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.

Perfectly A Strangeness (2024)

This quiet and strangely beautiful short documentary is nominated for a 2026 Academy Award. The film maker has done this before, or something like it. In her 2017 feature length documentary Cielo, which was also shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, her cameras follow the simple, sauntering gait of the donkeys to allow audiences to take in vast mountainous terrains by day and by night the marvels of the Milky Way filling the Atacama Desert sky. She is aware that light pollution that keeps most people from seeing starlit galaxies at night, recalled the first time she saw the cosmic movements in the Atacama Desert nighttime sky. This time around we follow the donkey trio, where they come upon a building--no people, no vehicles, just the building. Her cameras did interior shots at the Paranal Observatory run by a consortium of European astronomers at around 2,635 meters above sea level. The whole experience of watching these eerily calm animals saunter in and around the observatory, never seeing anything--no food, no water, where do they get sustenance? It left me with more questions than answers, but also at peace.

Myers + Chang At Home by Joanne Chang

This cookbook, which came out in 2017, but my Facebook Cookbook Group featured it as the cookbook of the month in November, 2025, at which point I found it. Joanne Change has written several baking books, of which Pastry Love is the one we have cooked out of most, but this one is full of recipes from the upscale Chinese restaurant she and her husband have in Boston. She grew up eating only Chinese food and was well into elementary school before she had more typically American food, so she comes from a different food tradition than many of us do--she met her spouse when she was cooking in a restaurant after college, and this is a blend of what they like. So if you are looking for a more traditional approach this is not it--Kenji's The Wok is the book for you, or give Fuchsia Dunlop's oeuvre a whirl--Every Grain of Rice is a good starting place. What I very much appreciate about this book is the non-traditional dipping sauces they have because they are unlike others, and we as a family really love a good dipping sauce. We often buy frozen dumplings at the nearby Asian market, and are satisfied with the quality when we steam then fry them up, but then have to cobble together an acceptable sauce, and having another place to start to do that is a big plus to our cookbook collection. I was able to buy this used for under $10, which is another plus.

Marty Supreme (2025)

On the surface this film, nominated in 9 categories for an Academy Award in 2026, including best casting, tells the story of a gifted but impoverished table tennis hustler in 1950s New York, who wants nothing more than to leave his parent’s shoe shop behind to showcase his ping-pong skills on the world stage. Played at full throttle by Timothée Chalamet, Marty Mauser is a motormouth, sharp in both wits and tongue. He’s selfish, manipulative, and not particularly nice to women, but boy can he smack a ball over a netted table. In fact, there are really no likable characters in this movie--while I can tolerate that for the greater good of the message, that too is lacking here. So, Marty goes to London for the British championship after cobbling together enough cash, where he ends up playing the world’s best, Koto Endo (played by the real-life player Koto Kawaguchi) from Japan. It goes badly, so Marty returns to America, determined to have another stab at glory, all the while shunning anything that looks like real work or responsibility. To do that, he just needs to raise more money. In the meantime, he impregnates his former flame, who happens to also be married to another man, seduces and exploits a sad, faded movie star, and lets down his best friend as he begs, borrows and steals his way back to the Big Leagues. The antics that he goes through to get to Japan for another chance are the core of the movie, and only at the end do we see where he begins to have a chance to make it big. The character Marty Mauser is loosely based on the real-life ping-pong hustler Marty Reisman—a fascinating, colorful and complex man. He died in 2012 at 82 years old of lung and heart complications and at one point was the champion of the world. Chalomee as Marty is believable if unlikable and stands a shot at Best Actor, but really, he should have won last year for the way he completely inhabited the character of Bob Dylan, and not for this.

West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

This was recommended to me, and somehow I didn't manage to find the magic in it. One hundred and five-year-old WWII vet Woodrow Wilson Nickel realizes his days are numbered and urgently begins writing down his memories of traveling from New York City to San Diego with a pair of young giraffes. They are headed to the San Diego Zoo, which is starting to build it's animal collection to what becomes a world renowned zoo. Most of the book takes place in October 1938. America is still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl that devastated the heartland. Woody was then a 17-year-old orphan from the Texas panhandle who has fled the dust to live with his uncle in NYC. A powerful hurricane leaves him orphaned once again. That same hurricane hit the ship the giraffes were traveling on and left the female giraffe with a wounded leg. Really, it’s a miracle the giraffes survived at all and that just added to their mystique. The giraffes are celebrities, a bright spot in a grim world, and the press adoringly chronicles their cross-country journey. There are a surprising number of hurdles to overcome when transporting very large animals over a very large distance, and you can imagine some of the regional challenges that might come up, all of which are not surprisingly overcome, but are heart stopping at times. Lots of people loved this book and I liked it well enough.

A Friend Of Dorothy (2025)

I loved this. There is a lot going on here, and it is packed into a short film. After losing his football in her yard, black teenager JJ finds a friend in Dorothy, an elderly white and middle-class widow who lives by herself and needs aid in opening a stubborn can of prunes. Their platonic bond is strengthened as Dorothy—who owns a wide library of plays and once funded the education of aspiring drama students along with her late husband—fosters JJ’s inner theatre kid by requesting him to read out a play to her whenever he visits. It is a no-brainer that Dorothy acts as a maternal figure and looking out for JJ’s best interests. Simultaneously, the movie serves as a love letter to the arts. Dorothy helps the young, budding actor out of his shell and gain confidence in his true passion—encouraging him to consider theatre as a serious career rather than merely pursuing it as a hobby. And this is the part I missed until I read a review of the movie--the colloquial term ‘A friend of Dorothy’ which initially was used as a code within the community during an era when homosexuality was deemed illegal, also takes on a renewed meaning here. Due to their friendship, open-minded Dorothy introduces her new friend to n historic play which challenges homophobic persecution and celebrates queerness or being ‘different’, further allowing JJ to be comfortable in his own skin. Then there is the way Dorothy's family treats her, which is as a doddering old woman to be placed in supervised living so they can worry about her even less than they do now--no wonder she fostered her friendship with JJ--not only did he open her prune can for her, the one thing she can't do that she needs to stay in her own home--but he also sees her as a teacher and a person worthy of his attention. This is nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards in the Short Live Action film category and is well worth your time.