Armed Only With A Camera (2025)

There is so much to care about in this documentary and so much tragedy to go along with it. Brent Renaud is a photo journalist who was purposely targeted and killed by the Russians in Ukraine. There is so much to dislike about Putin, Russia, and the soldiers fighting for things that do not belong to them, but that is not what this is about. This short documentary, which is nominated in that category for the 2026 Academy Awards, is more of a celebration of a photo journalist's life. The span of where he went, what he filmed, and how important the brave work that he accomplished in his too short life is what the film is about.We meet Brent Renaud as he trudges through a shallow, fast-moving river on the border of Guatemala and Mexico. He films a 16-year-old boy as he makes the arduous trek from his former home of Honduras to what he hopes is his future home, the United States. The boy says he has no parents and no future in Honduras, but believes the U.S. will be a place where he can build a new family and find some hope. That is another tragedy best left untalked about right now but the camera and the man behind it are so sympathetic to the underdog you can feel him routing for the boy when he has to part ways with him, and it is more than what he says. He survived many scary situations before he met his death, and I was left bereft when he was shot down. Much like Tim Featherington, who's full length documentary Restrepo, filmed when he was embedded with a U.S. platoon in Afghanistan, took us into one war before another war left him dead, it seems that the very best of them are heroes who show us what we are missing about the world and violence, but they too are so slow to it that more than a few of them get burned. This is worth every minute of time watching it.

Scrap Quilt Sensation by Katharine Guerriere

I really liked this book, which is focused on traditional quilt blocks that are done in a less traditional manner, and also very scrappy. She does a really nice job of describing and demonstrating he approach to design, and her quilts have a consistency between them and are decidedly different from another designers. The author has quilts that are dense in not just scraps but also using batiks rather than solids--which is often one color, different hues but not strictly reading like prints would. She does do a discussion of trying to figure out color, value, and hue, how to think about or deal with prints, and how she thinks about it when in the design phase. For reasons that I cannot quite put my finger on, this style of quilt is one that I both find quite appealing and am not a natural with, so while I first encountered the book by getting it out of the library, I did decide to buy it. It is an older publication, so it was possible to get from a used book seller of your choice for a very modest price.

Snuggly Monkey

This happens every year. I come home from QuiltCon inspired to organize my creative fiber life, and as I inch closer to retirement (yes, I am picking a date, and yes, it is looming within sight) I feel like I need to get geared up and organized in order to launch immediately into a productive post-work life. It needs to have handwork and machine work. I need to have my supplies and I need to be able to find them (this is a story for another day). This year, in the ugly war that my own government launched against it's own people in Minneapolis, where I work, I am also quite commited to buying from people who side with decency. I used to think it was more common than it turns out to be. Last year I bought from Snuggly Monkey because the site had a wonderful and reasonably priced array of Sashiko products and while I have a lot of embroidery supplies, not many of them came from Japan, and I rectified that because Sashiko is something I want to do more of. This year, Snuggly Monkey was outspoken about doing the right thing, which is resist resist resist this ugly facist regime that is disappearing and murdering people because of the color of their skin, and so this year I spend my creative dollars with them because they are with me philosophically as well as artisitcally. And the bonus is that they have an even better array of things that inspire me than they did last year.

Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza

I am not entirely sure I got this book. It is a New York Times Notable Book from 2025, and I try to read at least a number of them, and while I think this is well written and literary, it is also allegorical and that is not my superpower. It does have elements that remind me of Latin American novels I have loved, and that is a genre I have read deeply in. The story is on the disturbing end, especially if you are not reading murder mysteries routinely, and examines the intrusion of crime into the lives of witnesses and detectives. A wave of men are being discovered, dead and castrated, their corpses accompanied by mysterious poetic allusions and all the marks of a serial killer to-be. The Detective, at a loss, starts enlisting the services of a local professor and writer, Cristina, who found the first body. The violence of the crimes starts a wave of impact that hits the professor, the Detective, her partner, and everyone else in its wake. The murderer appears to be a woman, castrating men, leaving behind poetry using ‘women’s objects,’ such as nail polish or lipstick. This troubles the professor and the detective both. Men start feeling that they have to protect their genitals in public and long for the days when basically women were subjugated to men so they could feel both safer and more powerful. So in the era of the Epstein files, where it it very clear that rich and powerful men like having their way with young women and children, we can see where the rage comes from. Read with caution, the material is gruesome but the emotions are understandable.

Lost In Starlight (2025)

This Korean animated feature length film is the one not nominated for an Oscar in 2026, and while I am almost certainly in the minority, maybe even alone, I liked this much more than the ever so populare K-Pop Demon Hunters. Would be astronaut Nan-young (Kim Tae-ri) has dedicated her life to being selected as a member of the next expedition to Mars, following in the footsteps of her mother who tragically died there in a natural disaster. But when she meets retro tech guru Jay (Hong Kyung) by chance, she discovers a whole new side of life, that will lead to a connection that traverses the solar system. A big aspect of the film’s visual look is clearly anime-style but which captures the kind of positive glimpse of a future world that science-fiction appears to have discarded wholesale in recent years. It’s something akin to more of the same but with changes: it’s a world of holographic displays and garish advertising, people overusing their phones (or equivalents) and using the best that scientists can create to set up a habitat on Mars, but it’s also a world of rainy streets, familiar cityscapes, people going gaga for retro tech in a trendy fashion and good ol’ fashioned communications through aerials dug into the ground. In fact, Lost In Starlight feels like a love-letter to analog in a lot of ways, to old forms of tech that cyclically come back into fashion, with a late-in-the-game hallucinogenic sequence really making the point about the longevity of vinyl. It’s use of tightly cut montage techniques are also stellar, giving the film a needed sense of vibrancy even when it might otherwise not seem like it has such a thing. Speaking as a lover of things that are mechanical, it was fun for me, and better than the plot that runs through it, which was fine, and for an animated movie good even, but nothing to write home about.

Heart The Lover by Lily King

First of all, I loved this book. It is the familiar genre of young love and decisions made that lead to regret later in life. Truely, it does feel like a miracle that the person you love at 20 is the same person you love at 70, and these deeply passionat love stories that harken back to college are part of a classic genre that I enjoy. This one involves a triangle--also a classic. The book opens in the 1980's with three friends, Casey, Yash, and Sam. Casey dates Sam in college and it ends badly, he leaving her and it being the 80's, there is no way to keep in touch. Then Casey and Yash get together, even though it causes issues for Sam and Yash--the whole I don't want her but you can't have her issue that can be so destructive. Suffice it to say that Yash is communication impaired, and Casey is in a bind, and so their relationship, which is full of strong feelings that certainly feel like love to both of them, ruptures. Casey is unable to forgive Yash, but goes on the find love and family and all that is good in middle age. The book ends years later around Yash's hospice bed where all the old secrets and resentments get sorted through if not completely resolved, and there is so much to love about how it all gets sorted, and so many cautionary tales about what not to do in your own love life, but do we ever really heed that advice? Not as often as would be ideal would be my assessment. Well, read this and enjoy. It feels very real to me.

The Singers (2025)

This film is nominated for a 2026 Academy Award in the Live Action Short category, which is filled with interesting nominations this year. What is notable about this is that it is a modern and updated version of an Ivan Turgenev short story of the same name. It was published in a collection of short stories and dates to 1850. In the text, a group of gruff men at a bar finds connection by baring their souls in an impromptu singing competition. In an interesting twist, the filmmaker was inspired to adapt the old work when juxtaposing it with a modern medium. The only thing that I have read by Turgenev is Fathers and Sons, which is a reflection on that relationship and is very good--I read it a decade ago when I was headed to Russia as a tourist destination, something not to be repeated and not a good idea at this point--which is a shame on many levels, but Russia has a deep and interesting history and is home to many beautiful treasures. In any case, I digress. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection titled A Sportsman's Sketches, was a milestone of Russian realism. He is now dwarfed by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy--rightly so--but he was a master at what he did, especially when exploring male relationships. This modern take on that mid-nineteenth century story is one that is as moving as it is bizarre. Men who are into a world unto themselves come together with the group activity of a singing competition and become a little bit less alone as a result.

Bog Queen by Anna North

I very much enjoyed this book--there are several layers of things going on, and it is beautifully packaged with a gorgeous cover. This is first the story of Agnes, a gifted American forensic anthropologist working in England, who’s early career, unsure of where she is going in life, and not getting the support from her family and friends to figure it all out. She is called to investigate a bog body pulled from the peat. At first it’s believed to be the corpse of a 20th-century murder victim, but Agnes quickly discovers that this remarkably well-preserved woman has lain below the murky surface for millennia, waiting for someone to uncover her secrets. In alternating chapters, the novel flashes back, telling the story of a young druid living in the earliest days of Roman-occupied Britain. She’s new to her role, and still discovering how best to use her power within her community. Though separated by time, these two women embark on parallel journeys, each discovering a world beyond their imagination. The book moves back and forth between who the bog woman was and what is happening in the present to figure her out. Agnes is most comfortable with what her role is vis-a-vis the dead and representing them in the present. There is a subtext of conservation, protecting bogs and their flora and fauna, and how understanding th past helps us to move forward in the present. All well told and a great read.

The Art of Protest

QuiltCon 2026 was full of quilts that expressed opinions about human rights, the erosion of democracy is the United States, the disappearance of people of color, and as a member of the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild, the terrorism being rained on us by our own government is very real. Quilting has always been about expressing yourself, and there has always been an a strong element of standing up for human rights and human dignity. The current administration has tried to make that seem political, but it is really about morals and values. I completely identify with the meme "Radicalized by Common Decency", which it turns out, is not all that common these days. Here is what the internet says about the meaning of that: "Decency is behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality, respectability, and modesty. It acts as a foundational, everyday moral baseline for social interaction, fostering dignity through kindness, empathy, and respect. It is often described as the "common decency" required for proper, polite, or ethical, respectful behavior." Not happening in the White House these days, and no one, not my elected officials at least, are saying boo about it. I call or write regularly and not once have they advocated the decent thing. Our schools are gutted and we have successfully made Iowa an unsafe place for women of reproductive age to live, we are sealing our own fate by our lack of common decency, and we are now gutting our workforce by being unwelcoming of immigrants who do the labor that our citizens shun. In the meantime, we protest. I bought this quilt at QuiltCon because I know the woman who made it. She was an exchange student in Germany many years ago, and she was impressed by how strongly they teach their hisotry to avoid repeating it. We in the US are trying to bury ours, and instead it will bury us.

Radium Girls by Kate Moore

This is a book of pain--chronicling the horrors of what happened to young women who worked with radium and very painful to read the account of it. Almost every page contains an example of suffering: a disintegrating lower jaw that falls from its owner’s mouth onto the breakfast table; a sarcoma the size of a grapefruit growing on a chin; skin rendered so thin that it splits open at the touch of a fingernail. Those afflicted were almost exclusively young women who had, in the two decades after 1917, been employed by two separate companies (in New Jersey and Illinois) painting watches, clocks and military instruments with a luminous mixture containing a tiny amount of radium. They were paid well for what was regarded as glamorous and exciting work; some would find themselves earning more even than their fathers. What they did not know then was that they were also ingesting a substance that, once it had infiltrated their bones, would work slowly but surely to destroy them from the inside. The second half of the book is about the physicians who finally figured out that while a small amount of targeted radiation could cure a patient, the amount the women ingested was poisoning them and once that was discovered, the lengths that the company went to to avoid compensating them, as well as not preventing it from happening to others. Their eventual success in court led to reforms in the work place that made it possible to work more safely on the Manhattan Project, and with radioactive material in the future. It is a harrowing tale and a difficult read.