The Noel Diary (2022)

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

You Are Here by David Nicholls

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

Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ, Birmingham, Alabama

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

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

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

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

Lonely Planet (2024)

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

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry

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

Hazelwood Food and Drink, Bloomington, Minnesota

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

Ten Birds That Changed The World by Stephen Moss

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

Love At First Sight (2023)

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

Hard By A Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili

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