find is that the Irish poetry that the young man writes translates very well to a hip hop beat, and he convinces them to go into his storage unit cum recording studio and see how it sounds. And then they go into public performances, and in the end, they get into a lot of trouble but that is mixed with a fair amount of success. Rapping in their native Irish language, KNEECAP fast become the unlikely figureheads of a Civil Rights movement to save their mother tongue. But the trio must first overcome police, paramilitaries and politicians trying to silence their defiant sound -- whilst their anarchic approach to life often makes them their own worst enemies. In this fiercely original sex, drugs and hip-hop biopic KNEECAP play themselves, laying down a global rallying cry for the defense of native cultures. It is fantastic.

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

I found this book to be a little bit confusing when it opened, and by the end I felt like I finally had a handle on where it was going all along. It opens with a sudden death of a man, Samuel, in the United States. He was working as a taxi driver and died under suspicious circumstances. He was by all accounts a witty yet enigmatic Ethiopian immigrant whom Mamush, our journalist hero, thinks of as his father. When he learns of Samuel’s death, Manush leaves his wife and child behind in France and returns to the close-knit Ethiopian community in Washington DC that shaped his childhood. He’s propelled by feelings of personal grief, but also a professional urge to investigate the truth--but the more he learns, the less he understands and the more he sees that he knew only part of the story of Samuel's life. Samuel’s ambitions in America were never realized, and thoughts of his past life in Ethiopia left him feeling stuck in a state of not-quite-belonging, an in-between-ness that is a familiar story for immigrants, being betwixt and between, and Mamush of course figures out some things about himself as he seeks out Samuel's story.

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

This is a personal story but one that is all too common in the Americas. The author is indigenous but of mixed heritage. Her father is a Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo and her a Catholic Latina mother who never discussed being descended from both Spanish conquistadors and Native people. She comes through experience to understand the hierarchy within the American Southwest, that places more value on Spanish blood over indigenous blood, paying no heed to the fact that girls were enslaved to Conquistadors and the mixing of blood was not consensual. Her parents’ attitudes about things diverged drastically, as did their temperaments. Her father seemed to be raw to the world, his memories and traumas always just beneath the surface of his skin, spilling out in stories and outbursts alike; her mother anchored herself with prayer, preferring to keep her hurts private, her doubts buried, her insecurities hidden away behind a competent and confident facade. They were united, however, in their commitment to the family they’d built and raised together. There are issues related to violence, poverty and drug abuse--but they play supporting roles in the story. This is a coming of age story from someone whose ancestors came to this land first but are not treated as such.

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

This is a highly improbably and thoroughly enjoyable tale of a young girl who is the picture of a young thing who has no conception of what is happening to her and the consequences of the choices she makes until they are upon her. When we meet Margo she is a 20 years old about to give birth to a baby boy. The father is her junior college English professor, a man who is exactly who you would expect in the situation--a terrible husband who preys upon his students, although he would deny it. Everyone in Margo’s orbit has begged her not to have the baby. She doesn’t listen, following her heart instead, a decision full of stubbornness and naiveté. Of course she drops out of college but she begins by being sure she can raise her son, Bodhi, alone while living with a gaggle of roommates in Southern California. She cannot, at least not easily. She gets no help from the professor, of course, and his mother tries to buy her off. Margo’s mother, Shyanne, a former Hooters waitress who is now a sales associate at Bloomingdale’s, won’t take time off to help and probably shouldn't be trusted with another child. Margo’s father, Jinx, a WWE Hall of Fame wrestler turned manager who was never around because he too fathered a child while married to another, is absent. Until he isn’t. A few weeks after Bodhi’s birth, there is Jinx at Margo’s door. In leather pants, with a heavy history of heroin and opioid addiction, he is not the babysitter Margo is expecting, but he’s fully at ease taking care of Bodhi. And so begins the very unusual plan to make enough money for all of them to do a little bit better than survive. This was a very fun read with a bit of a serious underbelly to boot. Don't miss it.

La Louisiane

We are rolling into the second Christmas season without my dad. I do not know why this cocktail reminds me of the holidays or him, because he wasn't a man who much enjoyed a cocktail, and he wasn't one to take a lot of responsibility for holiday celebrations, beyond the turkey, which even when he didn't much cook he tackled that twice a year. But somehow it does. The heart is funny that way, often not makingmuch sense. In any case, it is time to get serious about celebrating all the end of the year holidays with family and friends, and this cocktail is not a bad place to start. 2 oz. rye whiskey (Rittenhouse) 3/4 oz. sweet vermouth (Antica Formula) 1/2 oz. D.O.M. Bénédictine 3 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters 3 dashes absinthe (we subbed Herbsaint) Stir with plenty of ice for 45 seconds and strain into a chilled stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with 1-3 cherries.

A Passionate Mind In Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks

This is a time limited biography of a woman I had never heard of who had tremendous influence in her time. Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was her parents’ 15th child and the first one born free. She fought for civil rights during the grim period between the end of Reconstruction and the post–World War II Civil Rights Movement. She founded schools, with an emphasis on educating Black girls, and she raised money to pay poll taxes and offered instruction on how to pass literacy tests for Black Americans trying to vote in the Jim Crow South. She served in the leadership of numerous civil rights and mutual aid organizations, from the NAACP to the National Council of Negro Women, and she advocated for the Black community as an adviser to three presidents. How did she do it? This is yet another example of what Eleanor Roosevelt did to lift up both African Americans as well as women in her time. In the early winter of 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt took a stand when she followed her friend, Mary McLeod Bethune into the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and sat beside Bethune, defying the racist Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama. That’s an account that’s easy to find anywhere, and it’s thrilling, but the story misses something: at one point, the conference’s organizer asked for “Mary” to come up to the platform. Bethune drew herself up and told the organizer “My name is Mrs. Bethune.” She heard the disrespect and she corrected it. The author identifies this as a personal work for her--she states that her grandparents knew Bethune and, in doing research for this book, her understanding of Bethune was totally changed. Bethune was more than an activist — she was also a dream maker and “the first lady of Black America.” This is a short read, but fascinating and again, if you didn't already love Eleanor Roosevelt, this will add on to the pile of miracles she performed.

Create Your Own Improv Quilts by Rayna Gillman

I have been quilting off and on for 50 years, but I am brand new to the concept of improvisational quilting. I do better when someone else picks out the pattern and I do my own version of it. If I really like the pattern I might do several versions. So the idea of starting with a concept, or even just starting, no concept is alien to me as a quilter. Then in 2024 I went to my first QuiltCon. My mind was blown. There was so much more to quilting than what I had explored and there were so many ways to explore it. I joined a Modern Quilt Guild and while I struggled to make meetings and also to make progress, I felt like I was on a new quilting path. At our guild's fall retreat a recommended reading list was developed and this book was on it. Finally, something that spoke to me and how I need a starting point in order to quilt. It is a relatively slim volume but one that is packed full of ideas and places to start with your own improv quilts.

She gives her idea of what exactly improve quilts consist of, how she approaches her own work, and walks through her creative process as a way of teaching the reader how to start. There are several chapters that are "start here" options, from string piecing to having a shape in mind and following it to starting small and seeing where it takes you. I would recommend this to someone who is hoping to make something totally their own but doesn't know where to start. Start here.

There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak

I have been a fan of this author since reading her fist book--her weaving of history from her homeland of Turkey into her stories, and the complexity of controversies there make for excellent reading. This one is tied to the Kurds and her Turkish homeland but starts in ancient Sumeria (which is more like Iraq, but includes home to Kurds). It is also tied to the universality of water, that it is constantly recycled and falls again, connecting us across centuries. It starts with King Ashurbanipal (mid-600s BCE), the legendary leader of the wealthiest empire in the world, last of the great rulers of the kingdom of Assyria.. He rules Ninevah, on the banks of a tributary of the Tigris River called Khosr, and amasses a mammoth library of more than 7,000 tablets written in cuneiform--the clay is long lasting, and so once the code was cracked, their history was both preserved and knowable. His favorite volume is the ancient flood myth The Epic of Gilgamesh. Then there is Arthur, born into staggering poverty in 1840's London. He cannot receive the schooling he craves but possesses a superlative memory. He’s fascinated by books and, above all, by Ninevah. Through a mix of luck, talent, and grit, he finds work at a printer’s office, which ultimately leads him to the British Museum. With his gift for decoding ancient stone tablets, he eventually makes his way to the Middle East to study them--he is almost thwarted in his quest to find the final tablet of the flood story by, you guessed it, a flood, this one man made. Arthur is based on real-life British Assyriologist George Smith [1840-1876], who was obsessed with and decoded the Epic of Gilgamesh. Finally there are Kurds in modern times--one in London and a Yaziki girl in Iraq who's village is about to be flooded by a dam--the story spans millennia, and there is the persistent presence a water and the power it holds. This is a great tale well told--even if you are not a student of ancient civilizations.

A California Christmas (2020)

It is time to start revving up the holiday cheer, and suspending belief whenever possible. This is the season of Santa Claus and elves at the North Pole, so anything is possible. is better than expected. Truthfully, it is not much of a Christmas film. Christmas is more a deadline than a feature, with the story being set in the run-up to Christmas. With good performances from the majority of there cast and a story that, though predictable, is well told, A California Christmas is an enjoyable Christmas-esque romcom. Here is the basic outline--a playboy who is more of a love them and leave them kind of guy than much of a worker is tasked by his CEO mother of their family company with the job of getting a stubborn farm family to sell their farmland so as their company can build a new warehouse. It is an all or nothing assignment, where if he doesn't get the task accomplished by Christmas, he is going to be sidelined and maybe also cut off . The task is made more difficult when he gets to the farm and is mistaken for a farmhand, a mistake he does not correct. He pretends to be the farmhand in the hope of getting closer to the stubborn daughter and lots of the comedy comes from him not knowing one thing about being a farm hand--they have both land to care for as well as animals. He gets some help not making a complete botched job of it by getting help from the real ranch hand--who is perfectly happy to live in hte upscale accomodations rented for him, while he stays in a broke down camper. The whole thing works out much better than could be expected, and while not strictly Christmasy, I would recommend for holiday viewing--streaming on Netflix.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This is on Obama's 2024 summer reading list as well as on the short list for the National Book Award, so some very good recommendations indeed. On top of that, someone who I very much admire started talking to me about it at a party, and midway into the conversation, I realized that I had started it but not finished it, I had that much trouble with it (he, not so much--he was so enthused about it, and he is far closer to the age of the author, so it is entirely possible that I just do not get it). Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. This formative trauma has left a terrible legacy: when we meet him, in his late 20s, he’s a recovering alcoholic, struggling with fragile mental health and an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical sedatives; he is a troubled young man searching for a reason to live. he story is set in 2017 but the narrative intermittently skips back in time, revisiting Cyrus’s childhood in Indiana and his parents’ life in late 1980s Iran. Growing up as a bisexual Iranian in the American Midwest, he cultivated a sort of invisibility in order to get by. An aspiring but unproductive writer, Cyrus has a fixation with martyrdom, and is researching a book on the subject. To this end he travels to New York and interviews an older, terminally ill Iranian artist, Orkideh, at the Brooklyn Museum. They strike up a tender rapport, and Cyrus gradually begins to work through his issues. The story’s disparate elements are neatly interwoven, even if the plot device that sets up the resolution is a little far-fetched.

The Burrito Pillow Case

There is a very long story involved in how I came to return to the Old Capital Quilt Guild 30 years after I left it, but let me try for the shortened version. I was an avid quilter before I had children, and I was in a fantastic Fiber Guild in Fresno prior to moving to Iowa. The classes that I took there launched me into a lifetime of seeing, doing, and appreciating artwork using fibers. So upon my arrival in Iowa, I joined to local guild. It wasn't quite what I had had but it was good and I was active up until the birth of my fourth child. After that the work-life balance was thrown off it's axis and my creative life came to a grinding halt. I did some quilting but I no longer had a group that I did it with. Fast forward to my mid-50's when I had and then survived an advanced cancer diagnosis and I was reminded in a very stark way that life can be short, and that it was time to make a few things before it was over, and through a series of wonderful inspirations from a co-worker, I was back to being in a guild again, this time a Modern Quilt Guild, but a year on from that, I rejoined my local guild as well. The very first thing I did was completely outside my comfort zone--agreeing to help teach a class in pillow case making to a group of kids who had never sewed. I have never taught sewing and never made a pillow case, but it all worked out, and I would do it again, and sometime before I retire I hope to have a lot more of these experiences. Here is a tutorial to make this fun pillowcase--which you can make in an hour, even if you have no experience at all: https://smashedpeasandcarrots.com/french-seam-pillowcase-set-in-under-30-minutes-tutorial/

A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

The New York Times released a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century and while I had a very good showing when it comes to what made that list, I am slowly, almost lackadaisically, working on reading some of the things that fall into the gaps, and this is one of them. The 43-story collection often rings autobiographical—the author worked numerous jobs, suffered from alcoholism, and lived in many of the cities found in the book such as El Paso, Santa Fe, and Berkeley—and brims with perceptive observations of working class life. The characters return in several stories, and the whole collection feels linked on a number of levels. There is a whirlwind of memories, characters, and settings, all of which ride on an undercurrent of dark humor, nearly every story in the collection is captivating in its constant motion and minute detail. The collection’s title piece, in particular, centers around a mode of transportation—the bus—and concerns a cleaning woman going through the motions of her work-week as she processes the loss of her late husband. The character analysis of both those one works for and those one works with are insightful and enjoyable. I listened to the collection while on some longer road trips, and it was a good way to enjoy the collection.

The End of Grieving

Well, it has been a year. We have had our last “first” holiday without my dad. He was at our table last year at our Thanksgiving celebration, although he arrived in a wheelchair van and struggled to stay awake, he told me again and again how grateful he was that he could be there with us. Life was not normal for him, so the ability to be in places he had been umpteen times was ever more important to him. The hardest part for him was that while his mind was sharp, his body was failing, and it was very hard for him to accept. Not long after Thanksgiving, he agreed to enter hospice, all the while saying he was not ready to die, but it was only a matter of days later that he did. According to tradition, it is time to set mourning aside at the one year mark and move forward with your life. On the one hand, I am 100% in agreement with this plan—never forget, but life is for the living. My dad is for sure alive in my youngest grandchild, who races through the house with glee in a way that I could envision my father doing over eight decades earlier, but it is the reminders and the memories now. I will never again argue with my dad about what we do and do not agree about. I can never ask him what he thinks about something or what he would do—I have to figure it out based on what I know. I wasn’t prepared for how sad it was going to be to let go, but I am making progress on that. Here’s hoping the hardest part is behind me.

A Fever In The Heartland by Timothy Egan

This is a highly readable and altogether horrifying chronicle of how the early-20th-century Klan resurrected itself following decades of dormancy; how it obtained millions of converts, not only in the South but throughout the country; and how, by the 1920s, it had infiltrated all levels of the U.S. government. But it is also a terrifying study of one particular Klan leader — a rapist and bigot who managed, in a matter of years, to acquire a vast popular following and to become the unelected boss of Indiana politics, all while formulating plans to propel himself to the White House. D.C. Stephenson, born in Texas, was a drifter with an amoral entrepreneurial streak, and he found himself in Evansville, Ind., in the early ’20s, a moment when the national Ku Klux Klan was rapidly expanding and seeking inroads in Northern states. Stephenson was hired by a Klan recruiter to infiltrate Indiana for the Ku Klux Klan. He fulfilled this plan with shocking speed. The Klan’s agenda of white supremacy turned out to be all too popular among Hoosiers, who began joining the terrorist group en masse. Many institutions — especially Protestant churches, whose ministers the Klan bribed — were quickly co-opted. Within years, the Klan had members at all levels of government, and controlled law enforcement. And this hate-filled reign might have continued if not for the decision of Madge Oberholtzer, who was raped by Stephenson in 1925, to speak out. Her bravery set in motion a trial and conviction that ensured that Stephenson would spend decades in prison. The Klan was humiliated in the eyes of the public, and its power in Indiana began to wane. Could it happen again--or worse yet--has it happened again? The current GOP candidate for president is an avowed racist, a convicted rapist, and a felon who has vowed to use the Department of Justice to exact revenge on those who he feels have wronged him, so the answer is yes, it very much could happen again.

The Plated Table, Iowa City, Iowa

It is hard to put a finger on what exactly to call this place. They opened in a beautifully renovated space that used to be a very good lunch place that they have transformed into an elegant combination of a wine shop with imported tinned seafood for sale, a caterer that makes a different meal for pick up and finish cooking at home, and an event space where you can have a fancy meal in an eqully fancy space. I was recently at a fund raiser that they put on and in order to attend the dinner I had to pass up on the soft opening of a restaurant that we invested in. We do not do this as a rule, and we love the much anticipated experience of being the first feet in the door. So it was hard to say no to that, but we did. We were not disappointed. The menu was delicious from start to finish, with quality ingredients, good champagne, and a wonderful overall meal. I would recommend it highly, and hope to come back for a future event. Give it a try for an evening of wine or better yet, a full meal.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

I read this because it is short listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and it was not my favorite book that I read on that list. The author is an excellent one, and her previous book is on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, so it is entirely possible that I did not get this book and that others might enjoy it more than I did. This is a bit of a spy thriller, but the tension level is not what you would expect if you are a reader of that genre. Bruno Lacombe, in his youth an ally of the 1960s revolutionary intellectual Guy Debord, is now self-exiled to a cave complex in the limestone regions of southern France. The caves vanished inhabitants obsess him (as they do me, if the truth be told) and that is a side note in the book. Since the Neanderthal extinction, “the wedge between human beings and nature” has become “far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth century life”. The left, he believes, needs to properly understand this--this is not my personal obsession. Mine has to do with the deep and ancient motivation that man has to make art, and how that connects us across cultures and across millennia. Meanwhile, shadowy French authorities have decided that Lacombe and the Moulinards – the post-Debordian eco-commune he mentors by email – need to be steered out of their less than utopian rural domesticity and towards some act of serious terrorism, so they can be dealt with. So they hire Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate and provoke an outrage. The situation Sadie finds on the ground is confused and intersectional, centered on a real-life green issue: the diversion of local water supplies into vast “mega-basins” to support corporate agribusiness projects at the expense of the local farmers and the environment. Actors within and without the Moulinard commune, less in bad or good faith than in something shifting constantly between the two, all have their motives for protest or intervention. Suffice it to say the agitation gets somewhat bogged down and the spy is not the charmer you might hope her to be. I am interested to talk with someone who loved this book to see what I missed.

Your Body, My Choice

This is the mantra that flooded X after the 2024 election, and while I hate almost everything about it, the thing I love is that it makes it crystal clear that the agenda is NOT "pro-life" or even "pro-birth" (because afterall, the GOP agenda is about not supporting life after birth), it is about power and control over women. Period. Any talk of when life begins and what various religions might and might not support or prohibit is just a distraction, a way to put a pretty bow on an ugly message, which is that men who are attracted to the GOP messaging want to have power and control over women. No wonder it is causing trouble in people's homes. Nobody wants to be a slave to anybody, and the impulse to control people is in itself very unattractive. But at least now it is out there on the table for all to see. This is what you voted for and this is what you want. Is it any wonder that many of us are upset to find out that over half the voting public wants this?

Lies and Wedding by Kevin Kwan

I read a review that stated "If you liked Crazy Rich Asians, you will enjoy this", and while I did not read the book I did watch the movie, and if there is a correlation between them, that would be an accurate perception. There is a similar vibe, with conspicuous transnational consumption and love against the odds. The basic template is familiar-- Hong Kong-born Arabella, the Countess of Greshamsbury, has made it her mission in life to arrange advantageous dynastic marriages for her three English Chinese children. She is particularly keen on landing a princess for her only son and heir, a hot wannabe artist named Rufus. In Arabella’s path lie three formidable obstacles, none of which she yet knows about. Her global chain of luxury hotels is mortgaged to the brink. Decades of unchecked family spending have emptied the Gresham trusts. And Rufus has long since consecrated his heart to the girl next door: Eden Tong, daughter of the Gresham family doctor and a kind and conscientious physician herself. She is also the only not-rich person in the entire book, which makes her by default its heroine. The story unfolds over a predictable but enjoyable trajectory, a romantic comedy that ends well, and it is light and enjoyable.

The Quilted Jacket

I cannot say enough great things about the workshop that I took with Sandra Lee Designs to learn how to make a quilted jacket. Sandra is a phenomenal teacher, and I would travel again to take a class with her, she is just so talented and so fun, and at the end of the day, everyone in the class ends up with a beautiful jacket because she knows how to make that happen. I got into this because I had so much fun at my first QuiltCon that I knew I had to go back, and ideally I wanted to go back with the woman who taught me that any amateur with a credit card and some foreplanning could attend this spectacular event. So sign up again I did. I say it was her idea and she says it was mine, but somewhere along the road to going back we agreed that we should each make a jacket that would scream "We are going to QuiltCon" to those in the know. I think it was her, because basically, I cannot sew. Not in the third dimension at least, and that is definitely a skill you need to pull of the quilted jacket. So when I caught wind of this class, I knew I had to make it work for me to attend, and I am so glad I did! I brought a quilt that I had made 30 years ago that was so damaged I did not feel up to the task of repairing it--so I cut it up, sewed it back together, and voila! A jacket emerged!

Held by Anne Michaels

This was short listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and as so often happens to me, I like some of the books that were long listed better than those that make the cut. To be fair, I am pretty sure there is beauty here that I just did not get--it is written by a poet, and that is very evident in the structure and cadence of the book. I am just not someone who much appreciates poetry--my spouse and I have put it on our list of things to do when we retire, but at this point, we still work full time. The scenes in the book loop back and forwards from 1902 through to 2025. Locations shift from a battlefield in first world war France to North Yorkshire, London, Belarus and various war zones. John was grievously wounded in the first world war. Alan is a war photographer. His partner, Mara, is a nurse in a field hospital. Her father, Peter, makes exquisite hats. Sometimes, the reader is able to understand how these characters and their stories connect but often the links are not explicit, and often, I struggled to find the common thread. As you would expect from a poet, it is lyrical and flows nicely, but it just was not story telling that resonates with me.

Gin et Gingembre

I have been remiss in posting cocktails, it is true. This one is a keeper, and well worth laying in a bottle of the Domaine de Canton (which is a flavorful liquor all on it's own). 2oz Gin 1oz Domaine de Canton 3/4 oz mint simple syrup 1 oz lemon juice Shake with ice; strain into coupe; garnish with mint sprigs. Enjoy!

The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouten

I read this because it was short listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and if it weren't for how spectacular a book James is, this would be my choice to win. The book is set in post-WWII Netherlands and it deals with the reckoning with what happened. Isabel is the main character, and she is emotionally complicated and very buttoned down and inhibited--she is a figure seething with resentments and desires that she keeps, rigidly and violently, in check. She lives in the house in which she grew up and in which her mother died, in a small town 15 years after the end of the war, obsessively cleaning and polishing the tableware and other objects that her mother loved while ruling tyrannically over the meek local girl who is her maid. When her socially confident and womanizing brother – who has been promised the house as his inheritance, making Isabel’s residence there tenuous and time-limited – leaves the country for several weeks, he brings his new girlfriend, the vivacious and flamboyant Eva, to live with Isabel, threatening to loosen or to sever the tight coils into which she has wound her existence. Both Isabel and I did not see what was coming from Eva, and it is a really enjoyable twist in the plot that comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Birmingham Botanical Gardens

This is a must see when visiting Birmingham--after visiting the civil rights sights, to take in a bit of peacefulness as an annecdote to all the racial hatred that is embedded in the city's past. In 1961, after years of trying and failing to make his dream a reality, Birmingham Mayor James W. Morgan finally came to an agreement with the Park and Recreation Board establishing the Botanical Gardens. The city constructed the gardens on 69 acres of Lane Park, just east of the Birmingham City Zoo, on the south side of Red Mountain. The mayor wanted Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens to be the largest of its kind in the Southeast.

The gardens are open year round and they are free of charge. There is a beautiful conservatory that is adjacent to the rose garden--the roses are aromatic, and one of the volunteers noted that while roses are being wiped out by pests across the southeast, they are remarkably healthy here. There are numerous paths, and lots of benches and gazebos to sit and take in the beautiful surroundings. Highly recommended.

Our Migrant Souls by Hector Tobar

This is a complicated story of Latin immigration to the United States--mostly to places that less than 200 years ago were part of Mexico--and being shunned and denigrated in places that historically speaking, the shunners are historically immigrants and those that are shunned are more native to the land. That is the crux of the matter, something that American Indians have understood and experienced for 500 years. Adding in to the conversation, the author uses his own family and their immigrant experience to bring some of his theses alive. Many of the conversations about Hispanics in America, especially those told in the media, suffer from a combination of myopia and monotony. They focus on predictable topics—perilous immigration experiences, cartels, poverty—and fail to grapple with the variety of Latino experience. This is not that book. Instead the author attempts in a way to remedy this. Part memoir and part polemic, the book tries to answer a rather panoramic question: What is the Latino experience in America like? At his best, Tobar offers a lyrical portrayal that captures the lives of many Hispanics. This is concise, approachable, and well worth reading.

Friendsgiving

Back in our younger days, when our kids were small, we went to a friend Thanksgiving, usually the weekend beofre the actual holiday, that was kind of a blowout affair. The meal was a pot luck, the host had an impressive wine cellar, and it was the sort of debauchery that you wouldn't want your kids to witness. As we got a bit older, the chenanigans ebbed, the wine got even better (the host had a bottle from each of our birth years, for example), and it was a welcome time to catch up with each other and to enjoy the traditional meal with the family that you choose. As out kids got older, they wanted a friends Thanksgiving, so we would have family of Thursday and that Sunday, when everyone who had gone out of town to celebrate, we had a massive do-over meal with our local friends and their families, often spread all over out first floor with furniture moved aside and lots of tables snaking through the rooms. Then the kids left home, and their friends as well as some of ours, moved on, and we were down to one traditional meal--but this year, the original host of our original friends Thanksgiving threw another one, for old time's sake, and it made we wonder why we ever gave it up! Happy holidays to all.

Cocoon by Zhang Yueran

This is a slow moving moody book that I am not sure I got everything about it. I saw on my nephew's reading list and decided to read it. The book is written by a young Chinese author and it reflects on the history of China in the second half of the 20th century, and so in that way is maybe a window into how that might be viewed or thought of by those who did not live through it, but whose parents and grandparents would have. Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong grew up in very dysfunctional families and this is a main theme of the book. The book opens with the two childhood friends reuniting in their 20s, and is told from their alternate perspectives, chapters seesawing between the accounts told by each, as they tell the story of growing up from their perspectives, filling in gaps in each other’s knowledge to the point where it was hard to keep the two stories straight, they were so similar and overlapping. At the center of the story is how does the lack of a respectable father, a respected mother, loving grandparents and aunts and uncles, affect a child and how does that shape their lives as young adults. Their two stories lead each other and the reader towards the truth of a crime that occurred in their family before their time. It shows how targeting one man at that time triggered the cycle of dysfunction and destruction that shaped families for generations. The author does this not only through the actions of the various characters and the inability of any family member to escape this cycle, but also through the gloomy, pessimistic atmosphere that pervades the book. It is a hard read, but maybe one that can shed some inside light upon what is happening for people in modern China.

Hayward Oubre

I saw this exhibit this fall at the Birmingham Art Museum--which is free to the public--and really loved it. Oubre is best known for his work with an everyday material—wire coat hangers—which he used to create modernist masterworks. While living in Alabama and North Carolina, he made art in his vanguard style. These artworks fuse his lived experience, wide-ranging interests, and art historical influences in compositions that range from realism to pure abstraction.

Oubre shaped art in the United States not only as an innovative artist, but also as a distinguished educator at two prominent Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He served as the first chair of the art department at Alabama State University (ASU) in Montgomery, from 1949 to 1965. After leaving ASU, Oubre established the art department at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) in North Carolina, building on the legacy he established at ASU. When he retired in 1981, he had taught and created art for more than forty years, educating generations of Black artists.

Shanghailanders by Juli Min

This is a series of linked stories about Leo Yang and his family that in the end sum up to a novel. The time is 2040 and neither China nor America come off looking like they have advanced in the near future. The opening story has Leo has just dropped his wife, Eko, and two older daughters, Yumi and Yoko, at the airport and is returning home on a high-speed train to teenage Kiko, the baby of the family. The older girls are returning to boarding school and college in Boston--but all is not as it seems. The girls have each gotten into their own hot water that has consequences that are more a product of where they happened than that they are deeply troubling. The stories hint at things that are revealed in later stories, including additional characters, and there is a sense of sadness and foreboding that pervades the book, but also a feeling of not wanting it to be over, that there must be more to know about this time and these people. Delayed answers to questions create a sense of unfolding and revealing that balances the disappointment one might feel about leaving the latest versions of the Yang's, and their interesting problems, behind. It is an oddly atmospheric book, but then Shanghai has that complexity as well.

Love, Guaranteed (2020)

This is part of my solo travel movie binging that was almost 100% light hearted romantic comedies. I read a review that characterized it as sufficiently bland and calmy cozy, and I would agree with that characterization. Susan is a plucky and uptight attorney with a strong sense of justice who works tirelessly for the little guy--she makes almost no money and often works pro bono. She loves her work but she is barely making it, as her underpaid office staff frequently point out. Strapped for cash, she agrees to take a case with the handsome and charming Nick, whom she initially clashes with, naturally. Nick has come to their office because he wants to file a lawsuit against an online dating company called – you guessed it – Love, Guaranteed. He says he's gone on 986 dates without having found love and wants to sue for fraud. This is the part that should have scared her--he has copious documentation related to each of these failed dates, but no, that is that part that makes her feel like they might actually have a case. The target of the lawsuit is the website's wealthy owner, a woman who feigns enlightenment and says "namaste" a lot but misquotes Buddha--very unlikable, in other words. The movie wends its way to its predictable end in a very inoffensive way, and I would recommend it for the sort of night where you con't want to think too much, which is me post-election.

The Summer Before The War by Helen Simonson

Yes, this is yet another book set in the lead up to WWI set in England. While WWII was devastating to almost all of Europe, England included, it was WWI that shook the British class system to it's core, and which led to the ultimate toppling of the British Empire world wide. While this was inevitable, they did not see it that way, and so books about England on the brink of that war abound. The book got off to a slow start for me, but I did enjoy it and reflecting back on it, I see that some of what I found uncharming about it was in fact the point. The heroine of the story is a charming young woman named Beatrice Nash, who arrives in the seaside town of Rye to serve as Latin teacher to the village's children. She enjoyed what she saw as an idyllic life being all things to her scholarly father--she was his secretary, his travel agent, his companion, and his intellectual equal--all of which ill prepared her to deal with her circumstances after his death. He father, who trusted her with everything in life, chose to tie her hands with a restrictive trust in death, and she is forced to earn her keep and finds herself constrained as all women were in the early 20th century. Beatrice soon falls in with a well-connected local family, the Kents. At the helm is Agatha Kent, who is subtly working to improve women's lot in life, her husband John, who is involved in national security, and her two nephews, one a poet and the other a doctor. The story invites us to look at all the ways that money and title tilted the table at the time, and how it was all going to change both in the short run and the long.

Domestique Coffee, Birmingham, Alabama

We went to a wedding in Birmingham and had a great time in the neighborhood that the hotel was in. This was the third wedding the family had hosted in their home town, and they had learned from their previous adventures. The hotel was very comfortable, but the neighborhood was hip and fun, with a lot of shops within a few blocks and a safe place to walk around. There were several coffee shops to choose from, but this was our favorite. The coffee is excellent, they have very good croissants that they heat up for you if you so desire (which is my favorite--the butter comes to life with a little heat, and that is after all the reason to eat croissants, you might as well get full enjoyment), and best of all, it is a shared space. The coffee shop is in the front and in the back is a bike shop--this is a large space with high ceilings--plenty of room for both, but the coffee shop space--which includes indoor and outdoor seating--is very nice and welcoming.

Just For The Summer by Abby Jimenez

I do not read much in the romantic genre, but I put this on my library hold list when it appeared as a recommendation in The Week as a good beach read--of course all of those four books took so long for me to wait for them that it was no longer beach season by the time I was able to check any of them out, but there are many opportunities for light reading to hit the spot. I found this entirely predictable, which is consistent with the genre, and none-the-less enjoyable. The premise is that Justin is the lucky rabbit foot for women who date him--after they break up with him, which happens pretty rapidly, the next person they date is their soul mate. Occasionally it is a friend of his, so his ex's are still around even, grateful and happy while he is vowing not to date again. Matters are complicated by his otherwise seemingly normal mother being on the brink of a long jail term after being convicted of embezzling a seemingly small amount of money she repaid, and he is going to be the guardian for his three younger siblings. Not exactly the stuff of romance. In comes Emily, who says that she too has the same curse as he, and they agree to date each other so that the next person they each date will be their dream come true. Emily has a lot of her own baggage, and it all conspires to break them up--or does it?

The Noel Diary (2022)

Still on my light and not altogether good romantic comedy adventure while traveling for work across southern Minnesota. Jake Turner is a damaged but likable and successful bestselling author who lives alone and is estranged from his parents. When he gets a call out of the blue that his estranged mother has passed away, he travels back to his childhood home to clean it out. One day while there, Rachel shows up at his door asking about someone who she believes to be her mother used to live in the house with his parents. She was there at the critical moment when Jake's older brother fell from a tree in the yard and died when Jake was four. She was also alone and pregnant with Rachel and Jake's parents took her in and let her live with them until she gave birth, and then gave her baby up for adoption. Thanks to the memories of helpful neighbor Ellie, Jake and Rachel discover that the person she's seeking was Jake's nanny and Rachel's biological mother. The discovery sends Jake and Rachel on a road trip to reconnect with Jake's father and to try to find out more information about Rachel's mother. The trip will force Jake and Rachel both outside their comfort zones in confronting their past and while this has all the elements of a romance, there is also a lot of grief, and the mixture is a good one, because the holidays always have a mixture of each.

You Are Here by David Nicholls

This is at core a romance novel, but it is genre breaking because you cannot tell where it will land until midway through the novel, and even then you cannot quite see how it will work out. When I think about it, this is my very favorite sort of romantic comedy, one that is smart, the people seem real, like you might know someone who is similar, and it is not all 100% predictable. Michael, 42, a bearded geography teacher from York, is walking 200 miles across Britain in order not to think about his recent divorce. His concerned friend Cleo gathers a small party to accompany him for the first few days, including her old friend Marnie, 38, a copy editor, also divorced, living in Herne Hill. Marnie’s friends have all married and moved out of London. Cleo wants to be a matchmaker, but she has a big fail at the outset when both of the potential matches for one of them bows out of the Coast-to-Coast hike (which has been oft described as a pretty rugged ramble--not impossible, but also nota walk in the park), as does Cleo's spouse. Bright, bookish Marnie therefore initially pursues the handsome Conrad, who isn’t very smart and doesn’t like books, but loves Formula One, overlooking Michael altogether. What follows, told in alternating narratives by Marnie and Michael, involves witty conversation, weather, overnight stops, mild drunken escapades and tugged heartstrings. There are a series of unfortunate events along the way, but it is an enjoyable walk overall, and it goes to show, you just never know.

Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ, Birmingham, Alabama

We were once again in Birmingham for a joyous occasion--a wedding of the daughter of some of our oldest friends, people we have celebrated many a joyous occasion with over the years. The groom's dinner was hosted at this restaurant, which was a block from the hotel where most of the out of town guests were staying, so the location was spectacular.

My spouse was so excited to try this and so disappointed by the food. We have Rodney Scott's BBQ cookbook, and I really love the potato salad recipe in it. I have been making potato salad for almost 50 years, so have had a series of different recipes over that time, but this one is my current favorite. Here is what the problem was--the meat just didn't have much smoke in the flavor. There is always an issue with a buffet in a place where the food is not necessarily prepared for that delivery--but BBQ meat can be served at any temperature, and it should be great. This was not. The fries were amazing and so was the cole slaw (I like that recipe in his book as well)--but the cornbread was dry, the salad had a number of issues, and overall, we would not go back.

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

I read this because it was on Obama's 2024 Summer Reading list, and I often love the books that he recommends, but not so with this one. It follows three friends, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng, through sixty years of their lives as they try to figure out what it means to create art, to care, and to make a difference. In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. The shape shifting that occurs at the end of the story in 2040 is where the book lost me--it is an imagined future that is very bleak--wand may be exactly what is in store for us, but it was a bit much for me. I am not one to read post-apocalypse stories of any kind, and while this was not so much that, it wasn't my cup of tea either.

Lonely Planet (2024)

This is yet another low level romantic comedy (which means a movie that was never meant for theatrical release, doesn't have an adequate script, and something that my family would complan vociferously if I tried to watch it at home) that I watched in a fall that was full of work related travel with a lot of alone time (BTW, I love alone time, but by the time I was able to spend two weeks in a row at home I was all over the alone time and ready to re-enter home life and all that entailed). The vibe has been that I have liked movies less than audiences have liked them, but this one was panned in quite a few venues and I found it diverting. Katherine (Laura Dern) is a writer on a fancy writers’ retreat in Morocco. She arrives at the retreat, which is at a palatial resort in the country with gorgeous views, beautiful architecture, but poor upkeep and lots of things that don't work. She doesn't notice because she has just been kicked out of her home and her relationship and she has writer's block so cannot finish her latest novel, which is overdue. Meanwhile, the other writers also begin to arrive, including Lil, a bright-eyed youngster who is fresh off the critical and commercial success of her debut novel, elated but deeply insecure about her place in the literary world and she’s somewhat inexplicably brought along her boyfriend Owen (Liam Hemsworth), a finance guy who really isn’t much of a reader. Well, guess what? Lily pays no attention to Owen, who is also not much of a traveler. He is bored out of his mind--and then he is also both pushed aside and berated for doing some business related to an unfinished deal that was in the works before he left--so bad to worse, and he starts to cast about for things to see and do, and Katherine always seems to be a source of both witty reparte as well as solace. The whole thing blows up--some volatile ingredients at work--but I enjoyed the ride--as well as the gorgeous scenery.

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry

I feel a bit robbed--I got this out as an audiobook from the search terms "food memoir", which it totally is in one sense of the word, but no one looking for a food memoir exclusively would have been happy about this as an example. This is a memoir about Rabia Chaudry's life, both in and out of Pakistan, and food is very important to her, so there is an awful lot of descriptions of traditional Pakistani food as well as a few lessons on the various cultures that make up the country's fabric. It opens with how she became a plus sized adult--her family returned to Pakistan for their first visit since moving to the United States, two-year-old Rabia was more than just a pudgy toddler. Dada Abu, her fit and sprightly grandfather, attempted to pick her up but had to put her straight back down, demanding of Chaudry’s mother: “What have you done to her?” The answer was two full bottles of half-and-half per day, frozen butter sticks to gnaw on, and lots and lots of American processed foods. The saga continues in this vein--it is at once a love letter (with recipes) to fresh roti, chaat, chicken biryani, ghee, pakoras, shorba, parathay, and an often hilarious dissection of life in a Muslim immigrant family, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is also a searingly honest portrait of a woman grappling with a body that gets the job done but that refuses to meet the expectations of others. Her tale of how she tries to reverse that is filled with myths and legends and all the wrong ways to go about it, but throughout it rings true. It is also entertaining and vulnerable and while it was not what I was looking for, I enjoyed it.

Hazelwood Food and Drink, Bloomington, Minnesota

Let me preface this by saying that when you are near either the Minneapolis airport or the Mall of America, you are not handed a lot of cute charming places to eat out. If you compound that by the fact that malls in general make me a little claustrophobic and dizzy (not a great combination to be sure), and so avoiding a place that requires you to traverse the biggest mall in the Midwest, your choices are even more limited. So I really enjoyed my meal here. I ate with someone who I really like and who I rarely see, and it was a good place to catch up and linger over the meal--we considered some ethnic food options, but that would have been harder to accomplish, and so not a consideration for everyone, but a plus for this place. I had the Minute Chicken (pictured here), which is a panko, herb, and aged parmesan crusted breast, served with angel hair pasta, wild mushrooms, shallots, capers, in a lemon butter sauce, and it was very good--simply prepared, enormous portion, and not so messy that you couldn't eat and talk. They have a nice cocktail menu, and I started there, and I would definitely come back if I was in the neighborhood again.

Ten Birds That Changed The World by Stephen Moss

The premise is that birds have, in various ways, led to “paradigm shifts” in human history. Had it not been for the Wild Turkey, for instance, the first Pilgrims to America, the English ones, would not, possibly, have survived, he says. And pigeons, with their uncanny homing instincts, have played heroic outsized roles in various of our human wars, including the First World War, where a bird named Cher Ami, shot and wounded in the chest, with the loss of the right leg and the sight in one eye, nevertheless made it home, and was credited with saving the lives of 194 Yanks – the “Lost Battalion.” The book is a grab-bag of facts about the ten birds, mostly culled from other works--do nothing earth shattering, but enjoyably stitched together. In his first chapter, on the Raven, Moss is an enthusiastic borrower from Bernd Heinrich’s classic The Mind of the Raven, and in chapter ten (about which more below) a good deal is sourced from a 2022 book, The Bald Eagle, by Jack E. Davis. The thing that is mostly left out is that man has irreparably altered avian life--mostly to their detriment, but that is for another book.

Love At First Sight (2023)

I spent most of six weeks on the road by myself for work and watched a string of romantic comedies that the rest of my family would blanch at watching, they are so formulaic and often badly written. This does fall into both of those pitfalls, and yet, in the end, I was glad that I watched it. There is so little of this, the understandable connection that people can make with each other when they are unexpectedly found sitting together for an enforced period of time--in this case, on a transatlantic flight--and then for whatever reason walk away, never to meet again. And to regret that they didn't do something to change that outcome. We first see Hadley racing through JFK Airport in New York to catch a plane to London. It is December 20, the peak of holiday travel, with over 193,000 passengers arriving and departing, causing an average of 23-minute delays at check-in and a peak wait time of 117 minutes at security. This explains why Hadley misses her plane by four minutes and has to wait for the next one when the only seat available is business class. It does give her time to look for a place to charge her cell phone, and that’s how she meets Oliver, who is studying, yes, statistics and data science at Yale. THey part ways, Hadley to attend her father's wedding and he to attend a party for his mother, and they do manage to cross paths, they find out that their lives are indeed more complex than they first appeared, and they have a chance to decide what to do about that.

Hard By A Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili

Today is Veteran's Day in the United States, where veterans are honored on the anniversary of the Armistice that ended WWI. It was the Great War, the War To End All Wars. It was not a great war, or even the worst war, and it did not end all wars, but a lot of people died needlessly and it is worth remembering that. This is a pretty harrowing book that depicts a lot of aspects of war that are hard to picture and get a handle on without these stories to guide us. There are events in the book that are based on history: The Georgian Civil War of 1991-1993 and the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. Even the absurdly comedic opening scenes, where the book’s hero arrives back in Tbilisi, a home he fled as a child, to find the city flooded and populated by roaming exotic wild animals. This serves to pinpoint the book’s first events to June 2015, when a flood actually did free most of the population of the Tbilisi Zoo, leading to pandemonium in the city. The rest of this is a story, but one that is inhabited with believable and mostly likable people. When Saba and his older brother, Sandro, came to London as children with their father, Irakli, in 1992, their mother had to stay behind in Georgia, where she died. Years later, Irakli returns to Georgia and two months later writes his sons, now young men, that he’s gone to the mountains and they should not look for him. Sandro flies to Georgia anyway, emailing Saba that he’s found a trail to Irakli. Then Sandro’s emails stop, so Saba, an insurance salesman, also heads to Georgia. Saba is obsessed with finding Sandro and Irakli but also obsessed with the past. Although he hires a guide, the beguiling taxi driver Nodar, he also follows a host of voices from dead relatives and friends offering advice and grievances. As he continually eludes the shadowy police authorities tracking him, his pursuit becomes an increasingly desperate cat-and-mouse mystery--the tension rises and it feels like the reader is just as caught up in it as Saba. An edge of your seat sort of read.

Automatic, Birmingham, Alabama

If you are in Birmingham for any reason and need to have lunch, I would recommend this restaurant. It is located in the building in the Lakeview neighborhood in cool old building that was once an automatic sprinkler facotry--the rennovation of the space is upscale, but leaves the shell of the old factory intact--it was a beautiful fall day when we ate there and we took advantage of an extensive outdoor patio to eat, because we come from northern climes and the days we have to eat outside are indeed numbered. The chef is Adam Evans, who won a James Beard Best Southern Chef Award in 2022, which seems well deserved based on my one visit. The menu is repleat with seafood that largely comes from the Gulf of Mexico, prepared in a straight-forwad, unfussy style that enhances the fresh flavors and doesn't mask the underlying quality of the ocean's bounty. My husband requires fresh oysters when on a coast and this met tht requirement very nicely, with a couple of good accompaniments. They claim to have some relationships with local fishermen who keep them supplied on a regular basis with whole fish that they can then do with as they please, ocean to restaurant without setting fin in a market, and it shows in the food.