Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

I have been impulse checking out at my local library, which means that I have been checking on the 14-Day loan shelf for something that I am well down the list to get with a traditional hold. I started with the Hilary Clinton/Louise Penny thriller, and went on at my peak to take out The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Cloud Cuckoo Land together one week, which landed me reading in excess of a 100 pages a day to get them back on time. This book is a different story, one that I did not intend to read necessarily, but happened upon and I am glad that I did. At it's most basic, this is a book about a family. The husband is a pastor, and he comes form a long line of pastors, so it is a habit in his family of origin. his wife is a pastor's wife, but she has her own dark past, with a father who suicided and a few unwise choices that predated her marriage, and then there are their four children, three boys and a girl. The thing that elevates this story beyond what you might expect is the meticulous attention to detail for all but the youngest child. The adults are in the midst of a midlife malaise that they do no better a job of navigating than most, and the teens are all sorts of impulsive and that lands them all in a certain amount of trouble. This is a well written wild ride that should not be missed.

French Dispatch (2021)

Where to start? Wes Anderson movies are full of intricate teeny tiny details that all fit together in an improbable way and at the end of it all I am not at all sure that I understand where he was going with it all, but I have enjoyed the ride. That is true to the nth degree with this movie, where it is like a fire hose of details in each and every scene and they just keep coming. It was filmed in Angoulême, which is a French town that is small as well as typically charming, in southwestern France, and that is just one tiny detail that is a clue to the film as a whole. Anderson, who lives in France, called this a love letter to journalism, and the cast is, as is typical of his flims, jam packed with stars. The story line is that the last volume of a magazien is being published and the audience is going through the article in real time. Each one is a bit bizarre, and at the end there is no effort to make sense of it as a whole, but you are left with a pleasant feeling none-the-less.

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

This book is set in the fictional African village of Kosawa and is the story of a decades-long fight for environmental justice in a former colony. The novel centers around the Nangi family, telling their story from multiple different perspectives over the course of the book. In addition to addressing the real issues of continued colonial influence to the detriment of those who live there and without them benefitting from their local resources, it bears a close resemblance to some important modern-day climate themes. People eventually act in an extreme way but they are driven to it by the combination of desperation and neglect, and the reader may squirm at the lengths that are resorted to, at no point does one feel they cannot relate to the impotence Kosawa feels in being unable to control their present of their future.

Being The Ricardo's (2021)

First and foremost, while I did not love this movie, Nicole Kidman is unbeleivable as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem is not far behind in his portrayal of Desi Arnaz. While I Love Lucy predated my television viewing days, I saw many rereuns and have a very good idea of what they were emulating and it is a pitch perfect performance. The film focuses on a fateful week in the relationship of the couple. Lucy is outed as having once marked herself as a member of the communist party at the height of the McCarthy led Red Scare, Desi was reported to have been spotted stepping out on Lucy, and Lucy reveals that she is pregnant and wants to have a baby in the show. The network agrees to let her have the baby--which is the first time ever in television. Crazy I know. Whenever I think about how poorly women are treated I have to remember that this happened in my lifetime. J. Edgar Hoover himself spoke up on Lucy's behalf, which makes you wonder what Desi had on him, and it was the beginning of the end of Desi and Lucy because he was in fact chronically unfaithful to her, and she had had enough.

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

This was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2021, and I have a long standing tradition of reading some if not all the books on the list. This book is characteristic of many that are nominated, in that it has an odd twist on how to tell a story. The idea came to the author as he was walking down London’s New Cross Road past a branch of Iceland on the site of which, in November 1944, a German V2 rocket fell. A plaque commemorates the killing of 168 people, including several children, in what was then Woolworths. Thinking about the lives cut short, he decided to make his novel about five working-class children, allowing them to survive and grow up but not using their actual names and transposing their stories to the invented south London borough of Bexford. The novel opens with a poised, detailed and audacious description of the bomb itself exploding and then follows his five characters for a day each in 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994 and 2009. The book leaps through their lives, giving us jsut a glimpse of how it all came out. There is a lot said and a lot left to the imagination, but it it is unique and enjoyable at the end.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

This is a lushly animated movie that has pretty standard Disney animated feature films share, but does standout in that it is the first movie with a Southeast Asian story. When I read that in a review it surprised me, but it shouldn't. Be that as it may, I think it is good to reinforce the positives, which is that they did it this year, and their other blockbuster animated feature film is set in South America. The movie is otherwise entirely recognizable, repleat with oft used Disney tropes. The story is a little complicated, as these stories tend to be. It takes place in Kumandra, an enchanted realm inspired by various Southeast Asian cultures and divided into five kingdoms named after a dragon's body parts: Heart, Fang, Spine, Talon and Tail. Before they became extinct centuries ago, dragons once roamed the land and served as friendly guardians to humanity. Their magic lives on in a jewel called the Dragon Gem, which is kept in a cave in Heart, but the other four kingdoms covet its mighty powers. One day, all five factions come together and try to reach a peace agreement, but tensions erupt, a fight breaks out and the Gem shatters into five pieces that are scattered across Kumandra. This opens the doorway to an ancient enemy called the Druun, a terrible plague that turns people to stone. Raya gathers a rag tag group of cursaders to her cause of reuniting Kumandra and off we go.

The Serious Eater by Ed Levine

This is a memoir by the founder of Serious Eats, who started out writing about the things that he loved, that made new York City so special from a food stand point. Pizza and bagels were early subjects, and then he got big dreams and some talented people working with him who have been really big, Kenji Lopez-Alt being the superstar, with his incredible attention to detail and his talent for teaching people to care about it as well. There is also Stella Park who went on to write the iconic book about classic American desserts. The book, however, is a business book more than it’s a food book, and while that’s okay, it is not my jam. Levine has a lot to say about the scramble for survival among the food sites and blogs. There’s a fair amount to learn here about acquisitions and deal structuring and scaling up and monetizing content, but I would have preferred something leaning more heavily on food.

The Rescue (2021)

December through March is my documentary binge season. I watch one or two each year outside of this time period, but I really lean heavily on the Oscar shortlist, and try to watch as many of the movies that I can find. This is a National Geographic documentary about the rescue of the boys soccer team that was trapped in a cave in Thailand by rising water with their coach. The situation was very tricky because the caves are so long that there were very few people on the planet who had the expertise requried to pull of a rescue, and they were all middle aged hobby divers, who outstrip navy Seals when it comes to this sort of work. The story is an incredible one, whereby they use extreme means to extricate everyone, and in a nick of time. It really is an amazing story.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I read this with a group of people who were all in a group on Facebook led by the inimitable Anna Barker, a Russian Literature professor and an all round enthusiastic teacher. We read it over 100 days, whoch is about 7-8 pages a day, which sounds extremely reasonable as a pace to read at, but this book is slow. I mean molasses slow. The hardest part about this is that I read the book initially as a teenager, and I loved it. I am now somewhat afraid to reread previously loved books because my older self has a totally different view. I was so much older then, I am younger than that now. There was so much I did not know, which made the book simpler and more compelling. Now it is a twisted mess. The themes of spiritual malaise, Faustian bargains, and philosophical paradigms are ever present. What you see is not exactly what you get, as so much is hidden somewhere between the lines as his characters showcase different beliefs and ethics, leaving us to pick up the pieces. The storytelling is tense and replete with drawn out buildups, that are usually redeemed by deeply poignant payoffs. The plentiful and fairly diverse cast of characters act as case studies of societal ills that remain today, and we are left to grapple with them. Dostoevsky leaves us sad and reconciled to our human state.

Encanto (2021)

Disney can be counted on for feel good, family friendly animated movies that you do not have to scratch your head too long to figure out what the underlying take home messages might be, and this movie is no exception. Except for one thing, it centers on a Spanish speaking culture and ideas and beliefs that are outside of the mainstream western norms that Disney has been slowly but consistently breaking out of. This story is a Colombian magical realist tale of a family that received special powers after surviving a tragedy. Now, a few generations later, they live together in a magical house and each member develops their own talent, like the ability to control the weather, shapeshift into other people, and talk to animals. Their house responds to the family’s requests and responds to their moods. Each bedroom is magically tailored to the relative and their magical gift. All except for one, Mirabel--she is pointedly without magic, and even her grandmother--especially her abuela--holds against her. Well, you can see where this is going from all angles and a mile away, but it does so against a magnificently rendered animated landscape that is breath taking to behold.