Tatanka Tavern, Driggs, Idaho

The view here is spectacular--sitting on the third floor gives one a spectacular view of the valley, and while that is not enough to bring you here, it is a nice perk. This has some interesting beer on tap and a limited but enjoyable menu. We have tried the stuffed mushroom appetizer and it is very goos, and the salad selections are good, and my favorite is that you can get them small for yourself or large to share with the table. But the pizza is the star of the show. There is another pizza place that can contend for the best pizza place in the neighborhood, but having tried them both this is our favorite. The wood fired oven is a plus, but the toppings are interesting and the crust is thin but not too thin, and both times we have eaten here we have left happy. You can build your own, but the combinations on offer are quite good.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

This is a classic, and one (of many) that I somehow missed along the way. It was the author's debut novel, published when she was just 23 years old. She and her husband Reeves McCullers were penniless, awaiting the last portion of the advance on the book so that they, both aspiring writers, could move to New York City. Reeves had gone off to work on a boat on Nantucket island and McCullers had little premonition of the literary sensation the book would become – or how completely it would transform her life. It was published in the summer of 1940. Despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, the depredations of the Great Depression had sucked hope from America’s bones, birthed a generation that had only known want and that was skeptical of the possibility of change and the United States was on the cusp of entering the war raging in Europe and Asia. The book is set in the time it was written in a poor Georgia mill town. The cast of characters is: There is Mick, tomboyish, dreaming of taking lessons so that she may learn to compose music. There is Jake, labor agitator, often seeking and never finding, in between bouts of drunkenness. There is Doctor Copeland, dignified and well-read, who engrosses himself in Black liberation through his studies and finds that he can no longer understand his children, his people. There is Biff, owner of the New York Café, always watchful and worried. They each struggle with feelings of isolation, the sense that no one shares their concern and yet none of them connect with each other. Instead they reach out to John Singer, a deaf man who works understands speech by reading lips. Because he does not speak, Singer rarely interrupts, and the others—rather ironically it turns out—come to view him as a good listener. It is a sad story about a sad time that we hope not to return to.

American Symphony (2023)

I am sorry that this movie did not make the cut from the short list of Best Documentary to the nominated list this past year, but it is a very good documentary. It follows Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s band leader and the Oscar winner for the movie "soul", for a year. I think to start it was to see the creative process unfold, which does happen, but what also happens is that the musician's long time partner, Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms about her diagnosis and recovery from leukemia, marries him and then her cancer relapses. So there is the creation and the pain, the growth and the contraction of their lives. Batiste comes across as both visionary and very human. I read a review that knocked this as not going deeply enough into either the creative process that went into Batiste's American Symphony nor into the fear and grief that cancer begets, but having walked on the path of the later, both personally and with a loved one, this is pretty evocative of that process, and how to do it authentically but also to survive it. I really enjoyed this.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Lots of people found this to be an immersive satirical novel takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the eyes of a writer who struggles to make her own way in the cut-throat world of publishing. It was the reader's fiction choise for Goodreads, and the New York Times put is on their Notable Books list for 2023; it found critical acclaim elsewhere as well. I, on the other hand, did not care for it. I am not much for satire, of course, and that could be the heart of my problem with it, but I just found it cringe worthy, not eye opening. The plot it this: a young white author who steals the manuscript of her dead Asian friend, finishes it, and publishes it as her own. She works to maintain the lie that her first big hit novel The Last Front, a story about Chinese workers in the British Army during WWI, is indeed her work and her work only--she is convincing both the reader and herself. The irony is that not only does she face accusations of theft and plagiarism, but the optics of a white woman writing about and therefore profiting off the work of an Asian event, which creates a platform for accusations of racism. The issues with who can write about what being taken to an extreme are well presented, but I struggled with the unfortunate series of events and where the story landed as a result.

New Taste of India, West Liberty Iowa

This is another roadside attraction on I-80--the availability of Indian food close to the highway and adjacent to a gas station is something we have done in Nebraska but this is a first for us in Iowa. It is not much to look at on the outside--it looks like it is closed! And it is a little hard to find, even. The decor is decidedly unchanged from the last inhabitants, and it is geared more to those picking up takout than wanting the dine in option. That said, it is friendly and very accomodating of our party of 9 which included four generations and ranged in age from 1 to almost 90.

There were some great options on the menu. Starting with the rice, which was fluffy and perfectly cooked. That and the garlic naan were real highlights, because they are something you are going to eat no matter what you order. The vegetable samosas were similarly good, nothing special exactly, but very good--we were less thrilled with the samosa chat and would skip it next time. The butter chicken and the chicken korma were both exceptionally good--we ordered more to take home to help finish off the the other dishes we had leftover. I enjoyed this meal more than any I have had recently in Iowa City, and it is well worth a stop if you are traveling through.

The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

The first book that I read by this author was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (which I admit is an award I have been remiss in not reading the nominees for, but started righting that this year and there is some truly great literature to be found in it)--he is Chilean and someone who not only writes but thinks deeply. This is a fictionalized portrait of the visionary Hungarian scientist, John von Neumann, who contributed to the Manhattan Project and laid the foundations of modern computing is a darkly intelligent and yet propulsive novel. It is basically a triptych of sorts--what came before von Neumann, his part in the story, and then what comes after. The first part is the (mostly true) story of Paul Ehrenfest, a brilliant Austrian physicist who descends into madness, murdering his fifteen-year-old son and then taking his own life. Ehrenfest feared what he saw was coming in the 20th century: the rise of fascism, the atomic bomb, the blurring lines between human and machine consciousnesses, and speaks to the reader, who is already living in a world of AI and returning totalitarianism. We move on to von Neumann, who in addition to working with Oppenheimer and being the father of Game Theory, also laid the foundations of modern computing (MANIAC is the acronym for a computer he developed) and foresaw the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Then we flash forward to the rise of AI, whose promises enrapture its developers even as they fret over its apocalyptic potential. It is excellent and kind of terrifying at the same time.

Dream Scenario (2023)

Nicolas Cage, who has navigated a lot of diverse and funny lead character portrayals in middle age, plays a nondescript evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews, who suddenly appears in the dreams of his students, daughters, and people he does not know. He doesn't do anything in their recurring dreams. He more or less just strolls through the background in his sweater and glasses, sometimes flashing his dopey, pleasant smile. Paul soon becomes a phenomenon, with people who are strangers stopping him on the street to tell him that he was in their dreams. He initially is puzzled by the attention, and then as people try to commercialize the event (inevitable) he starts to feel like he himself is important because of something that he isn’t doing and cannot control. The dreams are changing over time, which everyone could see coming, and they go from him observing to him interacting, both socially and sexually, and then the dreams turn quite graphically violent. Once you suspend belief, there are a lot of funny moments, some cringe worthy moments, and some opportunities to put yourself in Paul’s shoes and contemplate what you yourselves would do should you find yourself suddenly and for no good reason to be world famous. Do you dream of Tik Tok fame? What would that look like?

Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy

I loved this. It is a saucy Huda who is an average teenager living within a traditional Muslim family in America. She wants to blend in but she sticks out. Here is her origin story: for much of her life, Huda Fahmy, a Muslim American born and raised near Detroit, was dogged by questions about her hijab. Later, as an adult living in Houston, she was frequently asked, “Aren’t you hot in that?” The answer became the name of her comic strip, “Yes I’m Hot in This,” which Fahmy began posting on Instagram. It also became the title of her first book, a graphic novel for adults published in 2018. In this she and her family travel to Disney World--by car--and somehow manage to both survive and have fun. They are trying to adapt to a world where they stick out and are cause for concern, all while being typical teenaged girls. It is frisky and serious at the same time.

Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023)

I had never heard of Nikki Giovanni but this documentary, which has great footage of her back in the 1960's as an early 20's as she is being interviewed by James Balwin, entirely confident and contained within herself, and he clearly enjoys the interchange. The filmmakers carefully synthesize a combination of new and archival footage of Giovanni, discussing and sometimes embodying her work in her typically direct, unsentimental, and deeply moving style. The end result, for me, was to fall in love with someone who was previously unknown to me. She was one of the luminaries of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s into the 1970s, and she is now a 79-year-old who continues to address the pain and joys, the anger and resilience of the descendants of the Middle Passage, who know much about uncertain and dangerous journeys. The title of the documentary comes from something she saud, that if they want to populate outer space they need to send black women, because they have been getting it done for centuries. It’s genuinely refreshing to see Giovanni celebrated for having a personality that extends beyond her youth into her elder years. Yes, she’s rightfully shown speaking to and lighting up auditoriums full of fans, many of whom are Black women, but not just because they presumably share similar experiences or skin color. Rather,the filmmakers show and contextualize scenes of Giovanni’s public appearances, some televised and others filmed at recent speaking engagements, as proof of her animating presence. It’s one thing to hail Giovanni as an iconic presence and another to show her talk about and exemplify the qualities that have made her and her work so indispensable. The scenes where she reads her poetry are particularly good, and this is well worth watching.

The Sharper Your Knives, The Less You Cry by Kathleen Finn

This memoir claims to be about chronicles the author’s journey to fulfill her dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the world’s most famous cooking school. Unfortunately, to my ear, it isn't so much about that as it was about her personal life, which included not being happy in her job, struggling with intimacy, and not being able to relax and enjoy living in a foreign country where she did not speak the language. She also went to Le Cordon Bleu, but other than a recipe at the end of each chapter, there really isn't much in the way of details or reflection on that experience. That disappointed me because while I do not share the dream of attending cooking school in Paris, I did pick up the book to figure out what that was all about. I did pretty quickly figure out that this would not go on to my bucket list of things to do--I was pretty sure it wouldn't, because while I would love to live in France, I do not want to live in Paris, and cooking school would be enough of a struggle for me, I would want that to be in English. The only thing that surprised me from this is that there is a translator, so you can actually do it as a non-French speaker--no, that did not change my already made up mind. The parts of this book that are not about cooking were, for me, unsatisfying, a little melodramatic, and a lot like things I do not relate to and don't need to dig further into. So on the whole, I would not recommend this.