Quartet In Autumn by Barbara Pym

Someone asked me recently where I get ideas for the books that I read, and I gave what was probably too long an answer for what the asker was looking for, and quite sparse for the reality of the myriad of pathways into getting on my reading list, but one of them is Ann Patchett's If You Haven't Read It Is New To You Friday vlog series, where she and various authors who come to her store to do events offer up books that you m ight have overlooked--which is often the case for me, and this is one such book. If you ever start to think you are well read, check this series out, it will tether you back to the earth immediately. I am more or less immune to those thoughts because I live in a UNESCO City of Literature, where practically every third person on the street has read more than I have, and that is bolstered by the undergraduate population, who are young and haven't yet had the time. In any case, this gem from 1968 comes from that source. The book centers on Letty, Edwin, Marcia and Norman — four ageing clerks working in the same unspecified London office, all on the verge of retirement and all living alone. This book is not cluttered up with unrequited love, or indeed any love at all. The four main characters’ lives are drained of love. That one of them once offered to make a cup of tea for one of the others is what counts for kindness and warmth in their desiccated lives. Yet we gradually develop an affection for them as we watch them live out their isolated existences — especially over Christmas, when they somehow get through the dreaded day alone or foisted on charitable relatives or neighbours. Very gradually we realise that, really, they have no one in the world there for them but each other. Every scene in this novel manages to be simultaneously hilarious and almost unbearably bleak. And yet, here I am, recommending it to you.

Jardin Bosque de Chapultapec, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a beautiful and quite peaceful garden that is near to museums in Mexico City. We like to take some time to read outdoors when we are traveling, and this was a perfect spot to do that. It is generally believed that the Chapultepec Botanical Garden originated during the reign of Nezahualcoyotl. The Chapultepec complex was known as a natural reserve for the rulers of Tenochtitlan and the Triple Alliance. It is almost certain that some plants were cultivated here for medicinal and food purposes. This modern version was inaugurated in 2006 covering 5.3 ha reserved within the park. A magnificent landscape, today it houses a valuable collection of native and introduced plants. Since 2016, the garden has been rehabilitated and cared for by the organization Plantando con Causa A.C.. They have brought in world-class landscapers, botanists, horticulturists and biologists to meticulously restore some 22 unique environments within the garden. In 2017, the garden boasted more than 300 varieties of plants, distributed as follows: Pollination plants Edible plants Succulents Wetland plants 14 species of wild dahlias Agaves Cactaceae Orchids And an arbor There are also other plants. It is a critical part of Chapultepec’s landscape, and much like the day we were there, it is not usually crowded.

A Far Flung Life by M. L. Stedman

The author's second book was worth the wait. It is also set in Western Australia and is as steeped in moral ambiguity as her first. It is also deep in calamity, careening from one to another throughout the book and across the years, and once again (as with her first) there is a big secret that propels a lot of decisions and events that follow. It begins in 1958 and follows several generations of the MacBride family on their million-acre sheep ranch, Meredith Downs. Here, small decisions have vast consequences: when the patriarch, Phil, swerves to avoid a kangaroo while driving home from the market, he and his eldest son, Warren, are killed. Matt, the youngest son, only just survives. Lorna, suddenly a widow, takes over the reins of the ranch, now the sole parent not only of Matt, whose amnesic head injury forces him to redefine who he is and the life he had once hoped for, but also of her spirited daughter, Rosie. The book has loss and regret at it's core, and is preoccupied by what governs our understanding of right and wrong, as well as how we define our sense of family and identity. It is atmospheric, deep, and unsettling, all in a very good way.

Green Rhino Bakery, Mexico City, Mexico

This bakery is world class. It comes from star baker Richard Hart, renowned for his bakery Hart Bageri, with multiple locations in Copenhagen, and is his first bakery in North America. It opened in July of this year in a new building in Roma Norte. The space is huge. A wall of glass at the front, a pastry counter, and up a ramp, a small seating area that looks over the bakery floor, expansive and busy, which includes a lamination room, a walk-in freezer, and ovens the size of a studio apartment. Workers mill about, shaping loaves and filling trays. And the line can wrap around the block. There is a rotating cast of pastries, cookies, danishes, rolls, buns, and laminated numbers, which are very, very rich (likely half of their weight is butter) and shatteringly crisp. Look for those with fresh fruit to offset the fat and the savory ‘nudja and requeson rectangle. The bread is exceptional: deeply browned loaves, speckled with pepitas, seeds, and bran, with a sour, open-crumbed interior, begging for a thick smear of salted butter. For this style of sourdough, high-hydration with a robust, chewy crust, it is simply the best in Mexico City (and priced fairly, to boot). For beverages there is coffee, tea, frappes made with coconut water, matcha, and hot chocolate. There are also merch, jams, spreads, and fancy teas, from his romantic partner, the “raretealady" Henrietta Lovell, plus his James Beard-award-winning cookbook for sale.

It's In His Kiss by Julia Quinn

I am going to have to stop saying that I don't much read romance novels because here I am, seven deep in the Bridgerton novels, and I am still going strong. i am going to have to go with I dabble in romance, and when I do, I tend to enjoy it. The suspension of belief is no more central to this genre than the murder mystery genre, which I read deeply and widely in (like all my life, every day, year in and year out for over 50 years kind of serious). Hyacinth comes in to her own--finally. Of all the Bridgertons I have the least sense of her, up until now at least. She has a close relationship with Lady Danbury, which is a great plot line--we know Lady Danbury well and she is famous for not suffering fools and being completely up front about it, damn the consequences, so we know that when she loves both her grandson Gareth St. Clair and Hyacinth with equal zeal that they will find their way to each other. Gareth is loathed by his father because he is not his own child--there is a pretty happy story behind that that they discover much later, so he is left to fend for himself. He will inherit the estate but it is in ruins because his haughty father has a gambling problem and is a terrible estate manager to boot. Hyacinth is the opposite--her family is big and loving and it is the perfect unbrella for Garth to shelter under and thrive. This is a fun story, one with some unexpected turns, and I am more sad that the series will soon splinter into something else because we have only one Bridgerton sibling left to marry off.

Phone A Quilty Friend

I oversubscribed to Block Of The Months in 2026--which will make 2027 the year that I finish the 2026 BOM's, but in the meantime I am pretending to try to keep up, and the single best thing for my quilting productivity is a group sew in on Zoom. I was saying at the last one I attended that this alone is worth the price of admission for me in my Modern Quilt guild. Do not get me wrong, I love the monthly speakers, especially the ones that we can record and watch within the next week if for whatever reason we cannot make the meeting. I am often so inspired by them, and occasionally go on to take a class or buy a pattern. I also love the access the the national Modern Quilt Guild's website--there is so much education and inspiration there I have yet to scratch the surface on what is available. And the list goes on. All told, though, the ability to sit in my sewing room--which I had to move to the dining room because my ability to sew in a small space expired sometime in the last decade. I seriously made my whole family eat outside on a muggy, cicada deafening night recently rather that clear off the table!--and sew with guildmates over ZOom is priceless to me. I have spent hours doing tasks that are hard to accomplish alone. The Pink Door Amish With A Twist quilt has squares that require a dozen or more different fabrics be cut out, who can face that solo, I ask you. And yet here I am, having cut out all the blocks for the current month while catching up with a friend wrangling her pink scraps--neither of us is done, but we both made progress and we caught up with each other as well. It is possible that I like it as much as in person sewing--the upside is that I do not have to move my stuff--I did get a cart a year ago to make the transport easier, and I do go to in person workshops and love them too, but at the end of the day, Zoom actually works better for me. I not only love it, I am inspired by it as well. Try it and see--especially if you are struggling to find your sewjo.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

This is an unusual book. It is part memoir, part fiction, part essay and the lines between them are blurry at best. The author says that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last installment of a writing career that spans 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction (much like fellow Booker Prize author John Banville). Another is the author's own mortality--he has been diagnosed with a chronic blood cancer, something permanent and disabling but probably not leading to his ultimate demise. So now for the fiction--at the center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse Julian of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Julian's defense is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true that the author has spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth. So this is a fitting end but a less than usually satisfying Barnes novel.

Voicemails For Isabelle (2026)

Is texting or calling and leaving voicemails on your dead loved ones phone a thing? This is the second movie that I have watched where the bereaved woman has lost the love of her life, and the person who now has that phone number--in both cases a work phone that is newly issued to them, because no one would believe a grown up would not already have a personal phone--receives the messages and proceeds to not just fall for the person, but pursue them romantically. So then there is the tricky part--how do you break it to them that this is not an accident, that they fell for you based on what you said to a person no longer with us and searched for you without it sounding creepy? For me it seems no more creepy than lots of other ways that people meet and hook up, but that's just me. I very much liked this-- Zoey Deutch as Jill is a fun, mouthy, talented woman who grew up with a sister with cystic fibrosis. She was deeply attached to her and their relationship was home-based and yet very rich. They have a tradition of leaving each other irreverant voicemails that are endearing and hilarious. When Izzie dies, Jill is devestated and to help with her grieving, she keeps it up, only now instead of Izzie, Wes is listening to them. He falls hard for her and goes about finding her and getting to know her, and it is a fun story about how Jill gets both her career and her love life back on track.

John of John by Douglas Stuart

This is a cautionary tale of what not to do as a parent. The prodigal son, 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, returns to his childhood home, where his father is not just unhappy to see him, but detests everything about him, all the while expecting him to stay and take over the croft. There are undercurrents of domineering ownership that are not just distasteful, they are suffocating even for a straight man, much less a closeted gay one. Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community of farmers, weavers and fishers in what appears to be the 1990s, John of John tells the story of Cal’s uneasy homecoming. It’s an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence. Wearied by his ultraconservative environment, where connection feels out of reach, Cal takes a fancy to his dad’s sole friend, confirmed bachelor Innes MacInnes. Cal is struck by Innes’s “gentleness, his benevolence--but it cannot be, because his father and Innes have been lovers since they were teens. The irony in this intimate yet epic tale, with equal parts drama, familial fracture, love and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world. Do not miss this, it is alarming and telling.

Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City, Mexico

This is such a gorgeous musem. It is among the biggest museums of its kind in Latin America, witn an extraordinary collection focuses on the evolution of modern art in Mexico, especially with the Mexican School of Painting and the Breakaway Generation. In the equally beautifulChapultepec Park, the museum is housed in two circular buildings with two floors each and divided into four halls, and a gallery. You walk in and are immediatelywowed by how spectacular the design is. A remarkable sculpture garden connects the two buildings. The Xavier Villaurrutia and Carlos Pellicer halls allow visitors to admire the museum’s considerable permanent collection. This includes works by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo, among others. Other halls are used for temporary exhibitions which display parts of the museum’s collection curated under varying themes and topics. These exhibitions often reach some considerable international notoriety. The MAM plays an important role in research and investigation related to modern and contemporary art. Having opened in 1964 with an exhibition of works by Rufino Tamayo, the buildings were completed based on a design by the architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Carlos A. Cazares Salcido of the University of Sonora. They worked in collaboration with Rafael Mijares Alcérreca. The main body of the museum takes an organic form, curved in parallel to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was intended to respond to the landscape and surrounding undulating trees. It’s also, importantly, always been understood as a highly modern capstone to the country’s modernization process. Having been designed, built, and opened at the very peak of the Mexican economic miracle, also part of the museum's story.