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.

Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt

I bought this as a second hand book at the library in South Pomfret, Vermont--which is quintessentially Vermont, in that it is a very cool building, it had books for sale scattered outside, inside in the lobby, at the top on the basement stairs and then all through the basement (which, it being a funky house of a certain age, was surprisingly dry and intact). I used to passionately browse through used books stores and find gems to bring home--now I have shelves that groan with decades of this behavior and at the same time so much is available electronically--and easily--that my drive to do so has waned somewhat, but every so often I make a discovery that makes me think again about easing up on that endeavor. This book won the Newberry Medal in 1967 and it really is a reflection on that rapidly changing time, when young women could look towards doing something for themselves, not simply serving the needs of others, not being a family's answer to whatever problem they might have that required a warm body to see it through, to be able to be smart, educated, and independent. It is a story of a young girl growing up, falling in love, and getting ready to go to college in the 1960's and I read it at a time when it appears that quite a few men want to go back to a time when they had control over women and children. You can see the attraction--for them--no matter what goes on in the outside world, they have a place to be a dictator. The Handmaids Tale come to life. That is the crux of the gulf in America, that there are people who want no part of that and there are others who want a white supremacist patriarchy to prevail. They call it Christian, but it isn't--Jesus is too woke for them, they are more aligned with Old Testament hell and damnation. There really is no bridging that divide, you are either for or against it and there is no middle ground to be had any more. This story is told at just the time when there is an awakening power for those who wanted to change the way things had always been, and this is a beautiful look back at what seems like a long time ago, and yet where some would have us return to. This is well worth seeking out.

Find Me Falling (2023)

I have been traveling almost non-stop these days and one of the many things I like to do when I am alone in a hotel room is to watch movies that the rest of my family would not care for--which includes movies like this and more broadly, silly romantic comedies this improbable situations and outcomes that require the suspension of belief. This is also a good example of a flawed IMDB rating. This is a pretty so-so movie that has a higher than expected audience rating (and I say that as someone with a weakness ofr this sort of fare). The setting is Cyprus, which is gorgeous--one up side of the movie is that a visit to the long-inhabited island moved up from a 'maybe' to a 'definite' on my "Must Visit" list of countries. The scenery as well as the window into the culture, which is both ancient and complicated, are the best part of the movie.Harry Connick Jr. is a bit of a wooden actor, but he plays an aging rock star who has returned to Cyprus at a point when his career has stalled and he is pulled back to a place when he last found love. He isn't quite ready to heal, and on top of that he finds some surprises that he left behind, and while people are wary of what his motives are, it all more or less works out.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

This book was long listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, which is how it came to my attention, and reading reviews it seems that the author is known for her succinct prose and for telling a story that is familiar, but told in a new and different way. That characterizes my reaction to this book, which is the 7th book of the long list that I have read--it is not my favorite to date, but it is well worth reading. The story grapples with climate change and what can one man (or woman, in this case) do? What are we going to do about global heating, about mass extinction, about our rivers? What ability do we have to change things when politicians and corporations do the opposite of nothing, they make it worse? The narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, who has been working in species conservation, chooses to chuck it all. She leaves her life and marriage in Sydney and checks into a religious sanctuary. She initially sticks her head in the sand, but eventually she joins in with the life of the convent – preparing food, cleaning, turning up to mass and the hours of office. There’s no great conversion moment, no sense of redemption, just women getting on with things. It is enough different from the usual response, in a novel or in real life, that it is worth consideration.

Heathers, Minneapolis, Minnesota

I was in (and have been in) Minneapolis for work, and the silver lining for that has been that I have been able to dine with some co-workers who I rarely get to see in real life. So the upside is huge, and it is less important exactly where wwe eat, but this was such a charming place it would have been fun to eat at even if I was by myself. The inside space is ecclectic and cool, with limited seating and would definitely recommend reservations for that. There is an ourside patio that is enormous and there were fleece blankets available to stave off the chill--later in the season they have heaters as well, but the night we were there I was just under dressed, but was quite confortable with the blanket. I had the Cuban sandwich with a side salad--I was tempted by the description of it which included: Roast Pork Loin, Ham, Gruyere,Pickled Onions, Pickled Jalepeno Peppers, Green Chilis, Sweet Mustard Sauce, on a French Roll--all the components that you would hope for and oh my, it was delicious. The pork was perfect, and all the accoutrements made it an excellent version of this classic sandwich. The bonus was that it was enormous, and I had the other half for lunch the next day. I accompanied it with a very nice white sangria and was very happy. My dining companion had the Teryaki Salmon Bowl, which included Edamame, Pickled Onions, Peppers and Onions, Avocado, Rice and Broccoli, which looked great as well. The source for the delicious pork in the Cuban is where they get their bacon, which I suspect is also delicious, and they do source locally, which I always appreciate--especially when you can taste the difference.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

The plot for this combines astronomy and a 19th-century mystery to propel a deeply thoughtful plot forward. Thomas Hart, a 50-year-old columnist for the Essex Chronicle in the small English town of Aldleigh and a dedicated star gazer, makes furtive trips to London for secret trists, even though he belongs to a Strict and Particular Baptist sect that basically forbids it. He might well have left his small town behind years ago except for his devotion to Grace Macaulay. Much like him, 17-year-old Grace also finds herself torn between her religion and her desires when she falls in love with Nathan, a local boy not a member of her church. Meanwhile, Thomas becomes intrigued by some letters found during the renovation of decrepit Lowlands House—and by James Bower, the handsome museum employee who calls them to his attention. The letters were written by Maria Văduva, who lived at Lowlands but vanished mysteriously sometime around 1887. An assignment to write about the Hale-Bopp comet passing overhead leads Thomas to figure out that Maria was an astronomer who may have made an important discovery, and Grace’s chance encounter with an enigmatic homeless man supplies an important missing piece of Maria’s puzzle. As they pursue a series of expertly dropped clues about Maria’s intent and ultimate fate, things go a bit asunder for the two, and while we have a pretty good idea about Maria, it is less clear where things will land between the two of them. This was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and as is true of many in that category, it is thoughtful, sensitive, and beautifully written.

Paper Crane, Iowa City, Iowa

Wow, wow, wow. There is just so much to love about this newly opened dining experience in Iowa City. First and foremost, I love the owners. They opened The Webster just as COVID was being tamed by a vaccine, which was both very brave and a much needed injection of excellence into the Iowa City dining scene. I love everything about their first restaurant--the small plates, the pastas, and the mains, all designed to share in a place that feels like a celebration each and every timne I walk in. This place is both different and lovely to behold, and it benefits from their attention to detail--the decor is lush, it immediately creates an atmosphere, but this one is more casual, more fun, but no less beautiful. The most important thing for me, though, is the food, and they knock that out of the park--days after my first meal I am dwelling on the dishes I had and thinking "Is it woo soon to go back?" and "I don't think it is possible to get enough of it". It is that good. There are two separate spaces with two different menus. You might have to do one of each. The ramen shop is spectacular--the ramen is perfect, both the broth and the noodles. Second to none. But on top of that there are small bites, meal options for someone who doesn't want ramen but wants to eat with you, and for me, the ability to have a good salad is such a plus. Then there is the cocktail lounge with its Japanese Izakaya cuisine--do not miss the grilled squid! You cannot take anything from one to the other, so you do have to choose, but the whole experience is fresh and fun and delicious, and the change is welcome--do not miss trying it all out and hope to see you there!

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

I had a three 2024 Booker Prize long list nominee vacation over Labor Day and this was one of them. It did not make it to the shortlist, but as is so often the case for me, I am glad that I read it, I would not have been likely to find this one on my own, and I often like some of the long list more than those that make the cut to the short list. This is a short and ruthless story--apparently the author's first full length novel, and maybe it's sparseness is a result of a story teller who does so succinctly. What happens is that Donal's brother Cillian falls in with some drug smugglers to make a bit of cash on the side, and gets into trouble when his stash is below the water line and it literally dissolves away. To pressure him into paying them back, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, kidnap Donal and stash him in a gigantic loner's house. The Feria's are thuggish, unpredictable, prone to sudden bursts of rage and violence, and yet capable of tenderness and camaraderie between themselves. The story alternates between what is happening to Donal with the slow realization of his family as to what has become of him, leading up to a dramatic finale.

His Three Daughters (2023)

This is a bit of a departure from my usual solo travel work movie watching fare--it is a serious movie about a serious--and universal00life experience of having a parent die. True, some dodge it, but that is usually a tragedy of a different sort. The movie opens in a New York City apartment where we meet we meet Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne). The scene is painful to watch and yet as the movie rolls out over the next hour and a half, it also is a scene that doesn’t really capture who they are. Yes, they are sisters and daughters (and two are mothers). But in the days leading up to their father’s death, they’re reminded of the complexity of human emotion, behavior, and understanding. There is a lot that the daughters do not agree upon, and are left to grapple with as their father dwindles away, and it is a microcosm of the things that happen all too often for families that leave a lot unsaid and for whom there are misunderstandings, resentments, tensions, piled on top of the challenges of everyday life. When you don't communicate, you don't communicate and grappling with death does not make it any better. The script is pitch perfect, and while it was painful to watch, it felt very real. Grief tears down what we think of ourselves. It’s cruel. It’s harsh. It’s inevitable. It shatters the walls we put up around our personalities that so often reduce us to easy descriptions like sister, daughter, and mother, and none of that helps to get through to the place you need to get to move on.

Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein

This is a book that takes a deep dive into unconscious bias, and tries on a number of different levels to point it out, and to help the reader to see that no one escapes this one, we all succumb to it to a greater or lesser extent, and the trick is to constantly be on the look out for it and to try to counterbalance it. This scattergun variability in judgments of all kinds, from court sentencing to insurance underwriting to medical diagnosis, is what the authors call, well, noise. Like its more famous cousin, bias, noise is an error in judgment. The authors distinguish between the two using a shooting-range metaphor. If all the shots land systematically off-target in the same direction, that’s bias; by contrast, noise is all over the place. Some of the shots might even be on target, because the issue here is not missing the target but a lack of consistency. Given the same facts, one criminal gets life and another who is equally guilty gets off. Which brings us to the other significant distinction between bias and noise: to detect bias, you have to know what the right answer is, or to use the book’s metaphor, you have to be standing at the front of the target, so you can see the bullseye. Noise requires no such particulars. It is detectable no matter which side of the target you’re standing on, since all you need to know is whether or not there is variability. One insurance company executive estimated the annual cost of noise in underwriting in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And you should want to detect noise, the authors argue, because it is not only unfair, it can be hugely costly--in money, in opportunity, and in human capital.