Less by Andrew Sean Greer

This somewhat surprising almost whimsical book won the Pullitzer Prize this year and so has become the "it" book.
 It introduces us to a minor novelist named Arthur Less (which is definitely a double entendre) as he finds himself abruptly single.  We first see him as he is coasting through a studiedly casual not-quite-relationship with a vain younger man for several years. Less is described as “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered”, which gives you a bit of a sense of where this is all going. The younger man, who happens also to be the son of his arch enemy, then announces his engagement to someone else.
While still not acknowledging to himself that he was in love all along and that his heart is cracked, if not quite broken, Less accepts a slew of invitations that stem from his modest literary career, and conveniently fit together to provide a round-the-world trip. Not only will he thus avoid the wedding, but sidestep the pain of turning fifty in the company of people who know him.
The various stages of this journey lend the novel its structure and, as is customary, provide both a parade of colorful characters and a voyage of self-discovery.

Human Flow (2017)

Ai Wei Wei made this film, which was short listed for Best Documentary this past year, but did not quite make it onto the nominated films.  A shame, although his name recognition internationally is so high that I suspect this will get the attention it deserves. 
More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II.  The filmmaker examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact, and does so in a way that the magnitude of the problem starts to become understandable.  The fact is that even when it is done as well as can be expected, it is horrible, and the truth is that almost none of it is being done at all well.  The flow of people seems overwhelming and inevitable, and as he points out at several points in the film, the average refugee will spend 26 years being displaced before being able to return home, and in some cases it is far more.  This is streaming on Amazon Prime, so accessible.

Beethoven's Bonn, Germany

 The devotion of Beethoven's home town to his legacy is quite impressive.  Bonn is not known as a city of music for nothing. It is home to the birthplace of the famous German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. He first entered the world in the Bonngasse house in December 1770, where his family lived in one of the flats. During his 57-year life, Beethoven became one of the most important composers in musical history.
Besides the permanent exhibition, the Beethoven museum also regularly puts on temporary exhibitions, which likewise address topics relating to the famous composer in their historical context, and in the lab next door you can hear recordings of Beethoven's compositions on instruments that either he did use, or are congruent with the time he wrote in.  Very cool.

The collection of things that Beethoven used bordered on an obsession at his house.
You can follow in his footsteps and see through their own eyes the composer’s birthplace, which is now a museum. The historic atmosphere takes museum guests back to the 18th century and the museum offers deeper insights into the life and work of the great composer. The museum houses the largest Beethoven collection in the world, using impressive authentic documents to vividly depict Beethoven’s life and work.
Wandering through the museum’s twelve rooms, visitors can see 150 original exhibits offering an opportunity to reflect upon how Beethoven thought, felt, worked and acted. The authentic exhibits include manuscripts, photos, letters, furniture and other everyday objects from Beethoven's life, as well as musical instruments and memorabilia, including famous pieces, such as Beethoven's last grand piano, made by Viennese piano maker Conrad Graf, and valuable original manuscripts, such as that of Moonlight Sonata.

Mai Beck, Cologne, Germany

 This was a great restaurant, our favorite out of a number of really good restaurants on our recent trip to the Rhine region of Germany.  It was our favorite of the one Michelin star restaurants that we ate in, which is definitely saying something, as we had some spectacular meals.
There are two great things about this place, beyond how terrific the food is.  One is that you can order as little or as much as you want, which allows for some who are more self regulating than we are to have a petite meal (if I lived in Cologne, I would eat here all the time, one dish at a time).  The other is that they are not trying for another star--that is our favorite restaurant style.

Pictured are two of the six dishes we had.  The cold smoked salmon in the dish above was melt in your mouth smoke, just delicious, and the cucumbers three different ways, the sunflower butter, and the avocado were all perfect compliments, each bite was perfection, bright and delicious.  The pasta dishes (one of which is on the left) are something the restaurant is famous for, and we were not disappointed in this fresh pea tortellini with a light goat cheese.  All in all, I would go back, and probably eat here twice if I could.

An Inconvenient Sequel (2017)

My overwhelming feeling when I finished watching this, beyond that we are completely screwed if we do not start right here and now working together as a country on climate change, is that I continue to underestimate and undervalue Al Gore.
He quietly demonstrates in this film, which does a devastating update on just how much worse things have gotten since his first documentary on the subject, despite some very hopeful things that have been counterbalancing the desperately hot planet that we have today, all the while showing that he has been talking about this since the late 70's.  He was a canary, screaming in a coal mine full of politicians who did not want to hear him, and are being paid by big oil to not listen to him now, all the while they are trying to sew up their economic future in renewable energy.  He has been literally chipping away at the problem all the while his own country has done its damnedest to sabotage world wide efforts to improve the situation.  This was short listed for an Oscar nomination this past year, and  while it missed the cut, it is yet another great call to action on climate change.

Two Dozen Years!

As the parent of a childhood cancer survivor, each birthday that child has is a cause for celebration.  There is a book written by a pediatric neurosurgeon entitled "If I See Five" that has stuck in my head through the years.  It was said to him by a patient who had a brain tumor with a terrible prognosis, and the heart breakingly matter-of-fact way that she acknowledged what for her was going to be a very short life indeed.  So every birthday my first thought is that Ethan gets to see another year, and for that I am most grateful.
And an eventful year it has been.  He graduated from college with two majors and a minor, an excellent GPA, and most importantly, a liberal education that affords him the knowledge and the background to navigate the world.  I, his stalwart tutor, also learned quite a lot, and am thinking of becoming a Khan academy aficionado in order to go further in my personal studies.  I tutored Ethan for his sake, but I ended up gaining more than I could have imagined doing so.  The best kind of altruism.  So with great joy, I present my newly twenty four year old. 

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

This was long listed for the Booker Prize and it is by one of a group of favorite authors (in reading it I realized that I have missed a couple of his more recent books, so will have to rectify that).  And I was not disappointed.
The novel opens in 1945. Nathaniel, who is 14, and his sister, Rachel, have been left by their parents in London, in the care of a mysterious figure called the Moth. The book is partly in that time period and partly in the future looking back on that time period, which was both traumatic for the children and also not what it seemed to them at the time.  They felt abandoned by their parents into the hands of sketchy guardians, and while there are elements of truth to that as Nathaniel finds out later, there is a lot more going on than that. 
Ondaatje has a series of works that look at broken childhoods that are poorly remembered and even worse to have experienced, and within that framework this one is not amongst the most traumatized, but the things that we do to each other and war are both very much within his wheel house, and this book is no different.  Well written, and I hope that it at least gets to the Booker short list.

One More Time With Feeling (2016)

While it made me feel completely out of step with modern culture, I was unfamiliar with Nick Cave.  He makes music that is not out of step with my tastes and by all appearances he is nearer my age than not, but I knew nothing of him prior to watching this (streaming on Amazon Prime).
I suspect that this movie started off as an exploration of the creative process of a man and a band, but it ended up being a very intimate portrait of grief.  In that context, this is a thing of great beauty and pain.  The death of the child lies at the core of what comes out in this documentary.  There is no sugar coating the unbearable aspect of that, even as both the singer/songwriter and his wife deal with it head on, and make an effort to be normal, to allow joy and beauty into their lives, they are forever changed by the loss of their son.  The songs that come out of this period of intense loss, which are a sort of poetry put to music, seem reflective of that intensity of emotion, the grappling with it.  Very moving in an unusual way.

Thai Basil Chicken

One of my sons has some rampant basil going, so this has been a favorite this summer.  Really delicious, easily multiplied to feed a crowd.

• 1/3 cup chicken broth
  
  
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce, or as needed
• 2 teaspoons fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon white sugar
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken thighs, coarsely chopped
• 1/4 cup sliced shallots
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons minced Thai chilies, Serrano, or other hot pepper
• 1 cup very thinly sliced fresh basil leaves
• 2 cups hot cooked rice

1. Whisk chicken broth, oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, white sugar, and brown sugar together in a bowl until well blended.
2. Heat large skillet over high heat. Drizzle in oil. Add chicken and stir fry until it loses its raw color, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in shallots, garlic, and sliced chilies. Continue cooking on high heat until some of the juices start to caramelize in the bottom of the pan, about 2 or 3 more minutes. Add about a tablespoon of the sauce mixture to the skillet; cook and stir until sauce begins to caramelize, about 1 minute.
3. Pour in the rest of the sauce. Cook and stir until sauce has deglazed the bottom of the pan. Continue to cook until sauce glazes onto the meat, 1 or 2 more minutes. Remove from heat.
4. Stir in basil. Cook and stir until basil is wilted, about 20 seconds. Serve with rice.

Franz Marc (1880-1916)

Franz Marc was a German Expressionist painter who, like August Macke, went to France as part of his training as an artist and was influenced by what the French impressionists were doing.  He is known for his paintings of animals, as this painting to the right demonstrates.
He had many alliances in his short life.  Marc worked with Macke and then Kandinsky.  They split from the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1911, forming a rival group of artists named Der Blaue Reiter. Together they edited an almanac of the same name, which was published in 1912. Having long been interested in Eastern philosophies and religions, Marc responded enthusiastically to Kandinsky’s notion that art should lay bare the spiritual essence of natural forms instead of copying their objective appearance. Kandinsky and Marc developed the idea that mystical energy is best revealed through abstraction. Marc believed that civilization destroys humanity's  awareness of the spiritual force of nature; consequently, he usually painted animals.  Like Macke, he was killed on the battlefield in France in WWI.