The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

The short review is that this is a version of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain with a feminist view and a spin at the end. Like the original, sometimes it feels like it gets a bit bogged down in the mundane. Mieczyslaw Wojnicz is a young engineering student who has arrived in the village of Gorbersdorf to stay at a famed sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. He is staying at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, slightly removed from the main campus, along with a motley crew of other patients, all in varying stages of illness. Wojnicz is an awkward man who is very sensitive to the atmosphere around him. He witnesses something startling on his first day at the Guesthouse letting us know that this place may not be as it seems and the sense of unease steadily grows. The misogyny is lethal in this place. Wojnicz’s days at sanatorium quickly follow a pattern. He visits the doctor, he and the other patients go for walks in the woods, he rests. In the evenings, they gather together at the Guesthouse and drink a liquor made from hallucinogenic mushrooms and discuss their great ideas--all of which leave him as low man on the totem pole, just one rung above women--barely. The reality of the place is slow dawning and devastating.

Quilt As Art: Valuing Our Work, Tara Faughnan

I had an inspiring time at QuiltCan in Phoenix last month, but I purposely did not attend any of the lectures. I find the whole experience to be overwhelming, for one thing. Another is that while on site, I want to spend as much time with the quilts as I can, and finally, I find the leture hall to be too big. I am naturally antsy and to be in an auditorium with row after row of people is just not my idea of fun. So streaming the lectures at home hits all the right notes for me. I took an all day class with Tara Faughnan and it was amazing to be in the room with her for a day and to see her numerous featured quilts in the exhibit hall was an added bonus. Her keynote talk walked us all through her career as a modern quilter, her lack of success in the more traditional quilt world, and how her work fit so perfectly with the modern quilting sensibility, and how nourishing that was for her as an artist. That was all great to hear, but when she talked about quilting as art, how to value what we produce, and how it connects us to generations of quilters who came before us, that really resonated with me. I love those connections, feeling like I am walking in the footsteps of earlier family members--my great grandmother quilted--and to treasure and value my deep seeded love of fabric. She talked about her own drive, which is greater and more talented than my own, but coming from the same place when all is said and done.

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

This book found it's way onto the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century. This is notable for a couple of reasons. The first is that there is very little on that list that is not fiction. I would say 10% fall into the non-fiction category and even fewer are memoirs. The other is that two of the author's works of fiction are on that list, making her unique in having two forms represented and in an elite group of authors to have three works represented. The book chronicles the deaths of five young American black men that the author knew who were dead before they were 25, one of whom was the author's brother. The causes of death are varied, and do not really touch upon police brutality nor the prevalence of white supremacists in policing across the nation. It is simply a telling of who they were, why they mattered and how their deaths affected her personally. She is bearing witness and remembering them. Such is the uncertainty that African Americans contend with in the United States in the 21st century--even before an avowed racist was returned to the White House after he was convicted of rape. That is the state of young black male life in the US and then there is the paucity of options available to so many – almost one in 10 young black men are in jail and murder is the greatest killer of black men under the age of 24. It is to these statistics that the author attempts to give both humanity and context in her memoir, in which she relates the unconnected deaths in the space of just four years of five young men who were close to her.

Creekside Market, Jackson, Wyoming

This is the first place we have eaten in Jackson that we hands down agree we would go back to. We are only eating in Jackson two to four times a year, it is not a frequent event, but often enough to be more than a little disappointed with the food we have eaten, even discounting the bang we get for our buck. We know it is a town with a lot of tourists and a lot of money, so we do not expect to find a bargain, but we do expect to find something we would return to. This market with a well above average deli counter exceeded our expectations and we would whole heartedly return. Added bonus is that it did not cost the earth. We split an Italian sub and a Reuben and both were delicious. We would 100% get the Reuben again because it was as good as any Reuben, and that is saying something. The Italian sub was a bit over-stuffed for my spouse's taste, but we both agreed that the quality of the meats included were great, and the pickles were delicious--in other words there was an attention to detail. The added bonus is that it is located right across the street from the Elk Refuge (they even sell low priced binoculars in the market should you have neglected to pack yours and be up for elk viewing)--we parked there to eat in our car while watching about 50 trumpeter swans from various distances away, including close enough to be splashed on by some.

By The Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle

This book is and is not about the 2020 McGirt SCOTUS decision that affirmed the Creek (Mvskoke) reservation and, by extension, the reservations of the Cherokee and many others. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, which opened with: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.” A surprise to me, and maybe most, and the right one. This book is about much more is about much more than the McGirt decision. It’s a comprehensive weaving together of personal memoir, a murder case, and Native history that demonstrates that the present is a loud echo of the past, diminished only by Native resistance and occasional right decisions such as the McGirt ruling. It is not so much a victory but more of a rare instance when existing law supporting tribes was actually honored and upheld by the US government. Her stories meander but act as a comprehensive analysis of stories we know well in Indian Country. Her book is an opportunity to un-erase the past in order to understand the present. This is history about Native Americans by a Native American. She tells these stories boldly, and it is important, because they are going to be actively suppressed, distorted, and misrepresented in the near future .

Brave Brilliant Beautiful Badass

My guild had the most inspirational speaker for March, someone who hit all the right notes for me. Here is Berene Campbell's description of who she is and what she does: I'm Berene, a modern quilt designer, speaker and community project instigator. My sewing patterns feature inspiring messages of positivity and hope, with the goal of making the world a kinder and more peaceful place. I am a big fan of “collective energy” and use community projects to corral fellow creatives to work together for change. These projects include awareness projects, collaborative community installations, fundraisers for social justice causes, and the Handmade Collective Awards - a bursary fund set up for the maker community to fund awards for BIPOC and 2SLGBTQ+ students. It felt so good to hear someone talking about lifting up women at a time when they are being torn down in my country. She also talked about how doing your part to do the right thing makes a difference, because even though we are all small, we add layers upon layers of support, building up upon each other to reach the goal of hope, love, peace, and treating all people equally and humanely, even the mediocre white men who want to step on us to get ahead.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This is a story of generational trauma triggered by a fictionalized account of a real life tragedy that happened to people close to the author. Fletcher family, wealthy Long Islanders whose patriarch Carl was abducted from his suburban driveway one random day as he left for work. No one knew he was missing until he didn’t come home later that day, causing his powerful mother Phyllis, his pregnant wife Ruth, and their two young sons to exhaust both themselves and all resources at their disposal until he was recovered. And Carl is rescued; found intact with nary any of the maiming and severed body parts his kidnappers threatened would happen. Emotionally, though, he was never the same. He spends the rest of his life in a sort of shell shock. His kids grow up and react to the trauma in their own ways. Eldest son Nathan is so afraid of his own shadow that he compulsively buys any kind of insurance he can find. Middle child Bernard went running as far away as he could from his parents and their town’s idyllic surroundings, becoming a mediocre screenwriter in Hollywood and lives with his own kind of fear. Youngest Jenny, who was born after Carl’s kidnapping, is the smartest offspring and is therefore the one both least and most likely to fail spectacularly. All together this could add up to something great, but I struggled to find the deeper message, beyond that it is hard to hang on to a family legacy when someone yanks the rug out from under them midstream.

September 5 (2024)

This is a dramatic retelling of the violent kidnappings of the Israeli national team by Palestinean terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. The script was nominated in the category of Best Original Screenplay and it is my last movie to watch in that category (it did not win). Most of the movie takes place inside a TV control room, where ABC Sports broadcasters faced an unprecedented crisis. The first surprise is that the lead actress from the film The Teacher's Lounge (one of last year's nominees for Best International Film) is in this as a reporter/translator who provides the link for the ABC reporting team on what is being reported on German television--she is very good, and I was glad to see her in an American movie. It is hard to remember, having lived through the first Persian Gulf War, which took place during prime time viewing hours, that there had never been a televised event like this before. It took a while to realize that if the entire world could see certain aspects of the crisis live and in real time, that meant the gunmen could also see it, adapt their tactics to counter the efforts of police, and indulge in political theater for a billion-plus viewers. The movie manages to picture the madness through what feels like both fresh eyes and period broadcasting. It make you feel like you’re in the thick of it is a remarkable achievement, even though the movie ultimately thins itself out by glossing over historical and political context and treating the incident as a primer in media ethics. Well worth watching.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

I am not into Arthurian literature, and so when I say that I very much enjoyed that, I should also add that if you are a big King Arthur fan, you might not have the same response to this. For one thing, we find out quite early that the king is missing and presumed dead, and the other is that Merlin doesn't get a candy coated Disney treatment here--he is a sexual predator with a penchant for raping young girls that he takes under his wing, which is apparently a return to tradition, but doesn't play as well now as it might once have done. The book opens with Collum, an aspiring knight hoping to join King Arthur's Round Table at Camelot, being challenged by another knight on the road, and the two engage in a heated duel. He does well and is taken in to the fold. The knights who remain now have a monumental task ahead of them: figure out who can succeed Arthur, and with Collum coming along for the ride, they work figure out how to go about identifying such a person. The non-linear adventure they embark on solving the problem of locating Arthur's successor is an examination sorts; who are the people who make up the legends and what are their motivations? It delves into questions of the nature of heroics, of leadership, of bravery, and of knowing when to hold onto the stories and when to move on from them. It's a complicated, meandering, and fascinating story.

Chez Noir, Carmel, California

I picked this out for the big splash dinner on my recent trip to the north end of the central California coast (spoiler alert--I prefer the sourthern end of the central coast--the north is just a little bit rich for my taste), and it did not disappoint. Unbeknownst to me, one of my dining companions doesn't care for high end dining. It often makes her feel belittled, which is not the look I was going for--and luckily, that did not happen here. The restaurant is actually on the first floor of the Craftsman-style house that chef Jonny Black and his wife, Monique Black, who manages the front of the house,live in. They make you feel as if you're being invited into their own home because it is their home.

The cooking draws upon French bistro fare and showcases the bounty of the California coast, with seafood, like spot-on sea bass and swoon-worthy abalone, making a big impression. If selecting from the many delectable dishes proves too difficult, opt for a set menu offering a tour of the greatest hits. For me, the abalone was unforgetable, the very best I have ever had, and I would go back to have it again and again. It is something to dream about. The next best was the agnolotti--which was on the vegetarian option side of the fixed price menu, and did not disappoint. And make sure you do not skip the the ethereal vanilla-scented canelés with an ideal balance of crisp caramelized exterior and creamy, custardy interior--better than most I had in Bordeaux!

Great Expectation by Vinson Cunningham

This story is nestled in the hope and change that many people felt when Obama was elected and came to the White House--he is a black man elected by a mostly white nation and things felt possible then. I travelled to Denmark when my son was studying aboard there, and in the SAS lounge pre-boarding there was a feeling of joy, that we could proudly travel abroad as Americans. The Danes we talked to were astounded--saying that they couldn't possibly elect a Swede, much less someone who looked so different from most of them. The hope quickly faded and it has been abundantly clear that half of us are deeply racist, that we are easily lied to, and that as a result we are in really big trouble right now. So this book, which is set within the 2008 campaign--fictionally speaking--is a bit hard to read in the face of all that. It is a story of a young campaign worker, and what the campaign trail feels like when you go from underdog to winner.

Growing Your Hair

My hair had always been the same. I grows a few inches below my shoulder when I leave it to it's own devices, which is what I had done almost all of my adult life. I cut it myself, just trimming off the ends and otherwise leaving it on its own. When I was on the verge of turning 50 I briefly though about getting a grown up hair cut, but my husband's two sisters gasped in horror and I felt like I was breaking up the band, and literally said "I'll cut it when I need chemotherapy."

And lo and behold, a decade on, I needed chemotherapy--a lot of it and for a very long time, so I was bald for two years. When that ended, I just wasn't ready to let it go back into the wild. For one thing, my cancer had a terrible prognosis and I was pretty sure I would soon be making treatment choices that would not include keeping my hair. I am so grateful to have been wrong about that, but then there were the truly trivial things. My hair was a different color (black instead of brown) and less curly--I felt completely cheated--don't people usually get curlier hair? Well, not me. So it wasn't until I was nine years out and my dad was dying that I decided to let it go once again. I am not completely back to baseline, and I am certainly loads more gray, but it overall feels like a good choice.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

This is a bit lighter hearted than a lot of this author's books, and at first I thought that made it less weighty--but then I read The Anxious Generation, and I think that this is an important reflection on where we are at nationally--well, before the take over of our democracy, that is. The story begins in 2008 within a farming community in North Dakota’s Red River Valley. The Great Recession is biting hard. Everything here that still runs, runs on sugar beets — planting them, harvesting them, trucking them, processing them. The industry has bent the whole town around the pursuit of that ubiquitous sweetener, with bitter results. The soil is depleted and instead of trying to build it up again, pesticides and genetically modified crops are the path that has been chosen. That is the background for a love triangle between Kismet, an Ojibwa teen, and two boys. Gary is the more conventional choice, although not a great one, and Hugo is less advantaged but a better person. The story is slow moving with obvious disaster written all over it, but beautifully told, and a fine addition to onve of the best American fiction writer's impressive oeuvre.

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Wow. Just wow. I first saw Bob Dylan in the early 70's when I was in high school--I was, in retrospect, lucky to have a boyfriend who was into really great music, and while Dylan had some unevenness as a performer, he is an incredibly gifted lyricist. Watching Timothee Chalomet inhabit his character for a couple of hours was amazing for me. I knew most of the story and the sequence of events--I am, afterall, a life long fan of Dylan. While I saw the Grateful Dead way way more live, I listened to Dylan's music more than any other music across my lifespan. My children know his music, at first because they had little choice, it surrounded them, and late for enjoyment. Ballads, songs that tell a story, are my favorites, and his are some of the best. So it is impossible for me to judge this a a cinematic work--I loved spending time listening to Chalomet's renditions of Dylan's songs, both musically and vocally, because it evoked all of those experiences over decades of my life, and he was pitch perfect at the details. I appreciate his dedication to his craft and how faithful to his subject he was able to be. This wasn't overwhelmingly successful on the awards circuit, but it was one of the most enjoyable movies of the year for me to watch.

Madness by Antonia Hylton

This book covers an important topic, which is that while slavery ended by law in the mid-19th century it has yet to really end and here we are in the 21st century. That is layered on top of the treatment of mental illness, the burden of racism and poverty and the toll that takes on ones mental health, and the differential treatment of blacks in the medical system are are here--but the thing that I think distracts the author is that she has a dog in the fight. She has someone in her life that suffered from inadequate treatment and that story drives a certain amount of the telling of this story, which I found a little off the target. The meat of the story is the history of an institution called Crownsville, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland. Crownsville opened in 1911, the hospital itself built by the forced labor of its first patients. At its peak in the 1950s, more than 2,700 people were resident in a place that “existed along the spectrum of asylum and jail and warehouse”. While the things that happened here shared similarities with other psychiatric hospitals in terms of treatment, the conditions were appalling and they lasted longer than in other facilities. In the 93 years of its operation, 1,700 patients who died at Crownsville were buried in a field in the facility’s grounds and nearly 600 other bodies sent to universities for dissection (such as Johns Hopkins, where Henrietta Lacks' cells were harvested and sold for profit) . It finally closed its doors in 2004.

The Brutalist (2024)

This film clocks in at 3.5 hours, so maybe it is not surprising that within that kind of time frame you can pacak a lot in, but it covers so many things without specifically hammering, highlighting, or bullet-pointing them. Sure, it’s impossible to miss the commentary on capitalism and the casual cruetly of the super rich, but it’s also a story of immigration, addiction, Zionism, architecture, inequity, class, violence, and sexual predation. There are themes of generational trauma, particularly exploring the lasting impact of the Holocaust on a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth, who immigrates to post-war America, where his art and personal life are continuously shaped by his traumatic past, manifesting in his architectural designs and relationships with others; essentially, his buildings become a physical representation of his internal struggles with the trauma he carries from the concentration camps. László is a difficult man. The embodies brutalist architecture: it is stark, with clean lines, paradoxically somewhat ugly yet strangely beautiful. László is impactful, hard to like and hard to forget, all wrapped up with agony and self abuse. It is a masterful performance by Adrien Brody, whose grandmother was a Hungarian Jew who hid her ethnicity and whose mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a photographer. He said, "My mother and my grandparents owned a very similar journey of fleeing war-torn Europe and coming to the U.S. And the hardships and sacrifice and their own resilience and everything that they endured — in addition to my mother as an artist and her yearnings to leave behind a body of work of some great significance, they’re all things that are very personal to me. So I felt a deep responsibility to convey that authentically." Consider it done.

Our Evening by Allan Hollinghurst

This author is a masterful story teller. This is the story of Dave Win, a gay man of color, as he tells it in late middle age, recreating a sequence of formative or quietly significant episodes across six decades, from the 1960s to the COVID pandemic. When he is a boy at school, discovering the possibilities of music and drama, finding his own powers, shaken by encounters with prejudice and aggression, filled with unspoken ecstasies as his sensual attraction to men grows. Then he is a young actor with a subversive touring company in the 1970s; he is a lover, finding joy with his partners. He is also an only son to a single mother who knows that he is gay from the beginning and supports and loves him, their closeness outlasting all change. Dave is a gay man of a generation reaching maturity soon after decriminalization, seizing his freedoms wholeheartedly amid intolerance. He is also half Burmese, though he never met the father from whom he inherited his Asian looks, and all the racial intolerance that entails. The novel tracks the currents of gay liberation and race relations, not to mention a modern history of theatre and the arts throughout the period, and it is told unflinchingly and without rancor. Another great sweeping novel by a talented and openly gay author.

No Other Land (2024)

The documentary that could not get a U.S. distributer (it is a political hot potato) and few interviews (one of the directors is Palestinean) won the Best Documentary at this year's Oscars, as well as at many other award ceremonies. It is directed by the courageous Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and it is compassionate, thoughtful, and even revolutionary. It is a devastating profile of the community of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the West Bank constantly on the brink of destruction), the people living in perpetual uncertainty, and the way state violence consumes entire generations. This battle is mostly seen through the young eyes of Basel. A 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist, he has spent all of his life living in the shadow of annihilation as the documentary captures how the Israeli military routinely destroys their homes with bulldozers. In every shot where we see these convoys of destruction approaching on the horizon, there is a sense of grim familiarity and impending loss seen in the faces of the people we cut to. It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the grimness.

Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken

I loved this book, which while set in the 13th century, it feels familiar on a number of levels. Alice Kyteler was born in 1280 in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Her father was an innkeeper and a money lender. As the only child, she was schooled in these matters, which was most unusual for a woman at the time. Of course, she also was expected to marry --- and marry she did, early and then often in her remarkably long life. Alice is based on a real historical figure, but her voice and the more intimate details of her life are fictional. While Alice was prepared by both her parents with skills to successfully navigate life, Alice was abused by her father and as a result she was driven to murder him, using poisons that she learned from her mother. Her four husbands also died in turn, some under suspicious circumstances. It was these deaths, along with the growing scrutiny of Alice's success financially, that led to her being tried and convicted as a witch, the first woman in Ireland to have done so. The attitudes of those around her to her remarkable success in life seem very similar to modern attitudes, leaving me with feeling like while centuries have passed, the barriers remain.

The Nickel Boys (2024)

The book is brutal to read and I kind of dreaded watching the movie because of the intense brutality of it, literally killing black children sadistically and repeatedly, and I just wasn't sure how I could watch it unfold in living color. I was right to brace myself for the impact, it wasn't what I was expecting either. I did not know this when I watched it, but the director's previous feature was the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. As documentaries go, it was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With a certain kind of fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed the viewer in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens. It was impactful, truthful, and horrible without being overly gruesome. This one is quite different, but has some sameness as well. The stories of two Black teens confined to a brutal Florida reform school, is told from the point of view of his protagonists (which I learned from a reviewer that this is called the subjective camera, and people almost uniformly dislike it, so it is risky, but I thought it was successful in conveying the pain as well as engendering sympathy). Whitehead’s novel is sad and infuriating. It starts off as the story of Elwood Curtis, a precocious introvert growing up in a rural town in the Jim Crow–era South. He winds up at Nickel Academy after he hitches a ride with the wrong man on what would have been his first day taking classes at a nearby college. He meets the laid-back cynic Turner, a Houston native who’s on his second stint at Nickel and has few illusions about anyone’s chances of getting out of this nightmare through official means. The filme slips back and forth between their time at Nickel and the present day, and between the optimistic Elwood and the realistic Turner--the so-called reform school was modeled after the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a monstrously abusive institution from whose grounds nearly a hundred burials have been discovered in recent years, and for me, knowing the real life ending for so many who were there makes it all the more horrible to watch unfold, but this story is beautifully told in this film.

A Wilder Shore by Camille Peri

Robert Louis Stevenson was not a man who wrote about women--his novels contain few female characters and so it is hard to know how much he understood about women—but there is no doubt about the main influence on the second half of his life was his wife, and this book delineates the how of it, if not the why. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne was a married woman from Indiana when Stevenson met her in 1876. He was 25, she 10 years older than he with a lot more life experience. At that time she was a mother of two, and soon to be separated from her genial, improvident philanderer of a husband, Sam. He went to a Nevada silver mine, she to an artists’ colony in France--he was more of a con artist, a seeker of fortune, and she was more of a seeker of knowledge. Stevenson courted her at Fontainebleau, near Paris, and he could not have been more different from the man she left behind. He had talent written all over him, for one thing. Among other qualities that appealed to Fanny and her children were Stevenson’s integrity and his irrepressible desire for adventure, in defiance of poor health. The two of them sought adventure in their time together, and that spirit is evident in the writing that he left behind. This is an unusual love story and gives a window into who the author was.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I watched this in my quest to watch every Oscar nominated movie this year--and I have to say that while the Visual Effects category is almost always filled with movies that I would not otherwise watch, that is the whole point of the undertaking, to stretch yourself with a list that has been curated by people who really care about this stuff and then try to see what it is that made them choose each one. Sometimes--not this time, but sometimes I find a real gem, and so the quest continues. One review I read started off with: "An amazing addition to the Alien universe." This is one clue as to why this did not resonate with me, because my knee jerk thought is "What Alien universe?" So clearly I do not get it. My first thought as the movie got underway was that this is the third horror movie I had watched in the 2025 Oscar watch party. A personal high, I think, and not a genre that I like either. My spouse and one of my kids watched The Substance without me and my offspring noted "Mom is *not* going to want to watch this." Right on brand for me--this one was kind of an action adventure horror movie, and I will say that the actors gave it their all. The movie delivers a gritty experience reminiscent of the original film, with impressive world-building and and majorly creepy villians that make its nomination in this category well-deserved.

Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In the week after the 2024 election I was having dinner with long time friends and two of their children. One of them is an elected legislator in a red state and the other worked for a democratic candidate in a different red state. The former was sanguine about the results, noting the inflation economy is a predictable barrier to overcome, but the other was adamant that we need to understand why people voted for an outspoken racist who is clearly out for both revenge and personal gain. This book seeks to answer some of those questions. He spent a lot of time in Kentucky in areas that have diminished opportunities, especially for those without an education beyond high school, poverty, and that are predominantly (94%) white. He talked to mostly white men and found that they have pretty fragile senses of self-worth. The availability of good paying jobs (mostly mining jobs) was a source of pride for them, and as coal's star is setting, the lack of adequate paying jobs is a source of shame for them. Then comes the hard to fix part--they do not blame corporations for this shift, or climate change, but rather seemingly they fix their anger on whoever the GOP tells them is to blame. So while making a massive effort to engage this population that votes against their self interest makes sense, it seems like the appeal to their injured masculine pride has won the day. This is age old, but worsening as the economy shifts and substance abuse worsens, and those who support candidates who would help change the tide have zero interest in them because of their voting record. That is the damage done, though, with no insights on how to repair it.

The Girl With The Needle (2024)

This is the Oscar nominee for Best International movie, which is from Denmark. To say that it is on the dark side is to ill prepare the viewer for what is to come. This is a relentlessly grim movie, one that serves as a reminder that women on the fringe of the economic ladder have been marginalized for generations, around the world. I did not know this, but read in a review that it is based on the true story of a Danish serial killer named Dagmar Overbye, which only becomes apparent later. What is apparent is that the movie becomes almost numbing in its brutality. The main character is Karolina, who is being evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent when the movie opens. Her husband is a soldier in WWI and she has not heard from him, and what she makes at her job as a seamstress. Things go from bad to worse when her husband returns severely disfigured as well as psychologically damaged from the war, and she is abandoned by her wealthy lover when she becomes pregnant and his mother doesn't approve. She meets up with a woman who offers to help her find a home for her baby. She never quite turns the corner to a better life, but her journey is unexpected.

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

I read this book as part of my immersion program on the cusp of a winter trip across Southern India. It is a book divided-- In the first half, the book alternates between shorter chapters about the four characters in Sheffield, England and then novella-length sections about each of them prior to their arrival there. The first story is that of Tochi, a chamar or “untouchable” in an India of heightened Hindu nationalism where a man risks everything by merely being perceived as trying to break out of the strict rules of caste. The following novella-length section bringing together the tales of Avtar and Randeep reveals why their relationship is caught somewhere between acquaintances and friends. Former neighbors, whose lives in the world of the middle class in India prove to be precarious, they are propelled, respectively, by love and shame to travel to England in search of work. The final story is that of Narindar, a devout British Sikh woman for whom goodness is at the heart of religious practice. The second half of the novel moves forward, as the characters’ relationships with each other grow more tangled, and their situations more fraught. Tabloid phrases such as “scam marriages”, “illegal workers”, “abuse of student visas” are placed within the context of lives filled with love and desperation. There are quite a few questions raised, and most of them are left to the reader to sort out, but the groundwork is laid, and this is a thought provoking book.

The Six Triple Eight (2024)

There is a lot to like about this movie, especially if you are a bit of a Tyler Perry fan--I admit that there is a lot of melodrama in his writing and directing, but he is a star when it comes to telling stories about African-Americans and his actors are largely black, which I appreciate. This is based on a true story of the women of the all-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion who faced ruthless racism while serving during World War II. It is told through the eyes of Lena Derriecott King, a woman who joins up after her true love is killed in action, and Major Charity Adams, her commanding officer. The situation is this--the black regiment is marginalized in blatantly racist ways--but then Mary McLeod Bethune, a close personal friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, took up their cause and volunteers them for a Herculean task. Mail was not leaving the front and it wasn't being delivered there either and it was easy to relate to the idea that it was causing morale problems for the troops and a lot of anxiety for loved ones at home. Ms. Bethune, who was able to advance the stature of African American women through her friendship with Roosevelt, put forth that the 6888 could do the task of sorting the mail--which they did, despite enormous obstacles, both real and manufactured. They were the only black women to serve in Europe during the war, and the end of the movie shows a number of them who are still alive today--at 100 years old, more or less. This is nominated for an Academy Award in the Original Song category, and you have to watch to the end to listen to it.

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

This is the unmasking of what the East India Company was all about. I must say I didn't really understand the in's and out's of it, and I think that was a deliberate masking of the truth on the part of the Brits themselves. This is an attempt to set the record straight. The British company arrived on the scene in the early 1600's at a time when the Mughals were in charge--they had the largest standing army in the world and it wasn't until there was a waning of that power that there was any chance of taking charge. The tide starts to turn with Robert Clive, once celebrated as “Clive of India”, who enters here as a juvenile delinquent from Shropshire who arrived in Madras in 1744 as an 18-year-old clerk, but found his vocation as a thuggish fighter in the company’s small security force. At the Battle of Plassey of 1757, which won the company control of Bengal and which generations of British schoolchildren would memorize as a glorious imperial victory, the real story was substantially more complicated. The volatile, widely disliked Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, had made an intractable enemy of Bengal’s Marwari bankers, the Jagat Seths, who saw better prospects in investing with the East India Company than supporting him. The Jagat Seths offered the company substantial amounts of money to unseat Siraj ud-Daula and install a compliant collaborator in his stead. Clive, who stood to make an immense personal fortune, gladly accepted. Plassey was in truth a “palace coup”, executed by a greedy opportunist, won by bribery and betrayal. The rest is a very violent and bloody history, where the East India Company committed hundreds of atrocities and plundered the wealth of a nation--all as a corporation, not as a government . There was an attempt to hold the East India Company responsible for their actions, with the trial of Warren Hastings, which through court testimony brought the practices of the company to light--and while he was eventually acquitted, his reputation, and that of the company, were tarnished. It is a tale of corporate greed, no accountability, and while the British control of India became a government run operation, it did not start out that way. It is a fascinating, if grim, read.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)

The reason that this is Germany's submission for best international film and not Iran's is that the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long prison sentence and flogging. It is one of the five films nominated in that catagory for the 2025 Academy Award. The movie begins as what my kids would call a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatized. Iman is an ambitious lawyer who has just been promoted to state investigator – one step short of being a full judge in the revolutionary court. He gets a handsome pay raise and better accommodation for his family: which consists of his wife and two student-age daughters. But the promotion almost immediately brings disappointment and tension: Iman, a judicious man, is stunned to discover that he is expected to rubber-stamp death-penalty judgments without reading the evidence. He is told that he must now be secretive with friends and family who could be threatened and doxed by criminal elements as a way of pressuring him. There are a series of unfortunate events that co-occur in the midst of the widespread protests in 2022 (which are shown in the movie with actual footage taken at the time) and the situation quickly deteriorates fpr Iman's family.

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

At my most optimistic, I would say that there is value in trying to understand where people are coming from, regardless of how unpleasant I find them. I am admittedly not at my most optimistic--despite a stance since an openly racist sexual predator was elected to the highest office in the land of not consuming much in the way of media in an effort to maintain my sanity and ride it out, I got into a very unpleasant conversation on social media with someone who I think I mostly agree with who was chastising me for fear mongering regarding a desperately unqualified man become head of HHS despite Nobel Laureates, actual men and women of science, begging for that to not happen. So optimism is low, shall we say. This is a series of linked stories about people who are isolated, unpopular, and through their association with others with similar issues have convinced themselves that anyone but themselves are to blame and rather than try to figure out what they could do to make themselves happier, they externalize that blame and ramp up their anger. I see this in my professional life more frequently than I care to, and I do not need to read about it.

Anora (2024)

Wow. This is on the one hand a story you might think you have heard before. "Pretty Woman with a more realistic ending" or "Cinderella Russian style", but for me it is another "Life on the Margins" story by the director-writer who brought us another gem in this genre, The Florida Project. The title character, a vivacious Russian-American named Ani (short for Anora), she is doing exotic dancing and sex work, which is a matter-of-fact livelihood for her. She isn’t waiting around for a knight in shining armor to whisk her away from the club she works at. She just goes about her business with her clientele, and bickers with the other girls in the same profession—some, her genuine friends, and others, her rivals. Along comes Ivan, the prodigal son of a Russian oligarch, who looks and acts like he is in high school. He enlists Ani’s services one night and the two hit it off rapidly. She becomes his American fantasy, and he becomes her generous high-roller, bringing her out to his giant seaside mansion in Brooklyn for a fancy New Year’s Eve party and other affairs. It isn't until they get married that things start the unraveling process, a tragi-comedy that doesn't make the oligarchs look any better than you would imagine.

The New India by Rahul Bhatia

This book is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2024, and so I snagged it to put on my Kindle and read it while on a recent trip to Southern India. When Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata party to victory in 2014 – the first Indian election in 30 years in which a single party secured a majority – many in India pinned their hopes on him. He had promised to usher in development, citing his performance in Gujarat, where he had been chief minister for just over a decade. Even sceptics, appalled by his handling in 2002 of communal violence that left more than a thousand dead, the vast majority of them Muslims, were willing to hold their noses. They were swayed by his development rhetoric and jaded after 10 years of coalition rule led by India’s grand old party, Congress. But within days of his election, a Muslim engineer was murdered by goons, and other similar incidents began to occur. Modi stayed largely silent, making only feeble statements in response to truly grotesque attacks. His singular economic achievement – if it can be called that – was the 2016 withdrawal from circulation of high-value currency notes equating to 86% of India’s money supply. Liquidity was drained from the system and millions of small businesses folded. The short answer for this review is that whether Modi is a good choice for all of India is still an open question--the author would contend that he is not, and in his Northern India, Hindi centric policy making, there are winners and losers, and the economic powerhouse that is Southern India, more religiously diverse, and Tamil speaking will likely be less satisfied.

Nosferatu (2024)

This is the second horror movie that I watched this year because it is an Oscar nominee. I should really turn that around to make it more accurate. I watched a second horror movie this year because I very much enjoy watching the Oscar nominees. This is not a genre I watch either regularly or for pleasure, so a word of warning--my thoughts on it are notgoing to jive with an enthusiast of the medium's assessment. The movie is a fusion of two sources, the original 1924 silent film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” directed by F.W. Murnau; and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and the 1932 Tod Browning movie that adapted it. I have watched neither of these, but I watched this with someone who had, and he was able to pretty much anticipate where the movie was going and what each scene was meant to convey--I will add that he was a film major, so we are used to his musings mid-film. It is essentially a love triangle with Nosferatu, aka Count Orlak, the young socialite Ellen Hutter, whom the monster sees as his soulmate, and whose sleeping and waking consciousness he invades with escalating force, and Ellen’s husband Thomas Hutter. Thomas is the stooge here, and he journeys from England to the count’s castle hoping to purchase it and please his boss at a London real estate company thus improving his family’s fortunes. It is of course a fool's errand, and he rather quickly ends up in thrall to the beast and increasingly marginalized as Nosferatu becomes increasingly obsessed with Ellen. It is a pretty standard tale of horror, so you can guess where it is headed. There is a lot of Gothic histrionics and not much substance for my taste.

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

In the post pandemic era (or maybe I should modify that to between pandemics, as bird flu seems to be heating up and getting ready to cause catastrophe), I have dipped my toe ever so slightly into the world of romance novels, and this author has been a repeat customer for me. I missed this book when it came out, but when it appeared on the NYT 100 Notable Books in 2024, I read it. This is a very quiet story, about a gay journalist who is grieving the sudden death of his boyfriend--who left him far too young, but also left him rich--and a rising baseball star. It is set in the early 1960's so they need to be discreet, but both of them are comfortable with their sexual orientation, and their love story unfolds in a mixture of both physical and emotional attraction, tempered with the historically accurate portrayal of their need to keep their their relationship a secret. The author does dialogue well and she is adept at building friendship before anything develops--she allows her characters to be friends before anything else, and even though you know where this is heading from the very beginning, she makes the journey enjoyable and this one does not disappoint.

A Real Pain (2024)

It seems like there are a small handful of movies that feel quite independent, meaning that they feel special and well done with a message. They are also likely to be commercial duds, able to make back what they cost to produce, but not blockbuster material, but that are both enjoyable and a bit painful to watch. This is one such movie this year--it is nominated for best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay. The story follows two cousins — David, played by Jesse Eisenberg (who wrote and directed the film), and Benji, played by Kieran Culkin — their grandmother has died and left them a little bit of money. They embark on the concentration camp tour of Poland to find out a bit more about her--she was a Polish Holocaust survivor. I have done this trip myself with a Polish Jew who survived the war by hiding in the woods. It is a harrowing experience, mostly because of the magnitude of what the Germans did on such a massive scale. The two men were once as close as brothers, the two have since drifted apart. David has a wife, a kid and a successful career. Benji, on the other hand, is an impassioned man with nothing really going on in his life. As the two explore Poland with a Holocaust tour group, Benji’s social abrasiveness and strong opinions both unsettle and endear him to David and the group. Having just read The Anxious Generation and the struggle of boys moving from childhood to adulthood, there is a real embodyment of that struggle here.

Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda

This is an interesting collection of short stories, which stand alone but are linked by all being set in Lagos, and many of them have an aspect of the supernatural embedded in the storytelling. Some reviewers call them horror stories, which is not a genre that I am very familiar with (neither in books nor in movies), so maybe I am way off base about this, but they seem more associated with magical elements which don't often go the way you might hope they would. There is also a visceral quality to these stories, like the author is not one to hold back on gritty details when telling a tale. The most important context for all of these stories is Lagos itself. The crush and overwhelm and class structure of the city and its countless inhabitants colors and constrains everything here. Many of the families involved are internal migrants, having left the Nigerian countryside for the city. When one character asks her aunt why no one had ever told her about her grandmother, the older woman replies “There are stories we leave buried so our children can move without weight.” It turns out there is quite a lot of weight in Nigeria, and the characters who travel in to the capital discover it in various different permutations once they get there. The unsettling multiplicity of the author's approach is present here: she blends societal forces, parental expectations, intergenerational trauma, economic precarity, personal guilt, and they all constrain the agency of her characters.

The Apprentice (2024)

The story of Trump's life is best told in this movie at the beginning. two distinct chapters: an hour in the ‘70s wherein a young, relatively naïve Trump (Sebastian Stan) learns the art of the deal from the relentless manipulative Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Then an hour about a decade later, when Trump has risen to a level of corruption and amorality that he would maintain for most of his life. The first half has an intriguing concept, and is reasonably well-told, but the second half falls short on where he has gone since then--that is less important, since now that we are getting the Trump 2.0 administration we can see that he is just all about breaking things, that his feelings are so badly hurt by having lost to Joe Biden, a man who is even older than he is, that he just wants to fleece everything and everyone, and he cares not a wit about who and what gets broken in his path. So, as you might suspect, this movie has two distinct chapters: an hour in the ‘70s wherein a young, relatively naïve Trump (Sebastian Stan) learns the art of the deal from the relentless manipulative Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Then an hour about a decade later, when Trump has risen to a level of corruption and amorality that he would maintain for most of his life. The first half has an intriguing concept, and is reasonably well-told, but the second half falls short of shedding any light beyond that, and maybe it is no more complicated than it seems. Pray that the techno-oligarchs do not destroy us all, and that we can survive this F6 tornado that has been unleashed on us all.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

This book is on the New York Times Notable Books for 2024 and Obama's recommended reading list, and so it is double recommended and with good reason. There is a mash-up of Gothic novel combined with cautionary tale here. The novel swings back and forth with two time periods when two children from the wealthy Van Laar family have disappeared, 14 years apart. When the novel opens in August 1975, an Emerson Camp counselor discovers that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar is missing from her bunk. Barbara was conceived after the disappearance of her brother in 1961. Peter “Bear” Van Laar, a boy as playful and adventurous as his nickname, was 8 when he vanished from the Van Laars’ summer house that adjoins the camp and never found. There are several layers to the caution part of the story. The first is that generationally rich people see themselves as different, that the rules do not apply to them, and that attitude serves their communities poorly, but it is not always the advantage they see it as. That is played out here, with intergenerational trauma on view. The second is that there is a very clear cause and effect between the two disappearances that could have been avoided should they been faced but they were not. Finally, this is a wonderful portrayal of the challenges of adolescence, and that money complicates that as well. All told, this is a rich novel with many sub-stories within the overarching one, and it is highly recommended.

Conclave (2024)

This film is nominated in a few categories, but I feel like the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts--the Critics Choice Awards agreed and awarded this Best Cast. The movie sets the stage right away. The Pope is dead. If there is ever an organisation that has embraced the pomp and circumstance, it is the Catholic Church, and this happens in death just as much or even more than life. Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who is Dean of the College of Cardinals, has to convene a conclave to pick the next Pope even though he protests that he is unworthy of the task. However, as cardinals fly in from across the globe, it is clear that there is tension regarding how the Church will move forward and also that everyone who is asked will serve, even those who protest they do not want the job. Will they go backwards and embrace tradition or will the vault forward and seek modernization? Or maybe somewhere in between. As the succeeding votes go forward, one secret after another is revealed, and popular candidates gradually lose momentum, until in the end, they make a choice. It is very well scripted and acted, and it is well worth watching.

What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

I am not one to read a lot of Sophie Kinsella, seeing as her genre is one that I do not read extensively in, but this was on the 2024 NYT Notable Book list, and I do make my way through about half of those over the course of the ensuing year, and it was available on Libby just as I was loading up my Kindle for a long trip where I would take no physical books--well, knock me over with a feather, this not what I expected. The author herself was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, which is an aggressive and uniformly fatal brain tumor, and so does her main character. Also like the author, Eve is a successful author with a lovely husband and five children, and so the story is parallel to the one that Ms. Kinsella is herself living. On the plus side, she does address some of the things that one needs to grapple with in this situation, and she also avoids quite a lot about it at the same time. There is a fair amount of humor and good spirits--which I 100% agree is the only way to go, otherwise you already have one foot in the grave, but there was a lot missing, at least to my ear. I get it, this is a personal story and it is hard to face, even when you have an avatar in the form of a book character through which to filter your hopes and fears, but speaking as someone who received what is usually a uniformly fatal cancer diagnosis 9 years ago, there was a lot more to it than is here, and I would have liked it to go a bit deeper. But it didn't and despite that, it is worth a read

The Substance (2024)

This is an exaggerated yet very well done horror film. It is a genre that I know almost nothing about and have very little experience with, but given those caveats, this seemed adsurdly bloody as well. The bottom line in this movie is that if you are not seen you do not exist and to be seen and female, you have to be youthful. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), is the aging star who has had a career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor— abruptly ends when an executive (played with exaggerated offensiveness by Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, who is she? At least that is how it appears that she feels because when she is offered a Mephistophelian bargain--she takes a substance that will make her young--but only every other week--she jumps at the opportunity, and at first it goes very very well, but this being a horror movie, then it does not, and how very wrong it goes is for you to see. The remarkable thing is that Ms. Sparkle appears not to be missed at all, no one knocks on her door to check in on her, and she appears to have no friends. Her life really was on stage. The movie has beautiful cinematography and a unique voice--I hated the gore, but I did not hate the movie at all. It has several Oscar nominations, and while Best Movie seems a stretch to me, the other nominations seem at least defendable.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

This is a book with a unique premise. It is set in 1977 and Adina, a girl from another planet, is sent to Earth. She is four years old when her father pushes her out of their spaceship and she wakes up in a classroom designed by her predecessors where they communicate Adina’s mission – to determine whether Earth is a suitable replacement for their dying home world: Planet Cricket Rice (the closest approximation of its name using English). And how will she report back? By fax machine, of course. The story spins out from there, chronicling Adina’s childhood and teenage years in Pennsylvania, living with her mother, Terese, who barely makes ends meet, her friendship with Toni and Toni’s older brother Dominic, and her obsession with Carl Sagan and Philip Glass. All of it, including Adina’s move to New York, where a fame of sorts awaits her, is documented for her extraterrestrial family, sent via the whirr and screech of the fax machine, of course. It is the 70's, after all. It is all told from the stance of someone who is outside looking in, and while we all know that Earth also has some of the hallmarks of a dying planet and a population that is not treating it like a hair on fire emergency, all seen from the perspective of aliens who wish they could have a do-over. It is sad, and wise, and funny and altogether enjoyable.

The Wild Robot (2024)

Happy Valentine's Day! In a world full of turmoil, this is a quiet place to spend the holiday. This is not my favorite amongst the nominate Animated Feature films for this year's Academy Awards, but it is my second favorite. The two share lush animation that outshines the story line (my favorite is Flow and the story is one that the reader imposes on it since there is no dialogue at all) and I would highly recommend watching it when you need an injection of calm into your week. These days, that feeling is hard to come by, of course, so perhaps watch it more than once. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. Roz is greeted with understandable suspicion by the furry inhabitants of the island. Roz neither looks nor thinks like a living thing. Her logic is pure binary – execute task, then return to manufacturer. Devoid of a clear purpose and thwarted in her return by the natural world’s chaos, she stumbles into the possession and care of something she does not understand: a lone goose egg, the rest of the family crushed beneath her. Raising the gosling up becomes her raison d'être and the audience comes along for that ride. Sweet and lovely, even with the sub-text that robots could take over most tasks currently accomplished by man.

All Fours by Miranda July

This is a mid-life crisis book, female style. A modestly well known artist is grappling with all sorts of things: he child nearly being still born, and her own struggles, which leads her to set off on a great adventure of a road trip from LA to New York. But it all goes off the rails right from the get go. Just outside of Los Angeles, not a day into the journey, she locks eyes across her windscreen with Davey, a devilishly handsome attendant who knows his sexual attraction at a smalltown garage. She squanders thousands of dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to exquisitely redesign the room she takes in an ugly hotel, and there she remains for three weeks, joined every afternoon by Davey himself, with whom she discovers an astonishing mutual but unconsummated passion. He turns out to be foremost an incandescent, preternaturally airborne dancer, and through dancing they find forms of intimacy that finally make life seem real. Returning home she must somehow make sense of the rest of her life. She’s aware that her agonizing descent from ecstasy to misery coincides with symptoms of the menopause; a foisting of reality whose deathly overtones have had literal consequences in her family – her grandmother and aunt both killed themselves in their 50s when "the change" is upon them. Two things very clearly scare her. The first is the acceptance of mortality. Then there is sexuality. There is some very unique grappling with both of these in a way that is both gendered and ungendered and wholly fresh and different, which turn this explicitly into a novel about the menopause like none you have read before.