The Red Hen Moved to Montpelier, Vermont

One of our most frequently returned to places in central Vermont is the Red Hen Bakery--they have excellent bread, good laminated pastries, nice sandwiches, and decent coffee. When they were in Middlesex we liked their sit down options and usually had a meal there and took some things home with us as well, and when we leanred they were moving, we hoped it would go well. Their new store front in Montpelier is a bit closer for us to get to and a bit larger, so finding a seat was easy. And not because there was no one there--the place was hopping on Labor Day morning, which was very good to see. Montpelier has a lot going for it these days as well. A storm flooded the whole downtown area a coupld of summers ago and fortunately many of the affected buildings have businesses back in them, and there is a bustle about the place. Do not miss this bakery in it's new iteration, it is really top notch.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

I am working my way through the Booker Prize 2026 longlist--which is going surprisingly well, but I have yet to read the truly long book and there are quite a few that are between 200-300 pages, so not exactly back patting stuff. The main thing is that I have been able to get them, which is not always the case. That said, this is really not my cup of tea. It is dark in a way that I find unattractive and uninstructive. It is set in an ancient and unnamed university town which is rapidly being overwhelmed by vegetation: avenues lined with lush flower bushes, arches have vines galore, and it smells of flowers but in a sickeningly sweet way rather than opulent English garden style. A fraternity of mysterious gardeners seek to keep the chaotic foliage in check, but they are hamstrung by a bitter dispute with university officials. Power games and proxy battles ensue. It is a hot summer and decay is rampant: revolution is in the air. The narrator, Agathe, an alarmingly cynical young woman. She views everyone she meets as a tragic case, and knows that nothing lies between her and the same sad designation but her ability to see through the stories they’re telling themselves. She rejects self-expression and desire, refusing anything that might compromise her sense of separation and superiority. Her judgments are swift, conclusive and brutal. It goes from bad to worse when her mother has a failed suicide attempt, is left wheelchair bound, and her father basically blames her for any and all failings in the family. There is quite a few more unpleasant things that happen to equally unpleasant people, the end.

Sew.Quilt.Explore by Colby Cartledge

Colby is a member of our modern quilt guild and lucky for us, she is also a lecturer who really knows how to strike a chord with a large swath of the guild. Her lecture last year about her way of managing her scraps was really inspirational--at many a Zoom sew in afterwards someone was bound to quote her and I certainly took in her wisdom while not being completely adherent to the message. My scraps remain a mess, but I do feel like if I got a chance to manage them that I have a place to start. Another thing about her quilting philosophy is the Reuse Reduce Recycle kind of approach--she will take offcasts and is a proponent for sustainable quilting, even if I have not heard her say as much. The most recent lecture I heard was about Quilting Rules--which ones do you really need to adhere to and which ones can you ignore--she is a quilter who is not all about perfection, and if you are one of those, someone for whom the seam ripper might be used more than once on the same block, it might not be for you, but that is not me (although I seam ripped yesterday--more than once--but only when truly provoked, like I should have used a leader but I did not, and the squinching was too much, or a log cabin that I got off to the wrong start and a dark ended up in a light position, and it really had to be corrected, no getting around it). She talked about increasing your confidence in your skills so that you don't need all the guard rails, and guess what? There are no quilt police. You make your own rules and guidelines, and you can break them at your leisure.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Every once in awhile it is good to be reminded that in fact the fate of women has improved over time. This book introduces the reader to a real life person. Marguerite de la Rocque, a French noblewoman born in the 1500s. Orphaned in infancy, her inheritance was squandered by her guardian, the ambitious and cruel Jean-Francois de la Rocque de Roberval, leaving her vulnerable yet stubbornly dignified. Her noble lineage, a delicate reminder of her past, contrasted sharply with her precarious present. This contradiction—her inherent status versus her lack of tangible power—sets the stage for her transformative journey. Central to this narrative is the enduring bond between Marguerite and Damienne, her devoted nurse. Damienne, an older woman with an unwavering moral compass, served as Marguerite’s first teacher and a steadfast maternal figure. There are strong women who help make her life bearable, despite her lack of control over what happens. Throughout the novel, Marguerite learns to navigate a world that demands she restrain her true thoughts and feelings. This begins in her childhood, where societal expectations for a woman of noble birth require her to suppress her desires and opinions. As she grows older, this restraint is further compounded by fear—fear of the consequences should she dare to speak or act against the dictates of those in power, particularly her guardian. This enforced silence becomes a significant aspect of her internal struggle. However, she finds that she has hidden depths that her guardian under estimates.

Oak and Iron, Randolph, Vermont

This is a welcome new addition to the dining scene in Randolph. It is housed in a restaurant space I have previously eaten in, and they have done a nice job with it since. There is a well stocked bar with interesting looking cocktails that we did not partake in, and the menu is medium sized, varied, and overall well prepared. I did not care for the iteration of meatloaf I got (I was trying it to see if I got any ideas to improve on my own version and that did not happen--and not because mine is unbeatable) and my husband liked his fish, but we both thought the risotto could use some spice and some work on the texture. The side vegetables for both our meals were very good--well prepared and well flavored. We shared a Caesar salad that was excellent, with white anchovies, a bright and balanced lemon flavor and good parmesan. Randolph overall seems to be on the upswing compared to recent years. The corner restaurant space on Main Street is still empty--which is too bad because it has lots of windows and light and would be an excellent breakfast and lunch place to take advantage of that--but this is a good devlopment, and the fact that there is another new restaurant of note that we will try next year should it survive the winter is good news.

Paris To The Moon by Adam Gopnick

The author lived in Paris in the 1990s and into the early 2000s and chronicled his experiences in the Paris Journals for the New Yorker as well as within this memoir. He explores the difficulties of being an American in Paris as well as becoming a new father shortly before his move across continents. This predates the current situation, where the American brand has been badly tarnished abroad, but even back 30 years ago his delineation of the details related to the minutiae of living in Paris and the daily battles of an American trying to adapt to a new home, specifically in a home so disdainful of the brand of American globalism, and how he managed. The upside is that it appears to have been a great experience for him professionally as well as personally. There is an emphasis on food int he French culture and that is reflected here, as well as the apparently well-deserved reputation for excessive bureaucracy. This has a humorous flare to it, and comes across as insightful and a straight shooter.

The Answer Man (2009)

Well, is you see this as a grumpy man who softens with the help of a generous woman then this is a so so movie. I saw it a bit differently. One thing is that Arlen Faber wrote a book entitled 'Me and God' decades ago and it is still holding sway with 10% of 'the God market'--the fact that there is a God market and that one book that is not divine in origin can hold that kind of sway says a fair amount about mankind and our inability to answer our own questions. One look at Arlen makes it very clear that he does not hold the answers, not now, not ever. He wisely remains a recluse up until the time that he throws his back out and literally crawls into a chiroprator's, where she works two wonders--the first is allevating his pain and the other is that she grabs the attention of this somewhat socially anxious and possible neurodivergent man, who then goes about trial and error when it comes to winning her over. Lucky for him he can much more easily related to her son, which goes a long way towards cementing his chances with her. Arlen could have become an interesting character, but the script for this is far too wooden for that to happen, but I did not find it quite so terrible as the reviewers did.

American Fantasy by Emma Straub

This is a themed book where something happens that I would never ever do. Which is what Annie, the protagonist, thought as well. When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Many of them are repeats on the cruise and have developed relationships and rivalries . Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has fully changed her mind. It is an improbable story of redemption and renewal with the least likely source, and maybe what these nostalgia events tap into is recaptured youth in more ways than one.

Royal Orchid, Montpelier, Vermont

We return to Vermont with great regularity. We fly into Burlington airport in the afternoon after the traditional lunch hour has ended and have a 1.5 hour drive to central Vermont where we stay. We have searched for a place to eat that we would regularly return to, and while there have been some good candidates, there has not been a hands down winner. We enjoy a lobster roll, but beyond that we have looked for a place that fits our schedule and that serves a meal we would look forward to returning for. This restaurant in Montperlier might be just the thing. It does not serve food continuously, but it does open early, at 4PM, which works with our schedule. The food is excellent--we had two dishes with shrimp, which was of good quality and cooked well. We were there ahead of the traditional dining hour, and there were several tables occupied in the time we were there. It has a broad menu, and we will definitely return. Added bonus was that the food came quickly and we were back on the road in no time. Highly recommended.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

This has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which is how I came to read it. It is part magical realism, part a commentary on the persistence of trauma no matter how long ago it was and how far away you get from the source, and part a refelction on the toll of caregiving for a loved one with Alzheimer's disease. This is not a renovation gone wrong--which is that instead of getting a new bathroom, when Dilarah goes into her new bathroom it is instead a cell, and she is transported far away to a well-known prison in Turkey, the homeland she had left behind. Slowly, a past she was hiding from comes to light in flashbacks and shimmering sentences. The cell is part of a vast complex within Istanbul’s Silivri Prison, where women of all ages and classes are housed for their alleged conspiracies against an oppressive regime. Dilara had fled Turkey around a decade ago with her husband and mentally declining, dissident father to apparent freedom in the mountains of Italy. But try as she might, she cannot now conjure away the prospect of imprisonment; it has literally followed her. Then there is the trials and tribulations of caring for a loved one with dementia. Dilara’s husband takes the appearance of the cell as a sign the Turkish authorities are on their tail and abandons their home, leaving Dilara to care for her father on her own as he suffers from Alzheimer’s. Her father was once an outspoken professor and novelist; he now slips and falls easily, has lost his sense of humor, cannot recall basic words, and fails to recognize his own daughter, and Dilara herself is filled with anguish, anger, and sorrow watching him fade.

Arthur The King (2024)

Michael Light is a restless soul with the edge of an adrenalin junkie--he was the leader of an Adventure Racing team that had a spectacular failure in it's last outing and while no one watned to sponsor him again, he didn't feel done. Adventure Team Racing is the most extreme, demanding, endurance activity in the world. It makes the Iron Man combination of running, swimming, and biking look like a game of hopscotch. An adventure race can involve running, biking, climbing, kayaking, and any other imaginable strenuous movement forward, over every possible kind of treacherous terrain. Races can last for many days, with only brief permissible stops and time penalties for aids like IV fluids. This is loosely based on the true story of one of these races, with an American team racing through the jungles, mountains, and rivers of the Dominican Republic. Michael has amassed a team and while they were in the midst of the race, surprisingly competative, and they discovered they were being accompanied by a stray dog, and somewhere along the way, that relationship became more important than the race itself, and somehow Michael is able to find deep meaning in something else, something other than the race, and the dog, Arthur, helped him to transition from competitor to life beyond competing.

Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

This book was recommended to me by someone who has faced life threatening illness herself, with the feeling that this approach was helpful to her as she faces an uncertain future. The author is a long term survivor of Stage 4 Colon cancer, which is generally considered to be an unsurvivable disease, with the aid of immunotherapy. The reason this might indeed resonate with me is that I, too, am a long term survivor of an illness that is also considered unsurvivable. This is about finding joy, regardless of the circumstances. She has been a long time critic of the culture of bashing the American cult of positivity and the pursuit of optimal happiness. So this is difference from that. She talks a lot about the difference between happiness and joy--they have a distinct psychological profile. Here is it in her own words: "Happiness will feel like ease, it will feel relaxing, it will feel like the accumulated good things, where you’re kind of climbing a ladder of good feelings, and you get to have a beautiful view, and that’s because even just the word happiness comes from the word "hap." It’s the Norse word for chance, which just means like happenstance, the stuff that happens to you. We experience happiness that way — it’s the temperature of our coffee and the music playing and the friend you get to call later and the job that came through. It’s very contextual and circumstantial, and it’s also very incremental. It takes a lot of things coming together to make us happy. Joy, on the other hand, is not relaxing. Joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling. It’s like it startles us awake. It will make us say, "Yes, yes, it is good to be alive." And that’s why I think, whereas happiness is just a lot of positive things happening to you, joy isn’t just a positive emotion. It’s a story. That’s why it touches existential themes, like, "Is it good to be alive?" Joy, when it bubbles up inside of us, presents itself as an answer to that question." This is well worth the time to read and think about.

Reynal 2, Idaho Falls, ID

There are a number of Mexican restaurants in Idaho Falls that we would go back to. Garcia's Market was our favorite, a hopping eatery at the back of the store where the first time we ate there a server took pity on our glazed looks at the hustle and buslr and muscled us into a booth after a suitable period of disorientation. This one has a dish that we fell in love with over 30 years ago in Tuscon, a breakfast dish called machaca. Here you can order the dish, which comes with a large tortilla and make two meals out of it for $12. First you fill and roll up a burrito sized portion in the accompanying tortilla and then you share the remaining machaca with rice, beans, and any number of salsas from the excellent salsa bar. Unfortunately we haven't settle on the perfect second thing to order here, but the machaca is so good we keep trying.

Country People by Daniel Mason

This author writes beautifully and his books are quite varied. This one is also set in New England, like Northwoods, but it has a far lighter tone. It is looking inward rather than the broad scope of that book. It is whimsical and relatable rather than sark and brooding. Miles and Kate have been together since their school days--Kate soared academically, getting tenure before she was 30, despite having MS. She has responded well to immunotherapy, and is in remission but it casts a shadow. Miles on the other hand, is stalled. He is 12 years overdue in finishing his PhD and he main responsibility is as stay at home dad to their two children. Kate gets a visiting professorship in a Vermont college and they move from the west coast and begin small town life. From the moment they arrive Miles is sure he will not finish his PhD and he goes about figuring out exactly where he belongs and what he is going to do going forward. As is so often the case, his failure to launch a meaningful life does not set him apart from many of his generation--but he is different in that he is not playing video games and seething in his beholdeness to his far more successful wife. Rather he sways back and forth in what he sees as the steps forward and settles in a very good spot.

Tucci In Italy

I watched this whole season while traveling over the course of a couple of week and while I had been in the majority of regions so there was not much in the way of finding hidden gems, I very much enjoyed each episode. Stanley Tucci seems to believe that the best way to understand what makes a country unique is through its food, and while I am not sure that is true of my own coutnry, it is something that I want to believe too. Tucci grew up in an Italian American home, and he speaks Italian, so the show is inherently in two languages. In Italy, even the shape of the pasta and the sauce served with it can speak directly to identity and sharply differentiate each region. He is returning to visit five new regions, including one he’s never featured before, Le Marche, with many culinary delights that have escaped the attention of international tourists. In Campania, and its famed capital of Naples, he celebrates a once-forgotten vine grape, and in Veneto, he deliciously wades into the controversy over the origins of tiramisu. Stanley also visits two very different Islands: Sardinia, where he explores the relationship between food and longevity, and Sicily, where a multicultural history has left a delicious mark on its cuisine. At the end of it, I was sorry that there wasn't more and that it had ended. It left me wanting more and also ready to plan my next trip to Italy.

Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

I read this to fulfill a Goodreads summer challenge, but I have read the rest of this series and did not realize there was a new installment. I am not an avid reader of fantasy or books featuring witches and vampires, which characterizes this book and the ones that precede it, but I have really enjoyed this ongoing saga of Diana Bishop, a witch, and her now husband Matthew de Clairmont, a vampire. This is the fifth installment in what is called the All Souls series. It is set several years after the events of the previous installment--Diana and Matthew are now parents to seven-year-old twins, Pip and Becca. The story kicks off with a formal demand from the Congregation, the organization that governs witches and their magical behavior, to test the magical abilities of their children, echoing the trials Diana faced in her youth, which were not just traumatic, but she had longstanding conflict with her examiner. This leads Diana to uncover a previously unexplored branch of her family, the Proctors, and explore the depths of her own magical heritage. As she delves into higher magic under the guidance of her great-aunt Gwyneth, Diana must confront her family’s dark past and her own fears, all while protecting her children from the Congregation’s scrutiny. There are hints at books to come in this series, and it would be best to read this series in order.

Indigo Dyeing With Quilty Friends

My guild did it's in person meeting in August at a member's home and we did indigo dying. Indigo can dye all natural fibres. It gives beautiful shades of blue — from the palest summer sky to an almost purple black. The colour achieved depends on the type of vat, the concentration of indigo, and the number of dips. Indigotin (the dye component of indigo powder) is insoluble in water. To use it for dyeing it must be reduced to a water-soluble form. All indigo vats need three things: 1) Indigo 2) A reducing agent 3) A Base. Chemically, we need to reduce the indigo to make it soluble — we do this with a reducing agent. Reducing agents can be sugars, some natural dyes or other plants, or chemicals. A reducing agent lowers the oxidation state of the indigo molecule, transforming indigotin into leuco-indigo — which is soluble in water at room temperature. If we just add powdered indigo to water it will remain in pigment form, suspended but not dissolved. What is the difference between a suspension and a solution? A fish is suspended in the ocean. But salt is dissolved in the ocean. You can see the fish (which remains distinct) you cannot see the salt (which has dissolved). If we can see the indigo (the dye bath is blue inside) then the indigo is not dissolved and the dye bath cannot be used to for dyeing. When the indigo is reduced it dissolves and the dye bath is a greeny-yellow colour. We had so much fun with all the various iterations that we produced that we are eager to do it again next year.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

I loved The Correspondent, and when the author, Virginia Evans, did a segment on It's Friday And If You Haven't Read This It Is New To You and recommended this. Like her book, this an epistolatory novel, and she was surprised to learn that it is a memoir rather than a work of fiction. The author writes to the London bookstore at the address in the title in 1949 looking for obscure, out-of-print classic English books she cannot find in New York. The author is quintessentially American-- informal, frank, and humorous which is a contrast to the bookseller's more formal and properly British responses. The heartwarming part of the correspondence that that Helene is concerned about the scarcity of meat and eggs in post-WWII England and she sends care packages to the store through a relief organization at Christmas and Easter. Frank Doel, Helene's main contact at Marks and Company, shares them equally with the bookstore staff. These acts of kindness are deeply appreciated at a time when there is not another way to get these treats, and they write to tell Helene how much this has changed their holidays, how they have shared them with neighbors and family members, that her thoughtfulness has made a meaningful difference to them all. This is also a celebration of second-hand books, fine leather bindings, clear type, and the sheer tactile joy of reading. Helene is not a reader of best sellers, and what she is looking for is quite particular, and she doesn't want to spend the earth on her books either--Frank is able to find quality affordable books that make her very happy and for me the fact that these books find a good new home where they are appreciated. This is a window into a time and a place that is really quite lovely.

Guadalajara, Victor, Idaho

We went to a beautiful wedding in nearby Alta, and it was catered by this restaurant. There were three kinds of tacos--chicken, carnitas, and vegetables, which were sauteed and in the style of fajitas. The tortillas were steamed and despite the size of the crowd and the length of the service, they were soft and supple throughout. The rice and beans--which is one of the bars that I judge Tex-Mex food by--were both excellent. The guacamole was good, and the salsas had layered flavor as well as a hear gradient to keep everyone happy. The chips were very good, and despite the rain, they were crisp. The salasa had finely shredded cabbage in it, which was unusual but very good, and the queso was delicious.

Front Desk by Kelly Yang

One of my kids gave me the American Library Association's book of 52 books that are targeted by book banning groups, and this book is on that list. I am working my way through it, and this one is aimed at a middle school audience, which is not a genre I read at all. I related to a review that I read that noted that she did not read younger than Young Adults (although I do like a good picture book on occasion and I do have grandchildren who are getting old enough to be covered in this genre and I will be doing more of it as a result). The reason that that this book is being targeted by angry white adults is that they are scandalized that a children’s book would dare talk about racism. The racism in this book is very much in your face rather than more subtle, which is what I would expect for a book aimed at a middle school audience, but which was a bit glaring and heavy handed to my adult ear. The story is about Mia, who helps her parents manage a low end motel where there are some long term residents. She faces prejudice at school and while she works, and it is quite recognizable. Mia sees that immigrants and Asians are not the only people targeted, and when she sees a favored hotel resident who is African American get treated unfairly, she sticks up for him in an anti-racist manner that is very appropriate and is a great example of how to do that.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

The Devil Wears Prada--the reboot. It is literally 20 years later, both in real life and in movie life, and the gang's all here. What is no longer true is that print journalism is still here. That is the test, not the subtext, all prettied up with high fashion and glamor. Anne Hathaway returns as the delightful and talented Andy Sachs, now working as the kind of serious journalist she always wanted to be before becoming a Runway Magazine dropout in the first movie. She wins a journalism award the same night that she loses her job, and is ripe for, well, anything. Enter Runway and Miranda again, after Andy mysteriously lands a new job at her first professional home to reshape the editorial direction of the magazine. Battling with a PR nightmare after the magazine’s accidental praise of a highly unethical supplier, neither Miranda nor her right-hand Nigel recalls Andy at first glance. She is promptly placed in an embarrassing office that looks like a stockroom and paired with the hardworking assistant Jin, who is as smart and ambitious as the young Andy. The theme is that you cannot count on anything, and that people can be surprising, and while this is not a great film, it is a fun one. I recently rewatched the original and it holds up, and this one is a perfectly servicable sequel. Not to mention that while in the first one no fashion house wanted to be associated with a film spoofing an industry icon and they had to manage on a shoestring, this time around there were gobs of clothes and fashion was truely on parade, both on the screen and off.

Yesteryear by Caro Clair Burke

Well, this one left me thinking that I didn't initially know what to think about it. Natalie Heller Mills builds a multi-million-strong following by broadcasting an idealized, picture-perfect version of rural life and traditional womanhood. Behind the scenes, her idyllic farmhouse relies on nannies, producers, and industrial equipment. One morning, she wakes up in a harsh, 19th-century version of her farm without modern conveniences, forced to actually live out the old-fashioned values she preaches. She must figure out if she has time-traveled, suffered a psychotic break, or entered a sinister hoax. Here is the thing--Natalie shamelessly did what many a Tik Tok phenom does--they exploit themselves and those around them--including their children, all in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Which is as old as mankind, I get that--I am listening to the book 1929 right now, and a hundred years ago it was a different media and different gatekeepers, but fame and fortune was where it was at. The thing that really struck home for me was the memoir I just finished by Sally Mann, about how her life was blown up by a journalist who accused her of exploiting her children and how 25 years down the road that is just Tuesday, a nothing burger that is as common as days of the week and fast food. I really did not love this, but it is food for thought.

A Business Owner's Right To Choose

An owner's right to refuse to host a meeting by an organization that is against a woman's right to have autonomy over her body set off a tsunami. Jim Sheehan, the owner of a coffee shop in Driggs, was filmed in mid-August telling members of an anti-abortion rights group not to hold a meeting in his cafe, he has found himself the subject of national news stories and columns. He and his wife have been doxxed, and his business received so many angry calls — even death threats — that staff turned off the phones. Ironically when people try to protect a woman's body autonomy people threaten to kill them, making it all too clear that this is not, in fact, about life. No, it is about controlling women, making them at best second class citizens when you take away their ability to choose what is best for their bodies. It all started with a Facebook post by members of Students for Life of America, a group that opposes abortion rights, advertising that it would hold an Aug. 17 meeting at Wydaho Roasters to discuss efforts surrounding Proposition 1, a 2026 ballot initiative in Idaho that seeks to increase access to abortion. Sheehan, who supports Prop 1, also called the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, responded to the Facebook post in a comment, asking the group to hold its event elsewhere. He said he didn’t give the topic much more thought after that. But the next day, he said, he looked up from grinding coffee to see that the meeting was taking place anyway. He confronted the group, reiterating that he didn’t want them meeting in his shop. An event in the cafe, he reasoned, would give the appearance of support from the business and its owners, and he strongly opposed this group’s efforts. In a confrontation the activists filmed, they pressed Sheehan on what they saw as hypocrisy. His shop advertises its desire to be inclusive, flying an LGBTQ+ Pride flag and displaying a sign that reads, “Everyone is Welcome Here.” Well, not racists and not people who see women as less than worthy of the rights that men are afforded. They can buy coffee, but they cannot advertise they are holding meetings in a business without the owner's permission.

That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

I read this for one of the reading badges in a Goodreads challenge--I read incessantly but somehow two of the 12 summer badges did not have a single book that I had either read or was hoping to read, including this one, which was that the book had 'summer' in the title. The book has two Dianas. The first Diana we meet as a teenager where she works as a nanny for well-off family vacationing in Cape Cod. She loves the beach and the ocean and even her job. As the summer progresses she develops a crush on an older boy and when he invites her to a party with all of his friends, she happily accepts. But the boy betrays her and Diana is assaulted, which changes the trajectory of her life forever. The story fast forwards to 2019 and we meet the second Diana, called Daisy, who a stay-at-home housewife who is working on growing her cooking business. She married her husband Hal when she was very young and he 13 years her senior. She is quite financially dependent on him but also beholden to him--she dropped out of college intending to go back but never does. She wanted more children but only has one. She is isolated after the one friend she had that was hers dies. Otherwise he controls her life--what they do socially, where they travel, and what happens with their daughter. Everything changes for Daisy when she starts to receive misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Daisy gets a glimpse into Diana’s glamorous life and she begins to wonder, what if things were different for her? Eventually, the two connect, meet and become friends. But as you can imagine, this connection isn’t accidental. And you probably know exactly where the story is going from there--this is not a book with twists and turns. So that said, I liked but did not love this--it is a good story though, so I would recommend it.

Amish With A Twist Tula Pink Style

2026 is the Block of the Month year for me, and while the other 3 I am invovled with I have slipped behind in, this one has been easier to keep up. One is that the Facebook group is replete with people who do all the month's blocks the day they get the material and post their results lickedy split. I was gone when the first month arrived, the second month came a couple weeks later and while I was away for the Fourth of July the third month arrived, all while I had yet to open even one ofr them. So, not a great start for me, but I have rallyed and was done with the third month before the fourth arrived--one thing about the Pink Door preparation of the fabric is that it is possible to figure out what color is what, even with so many coming at once. I am really enjoying watching this come together, there is some space to go a little off road in some place, and after quilting for 50 years, I discovered two things that are pretty common and yet I had neither of them. One is design boards--there are so many different fabrics in each block that cutting out is a bit tedious, and it would be very unlikely that I could keep them all straight when sewing them together, and a 14" design board has been key. I have made some cutting errors, but with the design board as well as what the final block is supposed to look like, I have not had to seam rip because of wrong placement. The other is that I bought a ruler organizer--there are so many rulers that I have been regularly using for this quilt that it has been great to have them all organized and propped up so they are easy to move between as needed. We are a third into the quilt and it is coming together beautifully. The Facebook group has been a great source of inspiration--including someone who FPP a butterfly for her blocks! And provided the pattern so we all could if we wanted. There are a few people who I sew regularly with in my guild who are doing this as well, and the whole experience has been great. I would do another Pink Door Block of the Month if the pattern and final quilt moved me, but in some ways I would be just as likely to try this one again with fabric of my own choosing.

Hold Still by Sally Mann

I read this after hearing about it in the Parnassus weekly vlog It Is Friday And IF You Haven't Read This It Is New To You--which has been a rich source of books that are not new and therefore that I would have almost certainly missed without being alerted to them in this way. I have no fewer than 5 such recommendations on my bedside To Read stack and I finished another one earlier this week. It turns out a lot of things are new to me. Sally Mann is a photographer who is best known for photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family-sometimes naked, often not. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist(who shall remain nameless because, well, no need to toot that horn) lifted her life and work almost wholly from its context. She became a figure of a favorite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art. This is especially ironic in the Instagram/Tik Tok era, where influencers shamelessly flog their children for extra clicks. In any case, this is a far reaching story, sprinkled liberally with photographs, that goes back several generations in her family, to draw a clearer look at who she is, what made her, and what she is not. Some quintessential take homes are that she herself would not wear clothes--at all--until she went to school, making me think of some sensory integration challenges (maybe not where every reader went with that), she married young to someone who many years later she still sees as having saved her, and that she is driven to create. A probably unintended consequence of the journalist calling her art problematic, if not pornography, was that her in law's murder/suicide was re-examined by the police with her spouse as a suspect in a murder-murder. Why was unclear--the pair were deeply in debt, which was known to the author and her husband, and they literally had nothing to gain from such a violent course of action. Well, the adage of May You Live In Interesting Times certainly applies and the book is an outstanding version of peeling back the curtain and looking at the artist's process, messy as it is.

Patricia Belyea and Japanese Textiles

Patricia Belyea is a well known textile artist who imports Japanese textiles and leads trips to Japan for people to both learn more about the Japanese textile philosophy and to use more of them in textile art. Her origin story in quilting is that she made a baby quilt for a coworker, and has been a quilter ever since. I myself started with making a pinwheel quilt with fabric that my grandmother had used in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which I tied and used on my bed in college, and I too have been quilting ever since. It is a seductive craft, especially if you love fabric, and Japanese fabric is especially luscious. She is living these days in Wauconda WA with the ground squirrels, deer, and bears--it meets the definition of frontier living, which is an area with less than 2 people per square mile. She did a Zoom lecture to our guild from her studio there. Her relationshio with the textile process in Japan extends to growing indigo herself. It’s a big story — germinating seeds the size of a dot to growing plants with bright green leaves to extracting magical blue dye. It was the second time that Patricia Belyea attempted to farm and harvest Japanese indigo at her highland home. And it worked — with a yield of 5 pounds of indigo dye!

Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

This book, when I read it as a kid, made it seem possible to be independent, brainy, and comfortable with all that. The author illustrated the book herself, and Harriet is a decidedly unfeminine character, and one who is comfortable in her own unconventional skin. I reread it probably 50 years after my first reading, thinking that perhaps it would be a good gift for our granddaughters. Harriet is a flawed but very relatable protagonist. She is dedicated to her routine of spying on her peers and her neighbors--she is an outsider looking in. There are a lot of things that are very relatable about her, and it is not a book for tweens where everything comes out okay in the end, which is much like life itself. Harriet tells it like she sees it in her journal of spy observations, and she is not one to sugar coat it. When her fellow students get ahold of her journal and find out all the unkind things she has said, they shun her, and her struggle to figure out what to do about that is so relatable. The person she listens to best writes her a letter and tells her that sometimes you have to apologize and sometimes you have to lie. Period. Harriet struggles with that mightily. What I did not realize before I reread this is that the author herself was gay and that Harriet the Spy has a gay cult following. There is not a hint of sexual preference to my ear in the book, but Harriet is an iconoclast and an outsider, she has tomboy vibes, and she is fine with all of that, so it makes sense, but I did not know.

Don't Say Good Luck (2026)

There was an awful lot to cry about in this recently released Happy Gilmore film. The opening scene is Sophie just before her big audition for her school play, for which she’s been practicing and rehearsing diligently while occasionally eyeing a boy of interest and being supported by her best friend. She gets called back, which is deserved but she didn't knock it out of the park either, but while she is waiting her turn, her forever butt dialing her father does so unknowingly while they are receiving the devestating news that Sophie's mom's cancer has come back. Sophie pours all that pathos into her audition, and she lands the lead role, much to everyone's surprise. Having battled a cancer personally that I had not good reason to think I would beat, all the while trying to be a parent to my much older than Sophie's mom's kids I totally get trying to hold back the terrible news that this is the end while supporting Sophie spending long hours rehearsing the role of her young life. I also really feel for Sophie's daad as he tries to face losing his wife and balancing that with being the sole parent to his kids going forward. They try to bring in the grandparents briefly and while they offer a few helping hands, overall their grief at losing their daughter overwhelms their ability to be a plus and they have to leave--it is all so beleivable and while these are not the steps that I ultimately walked in my cancer journey, I shed a lot of tears then and when reliving it watching this. At this point, as my spouse occasionally says, we are too old to die young, at the time I was thinking I had something unbeatable, I had had a good lie, but I was too young for it to be over. Bring a handkerchief if you check this Netflix presnetation out.

On The Way To The Wedding by Julia Quinn

Yes, I finished the eighth Bridgerton novels, and at the end this one, all Bridgerton offspring are married! The challenge in a series of eight books, all romances and with stories that must be distinct and different from each other is that an author just runs out of gas on new and different ways to reluctantly fall in love. And so while this would likely shuffle to the bottom if I were to rank them, I very much enjoyed this book in much the same vein that I enjoyed the other seven, that is to say as light diversionary stories that kept my attention, I cared what happened, I was interested in the snippets of information about Gregory's siblings and their families, and overall I would give it a thumbs up. Gregory falls quite early on first for the obvious woman--the one everyone has their eyes on--but then settles on her best friend, which is the right choice for him. The unfortunate piece is that she is spoken for. Her uncle has promised her to another, much like a head of cattle, and so there are some shenanigans that ensue in order for him to wed her. The epilogue is a bit longer in this one, being the last as it is. And while I read right through this this summer, I won't be diving right in to the prequel just yet--though will likely get to it eventually.