We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

There is so much going on in this short novel that was long-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2026. The Argentinian author has written a tale that is based on a true story and contains a healthy amount of magical realism that is a good if somewhat disorienting at times read. The book reconstructs the wild, surreal life of Antonio de Erauso, a 17th-century Basque nun who escaped the convent, lived as a man, and became a soldier, conquistador, and outlaw. It opens as Antonio, hiding deep in the rainforest of the New World, writes letters to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he once escaped. Having rescued two young Guaraní girls from enslavement and facing pursuit from the colonial army he deserted, Antonio reflects on his monumental metamorphosis. The setting sharply contrasts the stagnant, rigid conventions of the Spanish Empire with the vibrant, magical "seething" life of the South American jungle. All told, it is a queer positive satire and a powerful subversion of Latin American history as told by Spain. It serves as an understated critique of colonialism, religious tyranny, and the brutal subjugation of Indigenous people. As an example, Antonio goes to Potosí, where historical estimates suggest that up to 8 million indigenous people and enslaved Africans died working in the mines there in Bolivia during the colonial era but that horror is understated at best in this recounting.

The Lost Bus (2025)

I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that this movie was nominated in the area of special effects for the 2026 Academy Awards and it certainly fits that bill. It is a "telling the story of a disaster" movie, which adheres largely to the facts even if some of the people and their circumstances are changed. This is about the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which went from a small fire to a devestating fire in no time at all, aided and abetted by dry conditions and very high wind. Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) is a relatively new school bus driver, back in Paradise for a number of reasons and struggling. He answers a call from his dispatcher to pick up 23 kids at an elementary school and get them to safety. At first, it doesn’t seem that difficult, but everyone in the area of Paradise, California, underestimated how quickly this blaze would move and how hard it would be to evacuate as it did. Stuck in traffic with enough smoke in the air to block the sun, Kevin and a teacher named Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) do their best to keep the kids calm, even as their own panic rises. Cutting through traffic, trying shortcuts, and blocking the children from seeing people literally on fire. The actual action of is white-knuckle riveting. It’s powerfully immersive stuff, so much so that while there isn’t a bus of children actually avoiding a deadly blaze, the viewer gets so caught up in the immediacy of what they are facing that it is hard to watch and hard to look away. There’s a scene where Mary actually gets off the bus to find water that will had me wanting to yell at her to get back to the bus--NOW. THe bad news is that the beginning of the movie is completely unnecessary and clunky. We do not need to know Kevin's backstory to care about whether he gets these kids, himslef and the teacher to safety. Instead of glossing over that we spend quite a bit of time learning Kevin recently underwent a bitter divorce, his teenage son hates him, his mother is cognitively declining, and icing on the life stressor cake, his dog died. Ugh, really? Maybe it even describes the real story but wow, not needed. Overall this was a good edge of your seat action movie, and if you haven't seen it, you should watch the short documentary, Campfire, which shows actual footage of the Camp Fire and how it unfolded in real life to see just hoe true to form this rendition is.

Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead

This is an expansive look at man's interactions with birds, written by an academic ornithologist. It opens with a visit to Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras, located in Andalusia, Spain and the Neolithic bird paintings on its walls. This is an 8,000-year old depiction of flamingos, herons, raptors, avocets and many other species. Birkhead recounts the story of how the cave was discovered in the early 20th-century and then Abbé Henri Breuilsummarizes academics’ efforts to identify the 208 birds on the cave wall--I really enjoy these ancient cave paintings, and it was a good place to start from my perspective. Each chapters focuses on a chronological era and sometimes a place, through the details within often jump around in time and space. There’s the Neolithic era; Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece and Rome (Aristotle liked birds, as did Pliny and Plutarch); Medieval times (mostly falconry); the Renaissance; the groundbreaking classification work of Francis Willughby and John Ray in the late Renaissance; the seabirds of the Faroe Islands (an essay on the interaction between puffins, murres, fulmars and the people who kill and eat them, a delicate balance first observed by a Danish priest in the mid-17th-century); the 19th-century ideological explosion that followed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species ; the Victorian Era’s obsession with the collecting of bird skins and eggs ; the development of field-based ornithological research in Europe and Great Britain; a quick step back through the history to look at bird protection, conservation, and our precarious future, with a focus on Birkhead’s long-term Common Guillemot research at Skomer Island, Wales (which he has written about a number of times before). It is scattershot but interesting, and he is a reasonable storyteller, so it is a good way to learn more about birds if you are so inclined.

Au Table du Gourmet, Riquewihr, Alsace, France

This was one of the most intensely herbal meals I have ever had and I loved it. They have a massive garden and they are not afraid to use it. The chef, Jean-Luc Brendel, describes himself as a chef, a gardiner, and a poet. All of this is evident in the food on offer at this gorgeous restaurant. From their own website: A chef's total commitment to sustainable and responsible gastronomy, in homage to nature and to his land of Alsace. Because the expression "cultivating one’s own garden" could have taken root here, Jean-Luc Brendel does a lot of the gardening, composts, selects, raises chickens and produces honey. He is the author of a spontaneous, fresh and free cuisine, a cuisine of the essential, of cultivated or wild products, of emotions and travels, and he signs his plates in green. Emotional upheaval and eco-responsibility.

The town itself if worth exploring and there are places to try the regional wines just around the corner from the restaurant. Riquewihr is a picturesque medieval village in the Alsace region of northeastern France, famous for its well-preserved 16th-century architecture, colorful half-timbered houses. So very cute, if also remarkably crowded with tourists, at least the older part of the town is pedestrian only. Really lovely, despite not having been discovered by us

In Her Defense by Phillipa Malicka

I am torn about this one. It raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of therapy combined with a hint about the training and regulation of therapists, but it ultimately did not answer the important ones, in my mind at least. The book opens with a court battle between a celebrity and an untrained therapist, but there are underlying mysteries that involve two other women. In London, the center of the trial is a woman named Mary. On one side is Mary’s mother, Anna Finbow, a beloved TV star but also not mother-of-the-year material, and Mary’s charismatic, controlling therapist, Jean Guest, whose unorthodox methods appear to be predatory and cultish. Neither are reliable witnesses, but least reliable of all is the book’s narrator, Augusta Bird, Anna’s former dog walker. She was coming off a bad breakup when she first found employment with Anna, but her loneliness and depression don’t explain some shifty behaviors. The timing was odd as well; the trial was approaching and Anna hadn’t seen Mary in years. Gus, poor and with no family support, is sympathetic and suspicious at the same time. And what does Mary have to do with it? Eventually, chapters go back in time to show these characters’ complex lives and the depths they suffer. But these portraits are keenly observed—and show why they are vulnerable to predation. As the book goes on, more and more questions arise about victimhood, power, perspective. Many are unanswered, and at no point is the issue of the power that therapists can wield and why training and regultion is so important, so as a mental health professional, I was ultimately dissatisfied with the outcome.

Anaconda (2026)

Let's start off by acknowledging that this movie is really awful. I watched it on a Transatlantic flight, which is the ideal setting for slightly less than spectacular movies whose main goal is to pass the time--so even in an ideal detting the end result is that this movie was terrible. It is billed as a meta-reboot of the original Anaconda, and aims to trade earnest horror for goofy self-aware comedy. It stars Jack Black as Doug and Paul Rudd as Griff and with their down-on-their-luck friends who set out to make an indie reboot of the 1997 classic, only to get trapped in the jungle with a real, giant CGI snake. Their partners in this endeavor are film making friends from their high school days, also with star power (Thandie Newton and Steve Zahn) and nothing, not even them, can save this. The original was (reportedly) a silly movie that knew it was silly. This new Anaconda begins life as a silly movie but then turns less silly and more absurd, and that’s when it becomes even less compelling than wehre is started. When the focus is on the scrappy movie within the movie, it’s good for the occasional laugh. However, throughout the movie the dialogue is terrible, and the acting is unable to save it, despite the presense of actors that I usually find entertaining.

Familia by Laura Rico

This was a The Community Reads book for my town, where there are unlimited electronic copies of the book for a period of time, and I was able to listen to it while I was doing (and am doing ) extensive PT after surgery, and I enjoyed it in a light fiction sort of genre. Here's the story: Gabby is an aspiring writer who lives in Brooklyn and works for the feature magazine Flux, where she and other staff members are offered the opportunity to take free familial DNA tests. Gabby’s charming boss, Max, hopes that some of the results will lead to a story of some sort. And they do: though Gabby insists that she is of Italian heritage, her DNA profile indicates European, African, and Taino ancestry. Gabby’s parents are deceased, so she cannot discuss the perplexing results with them; she’s also unnerved by her newfound DNA link to an older sister, Isabella, in Puerto Rico whose sister was kidnapped as a baby. She is so unnerved that even though she insists that it is a mistake, she ends up quitting her job and going to Puerto Rico to look into it further. The book shifts between Gabby and Isabella’s perspectives. Gabby was raised as an adored only child in New York, Gabby attended private school and traveled in Europe--she cannot imagine that her parents would kidnap a child and raise it as their own, and her birth certificate bears that out. In Puerto Rico, Isabella grew up with an alcoholic, heroin-addicted father; she witnessed her mother’s childbirth-related death and endured a violent sexual assault when she was fifteen. Now a talented artist who also works at a tourist shop, streetwise Isabella is thrilled by the possible discovery of a long-lost sibling. Together they untangle the truth.

Domaine Marcel Deiss, Bergheim, Alsace, France

And so we start our education of Alsace wines! We are staying on the edge of the Rue du Vin, and spent the day driving through charming villages. Our first tasting was at Domaine Marcel Deiss. Domaine Marcel Deiss ranks among the great wine estates of Alsace. The Deiss family—a lineage comprising winemakers, ironworkers, and bell founders—has been established in Bergheim since 1744. This was a great introduction to the wines of Alsace--we spent almost 2 hours tasting wine, learning about the wine growing history of Alsace, and how to approach the different wines that are characteristic of the region.

Domaine Marcel Deiss was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, in 1947. The creation of the vineyard was the work of Marcel Deiss who has been joined by his son André, to establish an extensive wine estate based in Bergheim. They scoured the records left by the monks who had been growing grapes for wine for centuries, and discovered there used to be 130 different grape varieties—of which 110 survived to modern times and they grow 60 in their vineyards, bucking the trend of Alsace tradition that one grape from one vineyard makes a wine . His descendants—first Jean-Michel, then Mathieu Deiss—subsequently took over the family operation. Since 1997, every single parcel of the Domaine Marcel Deiss estate has been farmed biodynamically. We had fun, we learned a lot and I love their use of medieval art to label their wine.

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

I think this is a book that you either love or hate, and when you look at the reviews on line, you will see that it strikes hard but it is not always well received. I really enjoyed this, although I sympathize with those who do not. Theo is an elderly man who is quietly and smartly friendly, who notices things around him, and is prone to random acts of kindness in the town of Golden. He pretty quickly finds himself with a close group of friends who are as excentric as they are likable. He has an eye for art, and one of the things he sets about doing is buying portraits that have been drawn by a local artist and currently hang in a high quality coffee shop in town. He decides to buy them, a few at a time, and gift them to the subjects, who he feels should rightfully own them. They are modestly priced, and he starts with just a few, inviting the person to a mysterious but entirely public meeting to bestow them. Throughout the story we catch glimpses of who Theo was before he moved to Golden, but less about why he is there. All is revealed in the end, and I found the whole package to be enjoyable. I listened to the book, which is perhaps part of why it held my attention, but overall, I found it uplifting despite the sometimes very sad things that happen.

Solo Mio (2026)

We watched this romantic comedy on a Transatlantic flight, and if for no other reason, it should be seen because Andrea Bocelli, the celebrated Italian tenor, performs in it. As far as I can tell, this is his first appearance in a movie that is not about him or his life. Matt, played by Kevin James, is left at the alter at his destination wedding in Rome. As so often happens in a romantic comedy, even one that involves middle aged heartbreak, he goes on the honeymoon solo mio, and as luck would have it, one of the locals who is determined to salvage it for him is a relative of the famous opera singer. This is a kind of run of the mill movie for this genre, but like another movie I watched this year, the appearance of a world class musical performer helps to transform the story to another level.