American Fantasy by Emma Straub

This is a themed book where something happens that I would never ever do. Which is what Annie, the protagonist, thought as well. When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Many of them are repeats on the cruise and have developed relationships and rivalries . Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has fully changed her mind. It is an improbable story of redemption and renewal with the least likely source, and maybe what these nostalgia events tap into is recaptured youth in more ways than one.

Royal Orchid, Montpelier, Vermont

We return to Vermont with great regularity. We fly into Burlington airport in the afternoon after the traditional lunch hour has ended and have a 1.5 hour drive to central Vermont where we stay. We have searched for a place to eat that we would regularly return to, and while there have been some good candidates, there has not been a hands down winner. We enjoy a lobster roll, but beyond that we have looked for a place that fits our schedule and that serves a meal we would look forward to returning for. This restaurant in Montperlier might be just the thing. It does not serve food continuously, but it does open early, at 4PM, which works with our schedule. The food is excellent--we had two dishes with shrimp, which was of good quality and cooked well. We were there ahead of the traditional dining hour, and there were several tables occupied in the time we were there. It has a broad menu, and we will definitely return. Added bonus was that the food came quickly and we were back on the road in no time. Highly recommended.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

This has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which is how I came to read it. It is part magical realism, part a commentary on the persistence of trauma no matter how long ago it was and how far away you get from the source, and part a refelction on the toll of caregiving for a loved one with Alzheimer's disease. This is not a renovation gone wrong--which is that instead of getting a new bathroom, when Dilarah goes into her new bathroom it is instead a cell, and she is transported far away to a well-known prison in Turkey, the homeland she had left behind. Slowly, a past she was hiding from comes to light in flashbacks and shimmering sentences. The cell is part of a vast complex within Istanbul’s Silivri Prison, where women of all ages and classes are housed for their alleged conspiracies against an oppressive regime. Dilara had fled Turkey around a decade ago with her husband and mentally declining, dissident father to apparent freedom in the mountains of Italy. But try as she might, she cannot now conjure away the prospect of imprisonment; it has literally followed her. Then there is the trials and tribulations of caring for a loved one with dementia. Dilara’s husband takes the appearance of the cell as a sign the Turkish authorities are on their tail and abandons their home, leaving Dilara to care for her father on her own as he suffers from Alzheimer’s. Her father was once an outspoken professor and novelist; he now slips and falls easily, has lost his sense of humor, cannot recall basic words, and fails to recognize his own daughter, and Dilara herself is filled with anguish, anger, and sorrow watching him fade.

Arthur The King (2024)

Michael Light is a restless soul with the edge of an adrenalin junkie--he was the leader of an Adventure Racing team that had a spectacular failure in it's last outing and while no one watned to sponsor him again, he didn't feel done. Adventure Team Racing is the most extreme, demanding, endurance activity in the world. It makes the Iron Man combination of running, swimming, and biking look like a game of hopscotch. An adventure race can involve running, biking, climbing, kayaking, and any other imaginable strenuous movement forward, over every possible kind of treacherous terrain. Races can last for many days, with only brief permissible stops and time penalties for aids like IV fluids. This is loosely based on the true story of one of these races, with an American team racing through the jungles, mountains, and rivers of the Dominican Republic. Michael has amassed a team and while they were in the midst of the race, surprisingly competative, and they discovered they were being accompanied by a stray dog, and somewhere along the way, that relationship became more important than the race itself, and somehow Michael is able to find deep meaning in something else, something other than the race, and the dog, Arthur, helped him to transition from competitor to life beyond competing.

Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

This book was recommended to me by someone who has faced life threatening illness herself, with the feeling that this approach was helpful to her as she faces an uncertain future. The author is a long term survivor of Stage 4 Colon cancer, which is generally considered to be an unsurvivable disease, with the aid of immunotherapy. The reason this might indeed resonate with me is that I, too, am a long term survivor of an illness that is also considered unsurvivable. This is about finding joy, regardless of the circumstances. She has been a long time critic of the culture of bashing the American cult of positivity and the pursuit of optimal happiness. So this is difference from that. She talks a lot about the difference between happiness and joy--they have a distinct psychological profile. Here is it in her own words: "Happiness will feel like ease, it will feel relaxing, it will feel like the accumulated good things, where you’re kind of climbing a ladder of good feelings, and you get to have a beautiful view, and that’s because even just the word happiness comes from the word "hap." It’s the Norse word for chance, which just means like happenstance, the stuff that happens to you. We experience happiness that way — it’s the temperature of our coffee and the music playing and the friend you get to call later and the job that came through. It’s very contextual and circumstantial, and it’s also very incremental. It takes a lot of things coming together to make us happy. Joy, on the other hand, is not relaxing. Joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling. It’s like it startles us awake. It will make us say, "Yes, yes, it is good to be alive." And that’s why I think, whereas happiness is just a lot of positive things happening to you, joy isn’t just a positive emotion. It’s a story. That’s why it touches existential themes, like, "Is it good to be alive?" Joy, when it bubbles up inside of us, presents itself as an answer to that question." This is well worth the time to read and think about.

Reynal 2, Idaho Falls, ID

There are a number of Mexican restaurants in Idaho Falls that we would go back to. Garcia's Market was our favorite, a hopping eatery at the back of the store where the first time we ate there a server took pity on our glazed looks at the hustle and buslr and muscled us into a booth after a suitable period of disorientation. This one has a dish that we fell in love with over 30 years ago in Tuscon, a breakfast dish called machaca. Here you can order the dish, which comes with a large tortilla and make two meals out of it for $12. First you fill and roll up a burrito sized portion in the accompanying tortilla and then you share the remaining machaca with rice, beans, and any number of salsas from the excellent salsa bar. Unfortunately we haven't settle on the perfect second thing to order here, but the machaca is so good we keep trying.

Country People by Daniel Mason

This author writes beautifully and his books are quite varied. This one is also set in New England, like Northwoods, but it has a far lighter tone. It is looking inward rather than the broad scope of that book. It is whimsical and relatable rather than sark and brooding. Miles and Kate have been together since their school days--Kate soared academically, getting tenure before she was 30, despite having MS. She has responded well to immunotherapy, and is in remission but it casts a shadow. Miles on the other hand, is stalled. He is 12 years overdue in finishing his PhD and he main responsibility is as stay at home dad to their two children. Kate gets a visiting professorship in a Vermont college and they move from the west coast and begin small town life. From the moment they arrive Miles is sure he will not finish his PhD and he goes about figuring out exactly where he belongs and what he is going to do going forward. As is so often the case, his failure to launch a meaningful life does not set him apart from many of his generation--but he is different in that he is not playing video games and seething in his beholdeness to his far more successful wife. Rather he sways back and forth in what he sees as the steps forward and settles in a very good spot.

Tucci In Italy

I watched this whole season while traveling over the course of a couple of week and while I had been in the majority of regions so there was not much in the way of finding hidden gems, I very much enjoyed each episode. Stanley Tucci seems to believe that the best way to understand what makes a country unique is through its food, and while I am not sure that is true of my own coutnry, it is something that I want to believe too. Tucci grew up in an Italian American home, and he speaks Italian, so the show is inherently in two languages. In Italy, even the shape of the pasta and the sauce served with it can speak directly to identity and sharply differentiate each region. He is returning to visit five new regions, including one he’s never featured before, Le Marche, with many culinary delights that have escaped the attention of international tourists. In Campania, and its famed capital of Naples, he celebrates a once-forgotten vine grape, and in Veneto, he deliciously wades into the controversy over the origins of tiramisu. Stanley also visits two very different Islands: Sardinia, where he explores the relationship between food and longevity, and Sicily, where a multicultural history has left a delicious mark on its cuisine. At the end of it, I was sorry that there wasn't more and that it had ended. It left me wanting more and also ready to plan my next trip to Italy.

Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

I read this to fulfill a Goodreads summer challenge, but I have read the rest of this series and did not realize there was a new installment. I am not an avid reader of fantasy or books featuring witches and vampires, which characterizes this book and the ones that precede it, but I have really enjoyed this ongoing saga of Diana Bishop, a witch, and her now husband Matthew de Clairmont, a vampire. This is the fifth installment in what is called the All Souls series. It is set several years after the events of the previous installment--Diana and Matthew are now parents to seven-year-old twins, Pip and Becca. The story kicks off with a formal demand from the Congregation, the organization that governs witches and their magical behavior, to test the magical abilities of their children, echoing the trials Diana faced in her youth, which were not just traumatic, but she had longstanding conflict with her examiner. This leads Diana to uncover a previously unexplored branch of her family, the Proctors, and explore the depths of her own magical heritage. As she delves into higher magic under the guidance of her great-aunt Gwyneth, Diana must confront her family’s dark past and her own fears, all while protecting her children from the Congregation’s scrutiny. There are hints at books to come in this series, and it would be best to read this series in order.

Indigo Dyeing With Quilty Friends

My guild did it's in person meeting in August at a member's home and we did indigo dying. Indigo can dye all natural fibres. It gives beautiful shades of blue — from the palest summer sky to an almost purple black. The colour achieved depends on the type of vat, the concentration of indigo, and the number of dips. Indigotin (the dye component of indigo powder) is insoluble in water. To use it for dyeing it must be reduced to a water-soluble form. All indigo vats need three things: 1) Indigo 2) A reducing agent 3) A Base. Chemically, we need to reduce the indigo to make it soluble — we do this with a reducing agent. Reducing agents can be sugars, some natural dyes or other plants, or chemicals. A reducing agent lowers the oxidation state of the indigo molecule, transforming indigotin into leuco-indigo — which is soluble in water at room temperature. If we just add powdered indigo to water it will remain in pigment form, suspended but not dissolved. What is the difference between a suspension and a solution? A fish is suspended in the ocean. But salt is dissolved in the ocean. You can see the fish (which remains distinct) you cannot see the salt (which has dissolved). If we can see the indigo (the dye bath is blue inside) then the indigo is not dissolved and the dye bath cannot be used to for dyeing. When the indigo is reduced it dissolves and the dye bath is a greeny-yellow colour. We had so much fun with all the various iterations that we produced that we are eager to do it again next year.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

I loved The Correspondent, and when the author, Virginia Evans, did a segment on It's Friday And If You Haven't Read This It Is New To You and recommended this. Like her book, this an epistolatory novel, and she was surprised to learn that it is a memoir rather than a work of fiction. The author writes to the London bookstore at the address in the title in 1949 looking for obscure, out-of-print classic English books she cannot find in New York. The author is quintessentially American-- informal, frank, and humorous which is a contrast to the bookseller's more formal and properly British responses. The heartwarming part of the correspondence that that Helene is concerned about the scarcity of meat and eggs in post-WWII England and she sends care packages to the store through a relief organization at Christmas and Easter. Frank Doel, Helene's main contact at Marks and Company, shares them equally with the bookstore staff. These acts of kindness are deeply appreciated at a time when there is not another way to get these treats, and they write to tell Helene how much this has changed their holidays, how they have shared them with neighbors and family members, that her thoughtfulness has made a meaningful difference to them all. This is also a celebration of second-hand books, fine leather bindings, clear type, and the sheer tactile joy of reading. Helene is not a reader of best sellers, and what she is looking for is quite particular, and she doesn't want to spend the earth on her books either--Frank is able to find quality affordable books that make her very happy and for me the fact that these books find a good new home where they are appreciated. This is a window into a time and a place that is really quite lovely.

Guadalajara, Victor, Idaho

We went to a beautiful wedding in nearby Alta, and it was catered by this restaurant. There were three kinds of tacos--chicken, carnitas, and vegetables, which were sauteed and in the style of fajitas. The tortillas were steamed and despite the size of the crowd and the length of the service, they were soft and supple throughout. The rice and beans--which is one of the bars that I judge Tex-Mex food by--were both excellent. The guacamole was good, and the salsas had layered flavor as well as a hear gradient to keep everyone happy. The chips were very good, and despite the rain, they were crisp. The salasa had finely shredded cabbage in it, which was unusual but very good, and the queso was delicious.

Front Desk by Kelly Yang

One of my kids gave me the American Library Association's book of 52 books that are targeted by book banning groups, and this book is on that list. I am working my way through it, and this one is aimed at a middle school audience, which is not a genre I read at all. I related to a review that I read that noted that she did not read younger than Young Adults (although I do like a good picture book on occasion and I do have grandchildren who are getting old enough to be covered in this genre and I will be doing more of it as a result). The reason that that this book is being targeted by angry white adults is that they are scandalized that a children’s book would dare talk about racism. The racism in this book is very much in your face rather than more subtle, which is what I would expect for a book aimed at a middle school audience, but which was a bit glaring and heavy handed to my adult ear. The story is about Mia, who helps her parents manage a low end motel where there are some long term residents. She faces prejudice at school and while she works, and it is quite recognizable. Mia sees that immigrants and Asians are not the only people targeted, and when she sees a favored hotel resident who is African American get treated unfairly, she sticks up for him in an anti-racist manner that is very appropriate and is a great example of how to do that.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

The Devil Wears Prada--the reboot. It is literally 20 years later, both in real life and in movie life, and the gang's all here. What is no longer true is that print journalism is still here. That is the test, not the subtext, all prettied up with high fashion and glamor. Anne Hathaway returns as the delightful and talented Andy Sachs, now working as the kind of serious journalist she always wanted to be before becoming a Runway Magazine dropout in the first movie. She wins a journalism award the same night that she loses her job, and is ripe for, well, anything. Enter Runway and Miranda again, after Andy mysteriously lands a new job at her first professional home to reshape the editorial direction of the magazine. Battling with a PR nightmare after the magazine’s accidental praise of a highly unethical supplier, neither Miranda nor her right-hand Nigel recalls Andy at first glance. She is promptly placed in an embarrassing office that looks like a stockroom and paired with the hardworking assistant Jin, who is as smart and ambitious as the young Andy. The theme is that you cannot count on anything, and that people can be surprising, and while this is not a great film, it is a fun one. I recently rewatched the original and it holds up, and this one is a perfectly servicable sequel. Not to mention that while in the first one no fashion house wanted to be associated with a film spoofing an industry icon and they had to manage on a shoestring, this time around there were gobs of clothes and fashion was truely on parade, both on the screen and off.

Yesteryear by Caro Clair Burke

Well, this one left me thinking that I didn't initially know what to think about it. Natalie Heller Mills builds a multi-million-strong following by broadcasting an idealized, picture-perfect version of rural life and traditional womanhood. Behind the scenes, her idyllic farmhouse relies on nannies, producers, and industrial equipment. One morning, she wakes up in a harsh, 19th-century version of her farm without modern conveniences, forced to actually live out the old-fashioned values she preaches. She must figure out if she has time-traveled, suffered a psychotic break, or entered a sinister hoax. Here is the thing--Natalie shamelessly did what many a Tik Tok phenom does--they exploit themselves and those around them--including their children, all in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Which is as old as mankind, I get that--I am listening to the book 1929 right now, and a hundred years ago it was a different media and different gatekeepers, but fame and fortune was where it was at. The thing that really struck home for me was the memoir I just finished by Sally Mann, about how her life was blown up by a journalist who accused her of exploiting her children and how 25 years down the road that is just Tuesday, a nothing burger that is as common as days of the week and fast food. I really did not love this, but it is food for thought.

A Business Owner's Right To Choose

An owner's right to refuse to host a meeting by an organization that is against a woman's right to have autonomy over her body set off a tsunami. Jim Sheehan, the owner of a coffee shop in Driggs, was filmed in mid-August telling members of an anti-abortion rights group not to hold a meeting in his cafe, he has found himself the subject of national news stories and columns. He and his wife have been doxxed, and his business received so many angry calls — even death threats — that staff turned off the phones. Ironically when people try to protect a woman's body autonomy people threaten to kill them, making it all too clear that this is not, in fact, about life. No, it is about controlling women, making them at best second class citizens when you take away their ability to choose what is best for their bodies. It all started with a Facebook post by members of Students for Life of America, a group that opposes abortion rights, advertising that it would hold an Aug. 17 meeting at Wydaho Roasters to discuss efforts surrounding Proposition 1, a 2026 ballot initiative in Idaho that seeks to increase access to abortion. Sheehan, who supports Prop 1, also called the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, responded to the Facebook post in a comment, asking the group to hold its event elsewhere. He said he didn’t give the topic much more thought after that. But the next day, he said, he looked up from grinding coffee to see that the meeting was taking place anyway. He confronted the group, reiterating that he didn’t want them meeting in his shop. An event in the cafe, he reasoned, would give the appearance of support from the business and its owners, and he strongly opposed this group’s efforts. In a confrontation the activists filmed, they pressed Sheehan on what they saw as hypocrisy. His shop advertises its desire to be inclusive, flying an LGBTQ+ Pride flag and displaying a sign that reads, “Everyone is Welcome Here.” Well, not racists and not people who see women as less than worthy of the rights that men are afforded. They can buy coffee, but they cannot advertise they are holding meetings in a business without the owner's permission.

That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

I read this for one of the reading badges in a Goodreads challenge--I read incessantly but somehow two of the 12 summer badges did not have a single book that I had either read or was hoping to read, including this one, which was that the book had 'summer' in the title. The book has two Dianas. The first Diana we meet as a teenager where she works as a nanny for well-off family vacationing in Cape Cod. She loves the beach and the ocean and even her job. As the summer progresses she develops a crush on an older boy and when he invites her to a party with all of his friends, she happily accepts. But the boy betrays her and Diana is assaulted, which changes the trajectory of her life forever. The story fast forwards to 2019 and we meet the second Diana, called Daisy, who a stay-at-home housewife who is working on growing her cooking business. She married her husband Hal when she was very young and he 13 years her senior. She is quite financially dependent on him but also beholden to him--she dropped out of college intending to go back but never does. She wanted more children but only has one. She is isolated after the one friend she had that was hers dies. Otherwise he controls her life--what they do socially, where they travel, and what happens with their daughter. Everything changes for Daisy when she starts to receive misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Daisy gets a glimpse into Diana’s glamorous life and she begins to wonder, what if things were different for her? Eventually, the two connect, meet and become friends. But as you can imagine, this connection isn’t accidental. And you probably know exactly where the story is going from there--this is not a book with twists and turns. So that said, I liked but did not love this--it is a good story though, so I would recommend it.

Amish With A Twist Tula Pink Style

2026 is the Block of the Month year for me, and while the other 3 I am invovled with I have slipped behind in, this one has been easier to keep up. One is that the Facebook group is replete with people who do all the month's blocks the day they get the material and post their results lickedy split. I was gone when the first month arrived, the second month came a couple weeks later and while I was away for the Fourth of July the third month arrived, all while I had yet to open even one ofr them. So, not a great start for me, but I have rallyed and was done with the third month before the fourth arrived--one thing about the Pink Door preparation of the fabric is that it is possible to figure out what color is what, even with so many coming at once. I am really enjoying watching this come together, there is some space to go a little off road in some place, and after quilting for 50 years, I discovered two things that are pretty common and yet I had neither of them. One is design boards--there are so many different fabrics in each block that cutting out is a bit tedious, and it would be very unlikely that I could keep them all straight when sewing them together, and a 14" design board has been key. I have made some cutting errors, but with the design board as well as what the final block is supposed to look like, I have not had to seam rip because of wrong placement. The other is that I bought a ruler organizer--there are so many rulers that I have been regularly using for this quilt that it has been great to have them all organized and propped up so they are easy to move between as needed. We are a third into the quilt and it is coming together beautifully. The Facebook group has been a great source of inspiration--including someone who FPP a butterfly for her blocks! And provided the pattern so we all could if we wanted. There are a few people who I sew regularly with in my guild who are doing this as well, and the whole experience has been great. I would do another Pink Door Block of the Month if the pattern and final quilt moved me, but in some ways I would be just as likely to try this one again with fabric of my own choosing.

Hold Still by Sally Mann

I read this after hearing about it in the Parnassus weekly vlog It Is Friday And IF You Haven't Read This It Is New To You--which has been a rich source of books that are not new and therefore that I would have almost certainly missed without being alerted to them in this way. I have no fewer than 5 such recommendations on my bedside To Read stack and I finished another one earlier this week. It turns out a lot of things are new to me. Sally Mann is a photographer who is best known for photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family-sometimes naked, often not. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist(who shall remain nameless because, well, no need to toot that horn) lifted her life and work almost wholly from its context. She became a figure of a favorite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art. This is especially ironic in the Instagram/Tik Tok era, where influencers shamelessly flog their children for extra clicks. In any case, this is a far reaching story, sprinkled liberally with photographs, that goes back several generations in her family, to draw a clearer look at who she is, what made her, and what she is not. Some quintessential take homes are that she herself would not wear clothes--at all--until she went to school, making me think of some sensory integration challenges (maybe not where every reader went with that), she married young to someone who many years later she still sees as having saved her, and that she is driven to create. A probably unintended consequence of the journalist calling her art problematic, if not pornography, was that her in law's murder/suicide was re-examined by the police with her spouse as a suspect in a murder-murder. Why was unclear--the pair were deeply in debt, which was known to the author and her husband, and they literally had nothing to gain from such a violent course of action. Well, the adage of May You Live In Interesting Times certainly applies and the book is an outstanding version of peeling back the curtain and looking at the artist's process, messy as it is.

Patricia Belyea and Japanese Textiles

Patricia Belyea is a well known textile artist who imports Japanese textiles and leads trips to Japan for people to both learn more about the Japanese textile philosophy and to use more of them in textile art. Her origin story in quilting is that she made a baby quilt for a coworker, and has been a quilter ever since. I myself started with making a pinwheel quilt with fabric that my grandmother had used in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which I tied and used on my bed in college, and I too have been quilting ever since. It is a seductive craft, especially if you love fabric, and Japanese fabric is especially luscious. She is living these days in Wauconda WA with the ground squirrels, deer, and bears--it meets the definition of frontier living, which is an area with less than 2 people per square mile. She did a Zoom lecture to our guild from her studio there. Her relationshio with the textile process in Japan extends to growing indigo herself. It’s a big story — germinating seeds the size of a dot to growing plants with bright green leaves to extracting magical blue dye. It was the second time that Patricia Belyea attempted to farm and harvest Japanese indigo at her highland home. And it worked — with a yield of 5 pounds of indigo dye!

Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

This book, when I read it as a kid, made it seem possible to be independent, brainy, and comfortable with all that. The author illustrated the book herself, and Harriet is a decidedly unfeminine character, and one who is comfortable in her own unconventional skin. I reread it probably 50 years after my first reading, thinking that perhaps it would be a good gift for our granddaughters. Harriet is a flawed but very relatable protagonist. She is dedicated to her routine of spying on her peers and her neighbors--she is an outsider looking in. There are a lot of things that are very relatable about her, and it is not a book for tweens where everything comes out okay in the end, which is much like life itself. Harriet tells it like she sees it in her journal of spy observations, and she is not one to sugar coat it. When her fellow students get ahold of her journal and find out all the unkind things she has said, they shun her, and her struggle to figure out what to do about that is so relatable. The person she listens to best writes her a letter and tells her that sometimes you have to apologize and sometimes you have to lie. Period. Harriet struggles with that mightily. What I did not realize before I reread this is that the author herself was gay and that Harriet the Spy has a gay cult following. There is not a hint of sexual preference to my ear in the book, but Harriet is an iconoclast and an outsider, she has tomboy vibes, and she is fine with all of that, so it makes sense, but I did not know.

Don't Say Good Luck (2026)

There was an awful lot to cry about in this recently released Happy Gilmore film. The opening scene is Sophie just before her big audition for her school play, for which she’s been practicing and rehearsing diligently while occasionally eyeing a boy of interest and being supported by her best friend. She gets called back, which is deserved but she didn't knock it out of the park either, but while she is waiting her turn, her forever butt dialing her father does so unknowingly while they are receiving the devestating news that Sophie's mom's cancer has come back. Sophie pours all that pathos into her audition, and she lands the lead role, much to everyone's surprise. Having battled a cancer personally that I had not good reason to think I would beat, all the while trying to be a parent to my much older than Sophie's mom's kids I totally get trying to hold back the terrible news that this is the end while supporting Sophie spending long hours rehearsing the role of her young life. I also really feel for Sophie's daad as he tries to face losing his wife and balancing that with being the sole parent to his kids going forward. They try to bring in the grandparents briefly and while they offer a few helping hands, overall their grief at losing their daughter overwhelms their ability to be a plus and they have to leave--it is all so beleivable and while these are not the steps that I ultimately walked in my cancer journey, I shed a lot of tears then and when reliving it watching this. At this point, as my spouse occasionally says, we are too old to die young, at the time I was thinking I had something unbeatable, I had had a good lie, but I was too young for it to be over. Bring a handkerchief if you check this Netflix presnetation out.

On The Way To The Wedding by Julia Quinn

Yes, I finished the eighth Bridgerton novels, and at the end this one, all Bridgerton offspring are married! The challenge in a series of eight books, all romances and with stories that must be distinct and different from each other is that an author just runs out of gas on new and different ways to reluctantly fall in love. And so while this would likely shuffle to the bottom if I were to rank them, I very much enjoyed this book in much the same vein that I enjoyed the other seven, that is to say as light diversionary stories that kept my attention, I cared what happened, I was interested in the snippets of information about Gregory's siblings and their families, and overall I would give it a thumbs up. Gregory falls quite early on first for the obvious woman--the one everyone has their eyes on--but then settles on her best friend, which is the right choice for him. The unfortunate piece is that she is spoken for. Her uncle has promised her to another, much like a head of cattle, and so there are some shenanigans that ensue in order for him to wed her. The epilogue is a bit longer in this one, being the last as it is. And while I read right through this this summer, I won't be diving right in to the prequel just yet--though will likely get to it eventually.

Leela's Kitchen, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

My spouse and son were looking for an Indian restaurant in Cedar Rapids when they were there on a separate task, not food related, but they were going to be leaving about 9:30 or 10AM at the latest, and most restaurants were not open. This place does a traditional Southern Indian breakfast. We had traveled there two winters ago, and every morning we hada traditional South Indian breakfast—often called "tiffin"—it features warm, savory dishes made from fermented rice and lentil batters or semolina. Core items include fluffy steamed idli, crispy dosa, savory upma, and fried vada, served with coconut chutney, which is a bit on the bland side, and vegetable sambar, which can pack a punch. All of these were part of the meal, which they offered in a carry out package, and also featured a delicious lentil dal as well. Breakfast is not my favorite Indian meal of the day, but if you have a hankering for it, this is the place.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

I read this debut novel because it was recently longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. The author is young, Irish, and interestingly, owns a tattoo business of some renown. This is a very gritty novel, which mixes toxic masculinity and a life of crime together and I wondered if tattoo artists hear a lot of stories that maybe other professions have less exposure to. In any case, this is violent and troubled, too much of both for my taste, but it is well paced and well written. On the run for five years after killing a man in a gang fight, Tony Ward has returned to west Dublin under the protection of a local crime boss. Teamed up with tall and sullen enforcer Flute Walsh, Tony is back on his home turf grafting a grim routine of collecting debts and drug dealer’s dues. Propelled through a world of old scores and hard knocks, our protagonist is a shark who has to keep moving simply to survive. But when he and Flute are called upon to kill a failing dealer, their brutal conspiracy becomes a visceral dance of desire and betrayal. Maybe part of my discomfort is connected with the overlap between these two poles of brutality and sexuality, but in the end, while I learned something, I liked but did not love this.

Love By The Tenth Date (2017)

As is so often the case in a romantic comedy, the premise is what can be a combination of annoying and what drives the plot. There are four black female co-workers of an online, upscale magazine who all have various issues within the relationship department, and it is the advice column of their boss that sets them into a dating challenge to prove to themselves and each other who can handle a real relationship. Gabby is plagued by a hurtful breakup in the past that she never completely let go. Her circle of influence that consists of three other women and two males in questionable relationships themselves, constantly give her controversial advice about how to go about building a successful relationship. All bets are on the table when Gabby is challenged to make it to ten dates with the same person. Not only is she eligible to win cash money, but she also gets to keep her job by providing a storyline that her boss, as well as the magazine’s readers will fall in love with. With renewed excitement, Gabby comes up with a plan to up her game and little does she realize that her longtime roadie, Dante, who has secretly been in love with her forever, silently wishes he wasn’t her confidant having to listen to every cringe-worthy detail of her dates. As the movie progresses all the women have various issues with preconceived ideas about love and relationships that get in the way of happiness until they are able to let go of them and let their heads take a back seat to their hearts.

The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb

I have read a number of these sorts of books, where the reader is urged to think of things in a different way and I continue to read them, one because they show up on lists of books that are worthy of reading, and two because while I am largely in the land of the already converted, I learn a thing or two and it makes it overall worthwhile to have read, although it is slow going because my pervasive thought is yes, I agree. This is one such book. The author has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves. Is this new? No it is not. Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet one might that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. The opposite approach, the author posits, is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to heal and rejuvenate our shared planet.

Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum, Mexico City, Mexico

The Tamayo Museum (Museo Tamayo) was founded by Ruffino Tamayo in 1981, when the Mexican artist donated his own works, in addition to a massive collection of international contemporary art, with the goal of showcasing 20th-century art for the public. My favorite part of the whole museum was Tamayo’s collection of his own work that he hand picked to be on exhibit in the museum. The building, designed by Mexican architects Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky, is made of reinforced concrete and white marble stone and is located in Chapultepec Park, a vast green space in Mexico City. The low-slung design and natural tones allow the building to hide in and among the trees. Inside, glass walls and light wood floors make the gallery spaces feel contemporary, open, and spacious.

Well-curated exhibitions change throughout the year, but the focus is always on contemporary and modern art, be it painting, video installation, and mixed-media, nicely bridging the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Occasionally, there are also interactive exhibits. There are always seasonal exhibits. The museum is basically divided in half, with its permanent collection and new, temporary shows. The space itself makes for easy transitions between the wings and the central courtyard; a few steps sunken into the ground often feature sculpture.

Dominion by Addie Citchens

Dominion means supreme authority, sovereign power, or complete control over something, in this case it is the dominion of men over women--it is exercised not only through violence, but through charisma, piety and the banality of male entitlement. Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfreys, a prominent Black church family whose putative grandeur conceals a deep and hereditary decay. Sabre leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church, dispensing wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts, exuding the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks exclusively in his register. The longsuffering Priscilla writes those sermons, raises their five sons and silently maintains the machinery of his authority without ever receiving credit for it. Their youngest child, Emanuel – known universally as Wonderboy – is beautiful, gifted and terrifying: a prodigious athlete with the voice of an angel. Unfortunately his true nature is dark and dangerous. The action unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy’s teenage girlfriend. This is neither light nor hopeful, but it does feel real. An impressive debut novel.

Goat (2026)

Ok, so the animation in this movie has been called stunning and dizzying—I would agree with the later assessment, in that the action moves so fast I had trouble keeping up. One reviewer liked it to the Spider verse animation, which I also found to be too much, and I would agree. Will Harris (voiced by Caleb McLaughlin) is a goat who has grown up dreaming of playing professional “roarball”, a fiercer and faster version of basketball. But Will is a “small” and roar players are all “bigs” – powerful beasts such as rhinos and horses. Will’s hero and the star of his favorite team, the Thorns, is a panther called Jet, a champ close to retirement but determined to win the league. When Will gets a shot at joining the Thorns, he is laughed at, underrated but undeterred. The rest of the plot unfolds in an entirely predictable manner. The movie has real-life inspiration: basketball star Stephen Curry, who was repeatedly told at the start of his career that he was too skinny and too small to make it as a pro. Curry is a producer here, and has a performing role. But in spite of this connection, Goat comes up lacking.

Son of Nothing by Yann Martel

I think this book, which is composed in an unusual manner, benefits greatly from the recent release of Christopher Nolan's movie retelling of the Odyssey. This is set before that, during the Trojan War, but the revisiting of Homer's work overall and the linked epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey have been revived for a greater audience. a Canadian classicist, Harlow Donne, has been offered a year’s fellowship at Oxford University. His wife, Gail, has a full-time managerial job, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, Helen. Who will pour out her breakfast cereal and pick her up from school while Harlow is away? He and Gail quarrel. He leaves for England, and Gail tells him to not come back (unlike with Penelope, who waits Once Harlow gets to Oxford, the narrative shifts its form and becomes odder and more interesting. His prescribed task is to help sift through and translate a hoard of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, in upper Egypt. It’s that he comes to believe are a long-lost epic poem. It relates the story of the Trojan war, but not, as Homer tells it, from the viewpoint of princely warriors and gods. The protagonist is a common soldier, a “son of nobody” named Psoas. This is a novel that contains the actual poem. The Psoad makes up half of the book in terms of word count--the poem’s fragments are printed across the top half of the pages, while below the line are footnotes, in which Harlow sets out to comment on the text, but is soon finding in it prompts for reminiscences about his relationship with Gail, and reflections about his home life addressed to his daughter. The two narrative strands – the ancient epic and the modern domestic drama – tug at and distort each other, until finally they merge in a doubly mournful conclusion.

Caracol De Mar, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant. We stayed in the Condesa neighborhood on our recent trip to Mexico City, and this was an easy walk from out apartment. Chef Gabriela Camara’s hospitality and vision shine the brightest at the newest iteration of the restaurant (it apparently had moved), which welcomes guests with bar seating and cocktails on the first floor and a stunning salon filled with natural light on the top floor. The downside of the space is that it has a lot of hard surfaces and is really quite loud. The culinary ethos remains, with sustainability and seasonal seafood at the core and all-time menu favorites in tow. Order the green mole risotto and the fish tacos—they were both delicious, and the side sauces are a high point.

This is recommended, especially if you want to lean into seafood, and the sound level didn’t sound like a negative. Of the two seafood restaurants we ate at, this one was more upscale and had more memorable accompaniments to the dishes.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

I finished this book a couple of days ago and am still not sure what I think of it. I read several reviews and there is a sense that this is a book that you love or you hate--and I think for me it is a mixture of both, which is maybe the hallmark of psychologically successful story telling. In broad strokes, this is a book about parenthood, white privilege, and the thin line between right and wrong. It is set in Shaker Heights, a planned community in the greater Cleveland area, and in Elena Richardson there is a holier-than-thou attitude that they are just that much better than everyone else because their community is set up to win. She has a spouse with a successful law practice, Trip is a star athlete, Lexie is popular and smart, Moody is shy and smart, and then there is Izzy, who nobody understands--and here is where it gets weird--everyone marginalizes. She is a stranger in her own home. The Richardson's have a rental property which is also in Shaker Heights--they provide affordable housing in a good neighborhood and Mia, an artist who works odd jobs to get by and her teenaged daughter Pearl. Their arrival shuffles the deck for the Richardson family. Moody has a crush on Pearl, Pearl has a crush on Trip, Lexie befriends Pearl in the way that all popular girls who need something do--she uses her and sees herself as helping her, Izzy finds a kindred spirit in Mia, and Elena becomes obsessed with discovering Mia's secrets, of which there are many. At the end of the day, I didn't know quite what I thought about all this, and then two days later decided that was in fact the point, and any book that makes me think this much has something going for it.

His, Hers, and Ours (2026)

The hook for me to watch this romantic dramedy over any other was that it is adapted from a Terry McMillan is invovled. I haven't read anything by her since the 1980's but very much enjoyed Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, so when my spouse is on call and I watch a movie that wouldn't be on his top 10 list, this got me interested. The things I like about this, which are features of the author's work, is that it focuses on the lives of creative successful black people who are family oriented. In other words, normal brown skinned people and the whole cast is black and brown people. The story is that a divorced woman and a widower have children who are in love with each other--which neither of them is quite ready to face their kids growing up and having adult feelings and relationships that might invovle sex. So they are doing a terrible job with that transition AND they fall for each other, which mortifies their children in a way that is predictable but also kind of hilarious--the teens are close relatives of their parents and so it stands to reason that they might also get along--I know that doesn't happen all that often in real life, but it certainly seems like it could, what with shared gene pools and all. The story is competently told, but while the teens have some ease and chemistry with each other, the adults are a bit stilted--we never really get to their inner thoughts and plans--so it is is a movie that skims along the surface rather than doing a deeper dive.

Quartet In Autumn by Barbara Pym

Someone asked me recently where I get ideas for the books that I read, and I gave what was probably too long an answer for what the asker was looking for, and quite sparse for the reality of the myriad of pathways into getting on my reading list, but one of them is Ann Patchett's If You Haven't Read It Is New To You Friday vlog series, where she and various authors who come to her store to do events offer up books that you m ight have overlooked--which is often the case for me, and this is one such book. If you ever start to think you are well read, check this series out, it will tether you back to the earth immediately. I am more or less immune to those thoughts because I live in a UNESCO City of Literature, where practically every third person on the street has read more than I have, and that is bolstered by the undergraduate population, who are young and haven't yet had the time. In any case, this gem from 1968 comes from that source. The book centers on Letty, Edwin, Marcia and Norman — four ageing clerks working in the same unspecified London office, all on the verge of retirement and all living alone. This book is not cluttered up with unrequited love, or indeed any love at all. The four main characters’ lives are drained of love. That one of them once offered to make a cup of tea for one of the others is what counts for kindness and warmth in their desiccated lives. Yet we gradually develop an affection for them as we watch them live out their isolated existences — especially over Christmas, when they somehow get through the dreaded day alone or foisted on charitable relatives or neighbours. Very gradually we realise that, really, they have no one in the world there for them but each other. Every scene in this novel manages to be simultaneously hilarious and almost unbearably bleak. And yet, here I am, recommending it to you.

Jardin Bosque de Chapultapec, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a beautiful and quite peaceful garden that is near to museums in Mexico City. We like to take some time to read outdoors when we are traveling, and this was a perfect spot to do that. It is generally believed that the Chapultepec Botanical Garden originated during the reign of Nezahualcoyotl. The Chapultepec complex was known as a natural reserve for the rulers of Tenochtitlan and the Triple Alliance. It is almost certain that some plants were cultivated here for medicinal and food purposes. This modern version was inaugurated in 2006 covering 5.3 ha reserved within the park. A magnificent landscape, today it houses a valuable collection of native and introduced plants. Since 2016, the garden has been rehabilitated and cared for by the organization Plantando con Causa A.C.. They have brought in world-class landscapers, botanists, horticulturists and biologists to meticulously restore some 22 unique environments within the garden. In 2017, the garden boasted more than 300 varieties of plants, distributed as follows: Pollination plants Edible plants Succulents Wetland plants 14 species of wild dahlias Agaves Cactaceae Orchids And an arbor There are also other plants. It is a critical part of Chapultepec’s landscape, and much like the day we were there, it is not usually crowded.

A Far Flung Life by M. L. Stedman

The author's second book was worth the wait. It is also set in Western Australia and is as steeped in moral ambiguity as her first. It is also deep in calamity, careening from one to another throughout the book and across the years, and once again (as with her first) there is a big secret that propels a lot of decisions and events that follow. It begins in 1958 and follows several generations of the MacBride family on their million-acre sheep ranch, Meredith Downs. Here, small decisions have vast consequences: when the patriarch, Phil, swerves to avoid a kangaroo while driving home from the market, he and his eldest son, Warren, are killed. Matt, the youngest son, only just survives. Lorna, suddenly a widow, takes over the reins of the ranch, now the sole parent not only of Matt, whose amnesic head injury forces him to redefine who he is and the life he had once hoped for, but also of her spirited daughter, Rosie. The book has loss and regret at it's core, and is preoccupied by what governs our understanding of right and wrong, as well as how we define our sense of family and identity. It is atmospheric, deep, and unsettling, all in a very good way.

Green Rhino Bakery, Mexico City, Mexico

This bakery is world class. It comes from star baker Richard Hart, renowned for his bakery Hart Bageri, with multiple locations in Copenhagen, and is his first bakery in North America. It opened in July of this year in a new building in Roma Norte. The space is huge. A wall of glass at the front, a pastry counter, and up a ramp, a small seating area that looks over the bakery floor, expansive and busy, which includes a lamination room, a walk-in freezer, and ovens the size of a studio apartment. Workers mill about, shaping loaves and filling trays. And the line can wrap around the block. There is a rotating cast of pastries, cookies, danishes, rolls, buns, and laminated numbers, which are very, very rich (likely half of their weight is butter) and shatteringly crisp. Look for those with fresh fruit to offset the fat and the savory ‘nudja and requeson rectangle. The bread is exceptional: deeply browned loaves, speckled with pepitas, seeds, and bran, with a sour, open-crumbed interior, begging for a thick smear of salted butter. For this style of sourdough, high-hydration with a robust, chewy crust, it is simply the best in Mexico City (and priced fairly, to boot). For beverages there is coffee, tea, frappes made with coconut water, matcha, and hot chocolate. There are also merch, jams, spreads, and fancy teas, from his romantic partner, the “raretealady" Henrietta Lovell, plus his James Beard-award-winning cookbook for sale.

It's In His Kiss by Julia Quinn

I am going to have to stop saying that I don't much read romance novels because here I am, seven deep in the Bridgerton novels, and I am still going strong. i am going to have to go with I dabble in romance, and when I do, I tend to enjoy it. The suspension of belief is no more central to this genre than the murder mystery genre, which I read deeply and widely in (like all my life, every day, year in and year out for over 50 years kind of serious). Hyacinth comes in to her own--finally. Of all the Bridgertons I have the least sense of her, up until now at least. She has a close relationship with Lady Danbury, which is a great plot line--we know Lady Danbury well and she is famous for not suffering fools and being completely up front about it, damn the consequences, so we know that when she loves both her grandson Gareth St. Clair and Hyacinth with equal zeal that they will find their way to each other. Gareth is loathed by his father because he is not his own child--there is a pretty happy story behind that that they discover much later, so he is left to fend for himself. He will inherit the estate but it is in ruins because his haughty father has a gambling problem and is a terrible estate manager to boot. Hyacinth is the opposite--her family is big and loving and it is the perfect unbrella for Garth to shelter under and thrive. This is a fun story, one with some unexpected turns, and I am more sad that the series will soon splinter into something else because we have only one Bridgerton sibling left to marry off.

Phone A Quilty Friend

I oversubscribed to Block Of The Months in 2026--which will make 2027 the year that I finish the 2026 BOM's, but in the meantime I am pretending to try to keep up, and the single best thing for my quilting productivity is a group sew in on Zoom. I was saying at the last one I attended that this alone is worth the price of admission for me in my Modern Quilt guild. Do not get me wrong, I love the monthly speakers, especially the ones that we can record and watch within the next week if for whatever reason we cannot make the meeting. I am often so inspired by them, and occasionally go on to take a class or buy a pattern. I also love the access the the national Modern Quilt Guild's website--there is so much education and inspiration there I have yet to scratch the surface on what is available. And the list goes on. All told, though, the ability to sit in my sewing room--which I had to move to the dining room because my ability to sew in a small space expired sometime in the last decade. I seriously made my whole family eat outside on a muggy, cicada deafening night recently rather that clear off the table!--and sew with guildmates over ZOom is priceless to me. I have spent hours doing tasks that are hard to accomplish alone. The Pink Door Amish With A Twist quilt has squares that require a dozen or more different fabrics be cut out, who can face that solo, I ask you. And yet here I am, having cut out all the blocks for the current month while catching up with a friend wrangling her pink scraps--neither of us is done, but we both made progress and we caught up with each other as well. It is possible that I like it as much as in person sewing--the upside is that I do not have to move my stuff--I did get a cart a year ago to make the transport easier, and I do go to in person workshops and love them too, but at the end of the day, Zoom actually works better for me. I not only love it, I am inspired by it as well. Try it and see--especially if you are struggling to find your sewjo.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

This is an unusual book. It is part memoir, part fiction, part essay and the lines between them are blurry at best. The author says that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last installment of a writing career that spans 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction (much like fellow Booker Prize author John Banville). Another is the author's own mortality--he has been diagnosed with a chronic blood cancer, something permanent and disabling but probably not leading to his ultimate demise. So now for the fiction--at the center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse Julian of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Julian's defense is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true that the author has spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth. So this is a fitting end but a less than usually satisfying Barnes novel.

Voicemails For Isabelle (2026)

Is texting or calling and leaving voicemails on your dead loved ones phone a thing? This is the second movie that I have watched where the bereaved woman has lost the love of her life, and the person who now has that phone number--in both cases a work phone that is newly issued to them, because no one would believe a grown up would not already have a personal phone--receives the messages and proceeds to not just fall for the person, but pursue them romantically. So then there is the tricky part--how do you break it to them that this is not an accident, that they fell for you based on what you said to a person no longer with us and searched for you without it sounding creepy? For me it seems no more creepy than lots of other ways that people meet and hook up, but that's just me. I very much liked this-- Zoey Deutch as Jill is a fun, mouthy, talented woman who grew up with a sister with cystic fibrosis. She was deeply attached to her and their relationship was home-based and yet very rich. They have a tradition of leaving each other irreverant voicemails that are endearing and hilarious. When Izzie dies, Jill is devestated and to help with her grieving, she keeps it up, only now instead of Izzie, Wes is listening to them. He falls hard for her and goes about finding her and getting to know her, and it is a fun story about how Jill gets both her career and her love life back on track.

John of John by Douglas Stuart

This is a cautionary tale of what not to do as a parent. The prodigal son, 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, returns to his childhood home, where his father is not just unhappy to see him, but detests everything about him, all the while expecting him to stay and take over the croft. There are undercurrents of domineering ownership that are not just distasteful, they are suffocating even for a straight man, much less a closeted gay one. Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community of farmers, weavers and fishers in what appears to be the 1990s, John of John tells the story of Cal’s uneasy homecoming. It’s an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence. Wearied by his ultraconservative environment, where connection feels out of reach, Cal takes a fancy to his dad’s sole friend, confirmed bachelor Innes MacInnes. Cal is struck by Innes’s “gentleness, his benevolence--but it cannot be, because his father and Innes have been lovers since they were teens. The irony in this intimate yet epic tale, with equal parts drama, familial fracture, love and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world. Do not miss this, it is alarming and telling.

Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City, Mexico

This is such a gorgeous musem. It is among the biggest museums of its kind in Latin America, witn an extraordinary collection focuses on the evolution of modern art in Mexico, especially with the Mexican School of Painting and the Breakaway Generation. In the equally beautifulChapultepec Park, the museum is housed in two circular buildings with two floors each and divided into four halls, and a gallery. You walk in and are immediatelywowed by how spectacular the design is. A remarkable sculpture garden connects the two buildings. The Xavier Villaurrutia and Carlos Pellicer halls allow visitors to admire the museum’s considerable permanent collection. This includes works by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo, among others. Other halls are used for temporary exhibitions which display parts of the museum’s collection curated under varying themes and topics. These exhibitions often reach some considerable international notoriety. The MAM plays an important role in research and investigation related to modern and contemporary art. Having opened in 1964 with an exhibition of works by Rufino Tamayo, the buildings were completed based on a design by the architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Carlos A. Cazares Salcido of the University of Sonora. They worked in collaboration with Rafael Mijares Alcérreca. The main body of the museum takes an organic form, curved in parallel to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was intended to respond to the landscape and surrounding undulating trees. It’s also, importantly, always been understood as a highly modern capstone to the country’s modernization process. Having been designed, built, and opened at the very peak of the Mexican economic miracle, also part of the museum's story.