Five Keys

We were out to dinner at a nice restaurant with a good cocktail bar, and we opted to pass on a cocktail there and have one at home instead. The $60-75 saved could be invested in specialty ingredients, like the unusual Cynar found in this cocktail! Five Keys 1.5 oz bourbon .25 oz luxardo .25 oz Cynar .75 oz sweet vermouth Stir with ice, strain into coupes To quote my spouse, who makes all the cocktails in my house: "This is one of the most delicious cocktails I’ve made this year; perfectly balanced; a keeper!"

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

This is a medical based memoir focused on the history of tuberculosis and the author's personal experiences with people who are infected with it. On the one hand this seems wildly different from his enormously popular YA books, which are fiction and then again, I think, they contain characters who struggle with substance use, mental health issues, cancer, and death, so maybe not that different at all. He is a talented story teller, and the short but accurate reflection on tuberculosis past and present, as well as the challenges that are faced in addressing the illness are well and accurately described, as are the health discrepancies across the globe. This is a guy who can make you cry for a good reason--I cried through much of the second half of The Fault In Our Stars, it so accurately captured my fears as a parent of a childhood cancer survivor. He gets it and he can write about it, and this book grabs you in a similar way. He makes a case for science, which is not currently popular nor funded, but hopefully that tide will turn and we will once again embrace fact based solutions to difficult problems. In the meantime, this book will help inform your thinking.

Art Quilt Workbook: Exercises & Techniques to Ignite Your Creativity by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston

This is a great How To book about how to move your creative side as an artist towards making fiber arts. I took a collage class with Lisa Thorpe at the Minnesota Quilters retreat and there is a section of this book that totally applies to this. There is information about copyright and how to avoid violating it in your work, which I have not seen much in books related to quilting. This is more about the art than the quilting. There is no instruction on how to piece or sew contained within it, it is all about making your art on fiber--so painting on fabric, dying fabric, printing on fabric, and how to put it all together--with examples from the both of the author's own works--which are very different from each other, so very helpful in the visualization of how it would translate depending on the artist. Recommended if this is a direction you want your quilting to take!

The CIA Book Club by Charlie English

I saw this on a "Best Books" list for 2025, and I had just finished reading a fictionalized account of the smuggling of Doctor Zhivago back into Russia earlier in the Cold War and thought this was related to that mission. And in some ways it is, but whereas that happened at the front end of the Cold War, this book is focused on things that happened closer to when the Berlin Wall came down rather than when it went up. This is a well researched and very readable book about the CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL. Solzhenitsyn was most often smuggled, but he was far from being the only author whose works the CIA snuck into Soviet block countries. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were probably the most popular among the dissidents the books were intended for, but a wide range of other authors including Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam and even Agatha Christie also featured on the QRHELPFUL book list. The inspiration behind the scheme was a charming-sounding CIA boss called George Minden, who believed that the freedom to read good literature was as important as any other form of freedom. During most of the 1980s the CIA was run by a rather tiresome, boisterous adventurer called Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. It was under him that Minden was able to pump books, photocopiers and even printing presses into the Soviet empire. They helped to keep people there in touch with precisely the kind of western culture the high priests of Marxism-Leninism wanted to block out. This was especially true in Poland, which is English’s main focus. Poles never forgot that their country was essentially part of western Europe, and the flow of French, British and American literature in particular was an important part of keeping that awareness going, and that it helped fuel the effort to re-establish independence. This is an interesting read about behind the scenes efforts to educate people.

Bar Hill, Montpelier, Vermont

Bar Hill makes award winning gin, and they have the unique starting ingredient of honey as the source of fermented sugar. They started off in the Northeast Kingdom, a rural part of the state, even by Vermont standards, but with success they expanded their operation and are now located in a facility of thier own making on Gin Lane on the outskirts of town in Montpelier. There is a restaurant, craft cocktail bar, and most appealing to us, a tasting room. We very much enjoyed tasting the variety of gin and vodka products they make, and because we were flying and hoping not to check bags, they have 100cc bottles available to take home in a carry on bag. The facility is as lovely as what they make and I would recommend adding this as a stop if you are in central Vermont or driving through. It is easy to get to off I-89 and well worth it. Montpelier has a lot to offer besides Bar Hill, and is also recommended. The independent bookstore, Bear Pond Books, was featured in a recent New York Times article on independent book stores and the resident animals they have--in addition to books, there is a store cat as well.

Wellness by Nathan Hill

This is a winner that was recommended to me by a friend while we were on a wild adventure in Argentina. She is also the source of the recommended podcasts from Parnassus books each week, for which I will be forever grateful she turned me on to. What a jewel that is! Ok, I read a review of this which called it a tale of the tragicomic maladies of marriage, which is a bit funny and very true. However, I see it more of an exaggerated account of the baggage that each member of the couple brings into their relationship from their families of origin, and how they form a team and try to avoid those exact mistakes onto their offspring, thereby creating their own set of issues to be passed on through their children to their grandchildren, and so on. Jack and Elizabeth meet as students in 1990s Chicago. They live in neighboring buildings and, at night, watch one another through dark windows, imagining themselves into each other’s lives long before actual intimacy occurs. This courtship through glass can’t help but have the aura of a scientific experiment – and scientific experiments are Elizabeth’s area. She works at a lab that specializes in placebo studies, exploring the porous border between real and imagined remedies. The organization is known by the name “Wellness”--which is not what it is about, we come to find out. It is more about manipulation, which is at the heart of this. Jack and Elizabeth come from families with a malignant dose of it--her father and his mother--and it leaves them damaged, so much so that they feel lucky to find each other. They then have to figure out how to make the whole thing work, and it is a messy story about how they manage that.

A Nice Indian Boy (2025)

This is a nice boy meets boy love story. Naveen and Jay are perfect for each other. There are hiccups but it is a straight up romantic comedy other than the couple aren't straight. The movie opens with Naveen's sister's semi-arranged marriage--his parents, who are themselves in an arranged marriage are over hte moon--the groom is a doctor! All eyes are on Naveem--you are next is oft heard, and it is painful for him, because not only is he not dating, he is exceedingly awkward and he is gay, which his paretns know but are a bit prickly about. They don't quite get him. Then miracle of miracles he meets Jay. At temple no less. They are big fans of Ganesh. Yes, Jay is white, but he was raised by an Indian foster family who he adored, and he speaks Hindi. There are some ups and downs, as you would expect in a romantic comedy--one must have comedy, after all, and a lot of things are said out loud that are well worth hearing so if you have some gay averse family members this is a pretty G-rated way to normalize what is altogether normal for them. And there is some light weight Bollywood love at the end that is fun.

Run For The Hills by Kevin Wilson

I have only read one other book by this author but it shared characteristics with this one, making me think that it might be how this author rolls. It’s wacky and full of heart, but in between each laugh I felt the very sad back beat of who is family and why do they so often fail their children in the most basic of ways. It is also a story of family and the many shapes it can take, but it is also much more, asking why the ones who leave and the ones who lie are always the epicenter, always the focal point. The book opens with Mad, an organic farmer in her thirties, is resigned to her solitary lifestyle on her farm that her father left behind. One day her quiet and predictable life is interrupted by her newly discovered half brother, Rube, showing up at her farm. Rube is at once soft and jagged, desperate and pleading, reaching out a hand for Mad to reluctantly take. He shows up with stories of his father, same name as Mad’s dad but an entirely different man—a writer from Boston, whereas the only father Mad ever knew was a farmer in Tennessee. He convinces her to go on a road trip to find their other half siblings and their disappearing father, and what they learn along the way is a lesson for all of us. Really enjoyable and not nearly as light and fluffy as it appears.

Rhetoric On The Right: The Embracing of Opposite Day

An outspoken advocate for gun ownership was shot and killed at a speaking event on September 11th. Would he be okay with that? In 2023, following a mass shooting at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, he stated, per Newsweek, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” The trade off for gun access and gun deaths is that people will die--and it can't always be other people, can it? In the US about 50,000 people die by guns every year, so "some" is a pretty big number. He was not advocating for the shooting of children, who are more likely to die from gun violence than any other cause, so it seems he accepted the risk, maybe better than those who advocate for more controls on guns. In the aftermath of the shooting death of a man who was known as a spokesman for widespread gun ownership in this country, there is a focus on the politics of advocating violence. The right wants to advocate violence against anyone who disagrees with them, and to vilify those who speak out against them. The current President uses a lot of violent rhetoric when talking about his opponents, and the very same week that Mr. Kirk was killed at a public event, he was threatening war on the city of Chicago. That is violent speech and imagery. Then I hear GOP politicians calling out the left--without attribution of source--for inciting violence. "Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil,” Representative Bob Onder, Republican of Missouri, said on Thursday in a speech on the House floor. “They hate the good, the truth, and the beautiful, and embrace the evil, the false, and the ugly.” Calling people well-meaning but evil none-the-less because they disagree with you is what is bad, false, and ugly. Half of America doesn't agree with you, afterall, and that alone does not make them evil. It is that rhetoric, which incites strong feelings, which can lead to violence. So who is it inciting violence in acutality? Seems like the right--look in the mirror if you want to see the problem, Congressman Onder.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

This is another of the Parnassus Book recommendations that I have followed (spoiler alert--I have become fairly addicted to watching these, and have folded a number of their recommendations in to my reading rotation. The book is dedicated to Gore Vidal and is set in 1962, just after the Cuban missile crisis, and describes a day (with some flashing about in time) in the life of George Falconer, a 58-year-old expat Englishman who is living in Santa Monica and teaching at a university in LA, just as Isherwood did. The narrative is edgy, subtle, and controlled, with chasms of buried rage. George has recently lost his partner, Jim, in a car crash, and is struggling with bereavement. He tries to make a connection to the world around him, while denying his predicament as a widower. We see him go through the motions of everyday life: teaching a class, fighting with his neighbors, working out at the gym, shopping at a supermarket, drinking with an older woman friend, flirting intellectually with a young student – before fading out on the final page. As a study of grief and a portrait of the aftermath of a gay marriage, A Single Man is unique, brilliant, and deeply moving, with not a word wasted, saying so much with so little. There is an autobiographical component to this, and the editor of the author's diaries notes that there is a lot of material lifted almost word for word from them. Published in 1964, it was a window into a world that few straight readers would have been familiar with at the time.