Sometimes Monday ...

 ... is a day for letting go. 

Ryan enjoys cooking and has been pestering politely asking me for several years if I thought maybe we could have Thanksgiving at his house. I've always said that it's my favorite holiday because it's just about good food and good company, with no extra pressure for gifts. I really do love Thanksgiving leftovers, even more than the meal itself, so I've always said, "That's okay, we'll just have Thanksgiving here."

But this is the year I've finally let it go. After a lively group text with Justin and Ryan, we decided that dinner will be at Ryan's. I will still be making a couple of pies, apple crisp, and crescent rolls, and Jess is bringing macaroni & cheese and Brussels sprouts. (Those are two different dishes!) Ryan is doing everything else, and I'm happy about it. I may have to bring home a piece of pie so I can have my traditional day-after-Thanksgiving pumpkin pie with too much whipped cream for breakfast, but I think Ryan will be okay with that. 

Sometimes it's good to let go and do something a bit different.

 

Thoughts on Some Books

I had a pretty good week in reading, and I'd like to tell you about the books I read. 

Some Bright Nowhere is a beautifully written, emotionally resonant novel about love, loss, and the quiet complexities of a long marriage. Ann Packer returns after more than a decade with a story that feels both intimate and universal, a portrait of two people facing the inevitable, and the way one shocking request reframes everything they thought they knew about each other.

Packer’s writing is as graceful and precise as ever. She captures the rhythms of a decades-long relationship with real honesty, including the small kindnesses, the familiar irritations, the enduring affection that deepens even as the body and spirit begin to fade. Eliot’s voice, in particular, is rendered with empathy and depth. His reflections on caregiving, love, and identity feel heartbreakingly true to life.

The novel’s pace is quiet, even meditative, which suits the subject matter but may feel slow to some readers. And while Claire’s “startling request” drives much of the emotional tension, it’s handled with restraint rather than melodrama and might be more an exploration of what love demands of us than a shocking twist. I really disliked Claire and her coven of friends and didn't understand what she wanted in her final days. Maybe I didn't understand her reasoning because I've been lucky enough not to be facing the end of my life, but I mainly felt sorry for her poor husband Eliot.

Ultimately, Some Bright Nowhere is a tender, thoughtful look at what it means to honor another person’s autonomy and to keep loving when love becomes hardest. Fans of Packer’s earlier work, like The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, will recognize her gift for emotional clarity and moral complexity. A moving, quietly powerful return from a writer who understands the human heart. Three and a half stars rounded up.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Harper for providing me with a copy of this book. It was published on November 11, 2025, and there is a Goodreads giveaway for it if you are interested. 

Julian Borger’s I Seek a Kind Person is a deeply moving and meticulously researched family memoir that bridges the personal and historical with impressive grace. What begins as a journalist’s investigation into a long-buried family secret becomes a powerful meditation on survival, silence, and the human capacity for both cruelty and compassion.

When Borger discovers the small newspaper ad that saved his father’s life in 1938 Vienna, he opens a door to a world of lost stories of children sent into exile by desperate parents, families torn apart, and the quiet heroism of strangers who answered those heartbreaking pleas. The author’s background as a journalist serves him well here; his research is exhaustive, and his attention to historical detail exacting. Yet what keeps the book from feeling overly documentary is its emotional core and the empathy Borger extends to both the remembered and the forgotten.

The book moves across continents and generations, weaving together accounts from Vienna, Britain, Shanghai, and beyond. At times, the sheer number of stories and names can feel overwhelming, but that may be true to the chaos of the time and a reflection of the fragmented lives left in the Holocaust’s wake. The passages about Borger’s father, Robert, and his lifelong silence are especially affecting, offering a sensitive portrait of inherited trauma and the difficulty of knowing those who survived by not speaking. 

While occasionally dense and perhaps a bit too detailed in its later chapters, I Seek a Kind Person remains a remarkable act of remembrance, both personal and collective. It’s a testament to the power of archival research, but more importantly, to the persistence of kindness in a world that so often forgets it. This was four stars for me.

Brightly Shining by Ingvild H. Rishøi is exactly the kind of book I’ve been craving: a story filled with gentler, kinder characters even as it faces hard truths head-on.

Christmas is approaching, Ronja’s father is once again out of work, and the family’s stability feels as fragile as ever. When Ronja manages to get him a job selling Christmas trees, it looks like fortune might finally shift, until the pull of the local pub proves stronger than his responsibilities. With social services close to intervening, Ronja and her sister step in, determined to keep their small family intact by selling the trees themselves.

What could easily have been a bleak or overly saccharine story instead becomes something quietly luminous. Rishøi writes with such warmth, tenderness, and deep understanding of the ways children create hope out of even the most precarious situations. Ronja and her sister aren’t idealized; they’re simply good, loyal kids trying their best in a world that hasn’t given them much. And again and again, kindness shows up, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes in small gestures that feel nothing less than life-saving.

Caroline Waight’s translation deserves special appreciation. Her rendering of Rishøi’s prose is clean and vivid, capturing both the humor and the heartbreak without tipping into sentimentality. The emotional truth of the story shines through in every scene.

Brightly Shining is a novella that carries surprising depth. It’s about addiction and responsibility, certainly, but even more about love, resilience, and the quiet generosity of strangers. For anyone seeking stories where goodness still has a place in the world, this four star book is a bright, moving gift.

Having just finished The Book of Guilt, I’m left with a strong sense of admiration for Catherine Chidgey. This book is ambitious, deftly written, and morally provocative. The author imagines an alternate Britain in 1979, with an unnerving under-current of institutional control and moral ambiguity. I found the world-building compelling; the three teenaged triplet boys in the Sycamore Homes, the daily routines of “The Book of Dreams”, “The Book of Knowledge” and “The Book of Guilt” work as powerful metaphors for surveillance, control and internalised shame.

Vincent’s voice (one of the triplets) is believable and his gradual awakening to the reality around him is quietly haunting. The way Chidgey layers the children’s trust in their "Mothers" with the creeping sense of something deeply wrong was, for me, the strongest part of the novel. Beyond that, the themes of dehumanization, complicity, science-ethical reckoning and what it means to be “other” in society feel both timely and deeply human. The prose, while at times understated, often glowed with small moments of vivid imagery: e.g., the description of the gazing ball “shimmering in the ferns like a great eye” was one of my favorite touches.

While Vincent’s sections were the most gripping, some of the other narrative threads (for example the Minister of Loneliness subplot) felt less emotionally grounded in comparison. The shift in perspective is clever, but I found that I was more invested in the boys’ story than the parallel ones. As a result, the latter parts of the novel, while thematically rich, didn’t quite land with the full force I was expecting.

If you enjoy literary-dystopian fiction with strong moral underpinnings, this four star book is one you’ll want to read. It has shocks, slowly-gathering dread, and characters you care about, and it leaves you with lingering questions about power, difference, and guilt. Both Remote Sympathy (the only other book I have read by Chidgey) and The Book of Guilt showcase her remarkable ability to explore moral complicity and the quiet, human face of institutional cruelty, but they do so in very different settings. Remote Sympathy is historical, set in and around a Nazi concentration camp, where Chidgey examines denial, guilt, and the uneasy intimacy between perpetrators and victims. The Book of Guilt moves into a near-future dystopia, an invented Britain where social control and moral judgment are systematized through eerie institutions. Together, they form a compelling diptych: one rooted in the atrocities of the past, the other in the moral dangers of the present and future.

I hope your weekend ahead includes some good reading!

Unraveled Wednesday: 11/12/25

I’m happily joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with progress on Justin's boot socks. 

I'm finished with one sock (except for grafting the toe) and well on the way down the leg of the second sock. 

 

And thanks to Araignee's recommendation, I now have a darning egg so grafting the toes will hopefully be faster and neater. This might even be incentive to get the second sock done faster so I can see how well it works.

 

 

I will welcome grafting if this slightly trepidatious task can be done faster and more neatly, and who knows? I might even darn a few socks that have needed it for a year or more. 

 

I read four books this week, so I'll be back on Friday with my thoughts on them.  

What are you making and reading this week? 

 

Read With Us: The Antidote

Hello, Read With Us friends! If you're looking for a rich, surprising novel to spark deep conversation, psychological exploration, and food for the mind and soul, let me tell you a little bit about The Antidote by Karen Russell. Below are five compelling reasons why I think this book is a wonderful choice for our next read. 

Why I think this one deserves your time:

1. A haunting setting that blends history and magic.
The novel opens in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s in a small Nebraskan town called Uz, already in collapse from drought, economic hardship, and historical erasure, and then a wild dust storm (on “Black Sunday”) lays bare the artificiality of the settlement, the cost of forgetting, and the fragility of memory. Russell layers in magical-realism (a “prairie witch” who stores memories, a time-travelling camera, a sentient scarecrow) to explore real themes of land-abuse, Indigenous erasure, and environmental collapse. For our book club, this means there’s both vivid story and rich metaphor: you’ll be reading a story of characters, while also talking about what the Dust Bowl means, what memory means, what our own era echoes.

2. Multi-layered characters whose stories interweave.
There’s Antonina (the “Prairie Witch” nicknamed the Antidote) who deposits other people’s memories; Harp Oletsky, the Polish-American farmer whose land miraculously thrives amid the drought; his niece Dell, a basketball-loving girl apprenticing under the witch; a Black photographer working for the New Deal whose camera shows more than meets the eye.  Because the novel moves among many viewpoints, we'll have plenty to talk about: whose story moved you most? Which viewpoint you found strongest or most compelling — and why.

Also interesting: the characters live with trauma, inheritance, place, and memory. After we read about someone leaving an abusive marriage in Nesting, you may especially appreciate how Russell handles trauma, memory, the “vaulting” of what we don’t want to remember.

3. Prose with ambition: beauty, strangeness, risk.
Russell is known for her inventive fiction (think Swamplandia!) and here she takes a big swing: the reviews talk about the “spell-binding” quality of her writing and how she uses metaphor and magical realism to make us think differently about American history. We are asking a bit more from you this time. For our book club, I think that’s a gift: you’ll find passages to re-read, lines to linger over, metaphors to unpack. I'm imagining that I might highlight how Russell describes dust, memory, wind, land, even basketball.

4. A narrative that connects to our time.
Though set in the 1930s, the book engages with themes still urgent today: climate collapse, settler amnesia, how we treat land, how we remember (and erase) history. For our Read With Us conversation, this means we won’t just ask “What happened?” but “What does this say about us now?” and “How does memory (personal, cultural, collective) tie into our lives today?”

5. Ideal for book-clubs because it offers both beauty and tension.
There’s tension: environmental disaster, murder, secrets, memory theft, going to the edges of what characters can hold. There’s beauty: language, character, strangeness, wonder. I think that mix can only add to our discussion. 

In an interview with BookPage, Karen Russell said she wanted to write a story where an apocalyptic future for us isn’t a foregone conclusion. “You can’t imagine a viable future, a world that’s kinder and more just than what we’ve got going today, without returning to the past,” Russell says. This sounds like a book for me. I've just started it and I'm finding it's not a book I can rush through, but it is a delicious read.

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout November. Discussion day for The Antidote is scheduled for Tuesday, January 6, 2026 at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always fun, educational, and entertaining Zoom discussion.

Whether you're new to Karen Russell or already a fan, we hope you'll Read With Us and discover (or revisit since I know some of you have already read it) this amazingly creative novel. I think it's ambitious but readable, magical but grounded, beautiful but thought-provoking. It offers spectacle and depth, characters you’ll care about (and question), metaphors you’ll carry after the last page, in preparation for a discussion you'll be glad you had. I'm already looking forward to it and I hope you'll Read With Us!

 

Bits and Pieces

I have a few things that aren't really enough for a post on their own, so it must be time for a Bits and Pieces post. 

Making - Venison stew, split pea soup, homemade dinner rolls, and zucchini bread. Now is the time to start using all of the things we froze over the summer. 

Finding Some Happiness and Hope - In all of the positive election results. I don't think I've felt this happy after reading the news in a long, long time. From our governor-elect Mikie Sherrill in NJ to the VA governor to all three Supreme Court judges in PA being retained, and a new Sheriff in Bucks County PA that will not be cooperating with ICE’s 287(g) program, it was a day of good news. Not just in the results, but there also seemed to be a much bigger voter turnout. Voter engagement is always a good thing!

House Price Gone Wild? -  The Zillow post above caused a bit of a stir on our street. The price was actually $460,000 but someone went a little crazy with zeros. I would sell our house if we could get anywhere near that, but alas, it was an error and has been corrected. 

Watching - The final of Great British Bake Off. I think I know who is going to win (Jasmine) as the other two contestants in the final have had some big baking mishaps. We'll see ...

Also Watching - The Daily Show where Jon Stewart talks to Joe Manchin. I used to think he was a bit of a "troublemaker" when he was in the Senate, but after listening to him, I see that I didn't really know much about him at all. It's a shame that he's no longer in politics and I don't think there are any centrists like him left.

 

The Coolest Thing - Showed up at our house with the tree guys. We were having two big oaks pruned and the tree guys brought The Spider. It's a really cool piece of equipment that they brought on a trailer and then drove it across the yard to the trees by radio control. It was so interesting that I had to go out and talk to the guy about it. He said there was a steep learning curve but it was part of why he had fun at work. 

 

 

Thinking About - maybe knitting a Hitchhiker. I have plenty in my knitting queue (Justin's socks and a pair of slippers for him, maybe some socks for John, a hat for Justin and one for me) but I think there are several skeins in my stash that would work. I miss the meditative quality of Hitchhiker knitting and I think I might need that; good election news can only go so far. 

 

 

Potholders -  I was looking through my files of potholder patterns and remembered that this was one I always meant to make. As soon as Justin's socks are done (which isn't going to happen if I keep dreaming of future projects) I think I'll get my loops out and give this one a try. 

 

We're supposed to have a warm Saturday followed by a rainy Sunday. That sounds perfect for reading a good book (The Heart-Shaped Tin for me). I hope you've got something good planned for this weekend!

 

Unraveled Wednesday: 11/5/25

I’m happily joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with a completed and modeled Rainbow Scarf for Ryan and 75% of the first boot sock for Justin.

There is still a needle in the scarf because I wanted to make sure the length was okay before I bound off. Ryan has deemed the length perfect so I will bind off this week and put the scarf in my Christmas pile o' gifts. I do kind of miss working on it and I have plenty of yarn left, so I might make a scarf for myself some day.

 

But first there are socks to finish for Justin and then slippers to knit for him. I'm about halfway through the foot on the first sock. It looks slightly odd now, but it is meant to be a tall boot sock and once I finish the foot (almost 12" long) it might look a little more normal, or at least like a normal sock for Bigfoot. I'm going to finish this pair of socks before I start the slippers. This yarn is really rustic wool and it's hard on my hands. I'm afraid if I don't make myself finish the socks first I might never get to the second sock. I have some lovely soft Malabrigo for the slippers and it is going to be a real pleasure to knit. 

 

I only read one book this week and it was a 48-page picture book! I stumbled upon Knight Owl, this charming picture book, loved the homophone word play of the title, and just had to check it out. The illustrations and the story are equally cute and delightful, so do yourself a favor and read it to a young child. (You could also read it yourself like I did, and I'm far from young!)

What are you making and reading this week? 

 

Sometimes Monday ...

... you are lucky enough to have a couple of early Christmas cactus blossoms, 

along with a bunch of buds waiting to burst forth with more color. 

I hope your week is off to a beautiful start! 

Some Books I Read This Week

I read four books this week so I'll share my thoughts here with you. The two average ones are up first. 

Kat read this book and it sounded interesting. It was, but it was also just three stars for me. A Biography of a Mountain by Matthew Davis is an ambitious, researched look at the complicated story of Mount Rushmore, its creation, meaning, and legacy. Davis traces the land’s origins as sacred ground for Native tribes, the expansion of the American West, and the monumental (and controversial) work of sculptor Gutzon Borglum. The book also connects the site’s history to modern movements like Land Back and ongoing debates about how America memorializes its past.

While I think Mr. Davis tried to be somewhat evenhanded in presenting both the United States National Park perspective and that of Native Americans, but for me he was not completely successful. I came away with too many personal stories, too much history told in a rather dull, textbook-like way, and not enough from the Native American side of the story. For a book that sets out to center those voices, their presence often felt secondary.

Still, I appreciated Davis’s effort to grapple with such a difficult subject and his willingness to confront the political and moral complexities of the monument. A Biography of a Mountain is a thoughtful, if uneven, read that may appeal most to history buffs and those curious about how a single mountain can embody so many layers of the American story.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on November 11, 2025. 

I’ve read John Grisham since his early days, when his legal thrillers were taut, fast-paced, and nearly impossible to put down. Unfortunately, The Widow didn’t have that same energy for me. The setup, a small-town lawyer whose new client turns out to be more than she appears, had some promise, but the story moved at a sluggish pace and often meandered through subplots that didn’t add much tension or urgency.

Simon Latch is an interesting enough protagonist, and the premise of being wrongly accused should have made for a sharp, suspenseful read. Instead, the narrative felt underwhelming, more reflective and procedural than thrilling. Grisham’s writing is still smooth and readable, but the spark that once made his courtroom dramas so gripping just wasn’t here. 

All in all, The Widow was an average read, but not the kind of tightly wound legal thriller I used to read Grisham for. This one was also a three star read. 

Written in Bone is a fascinating, sometimes unsettling exploration of what our skeletons can reveal about our lives and our deaths. Forensic anthropologist Sue Black draws on her long career working with the dead to explain, bone by bone, how each part of the human body tells a story. From the skull to the toes, she shows how age, trauma, disease, and even personality can leave physical traces behind.

What I appreciated most was Black’s deep respect for the human body and humans themselves. Her passion for her work shines through every chapter, and her quiet sense of humor often balances the darker material. The book is strongest when she combines case studies with personal reflections; those sections feel human and heartfelt rather than purely clinical. Sometimes the case studies are difficult to read, like the identification of fire victims and what can happen to bone in a fire, but it's still interesting and worth reading.

That said, this book isn’t always an easy read. The tone can shift abruptly from deeply moving to very technical, and some sections bog down in dense anatomical detail. Readers looking for a true-crime style narrative may be disappointed as this is more a textbook-with-heart than a thriller.

Overall, Written in Bone is intelligent, compassionate, and informative, though sometimes uneven in pacing and tone. I learned a great deal about both the science of bones and the humanity behind them. Three and a half stars, rounded up. 

 

 

Life: A Love Story by Elizabeth Berg is a beautiful, deeply human novel that glows with warmth and quiet wisdom. It’s the kind of book that makes you pause, smile, and feel grateful for ordinary moments, like the smell of coffee, a favorite comfortable chair, the light through a window. Berg has always written with a sensitivity to everyday life, and here she captures it perfectly through the voice of Florence “Flo” Greene, a woman looking back with honesty and ahead with grace.

Flo decides to leave behind not only her house but also a written legacy for Ruthie, the neighbor girl who grew up next door and remains like a daughter to her. What unfolds is part memoir, part letter, and part gentle nudge to keep living fully, no matter one’s age. Through her reflections and even her meddling in the lives of friends and neighbors, Flo becomes a vibrant force for connection, reminding us that love, in all its forms, is both fragile and enduring.

What I especially appreciated is that this is a profoundly positive and hopeful novel, but never saccharine. Berg’s prose is luminous yet grounded; she never glosses over loss or regret, but instead lets them coexist with humor, affection, and renewal. There’s real emotional honesty in the way Flo reveals her long-buried secret about her marriage, and in how she reaches out to others even as she’s preparing to say goodbye.

Reading this felt like sitting down with an old friend who tells the truth but still leaves you feeling lighter and more open to the world. I think Berg must have a compassionate spirit and it certainly comes through in her writing.

Thank to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on March 17, 2026. (I'm sorry that you have to wait five long months for the publication of this novel!)

I hope you've got something good to read this weekend!

 

Unraveled Wednesday: 10/29/25

I’m happily joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with a completed Rainbow Scarf for Ryan and the beginnings of what will hopefully be a pair of socks for Justin. I took the scarf along when I visited Ryan on Monday, asked him to make sure he tried it on for length before I left, and then we both forgot. It's a bit longer than six feet, but I left it on the needle so I can easily take out a few inches if he thinks it's too long. I'll post a proper picture when it's done/approved and bound off. 

I did get the yarn for Justin's slippers, but I've also gone off on a bit of a tangent. I didn't think that I wanted to make socks for him because he has such big feet. But what I didn't want to do was knit socks with fingering weight yarn. He wears boots almost every day which means he is usually wearing boot socks. I spent quite a while looking for worsted weight yarn with nylon, and found that Briggs & Little makes some they call Tuffy. Sometimes it's classified as aran weight, but whatever the weight, it is nice, thick, woolly, yarn. Of course, it comes from Canada and that means tariffs, but nobody seemed to know quite what that would add to the cost. The yarn is priced quite reasonably at $7.00 Canadian ($5.00 US) for 215 yds., but I was hesitant to order, not knowing what the real cost would be. So I looked on etsy, found a bunch in various colors, and cast on some socks. 

I ended up casting on three times times because each attempt looked too small. I've finally settled on a 48 stitch sock. This is certainly doable so I'm going to keep knitting and hopefully end up with a pair of wearable and warm socks. I still intend to knit the slippers, probably Wychwood or maybe Thick Bootie Slippers (both are Ravelry links) but I haven't cast on yet. 

 

 

I finished four books this week, so I'll save my reviews for Friday.

What are you making and reading this week? 

 

I'm Lucky

I consider myself lucky for lots of reasons, but today it’s because I have a kid who cooks really good food for me. Ryan enjoys being in the kitchen, and since John’s garden happens to be at Ryan’s house, we usually head over there once a week. While John checks the garden, Ryan makes us lunch. (Our soil here in New Jersey has untreatable verticillium wilt that makes it unsuited for a garden here and is also slowly killing our trees, but that’s a sad story for another day.)

We used to go out to diners, but no matter what we ordered, Ryan would usually say he could make it better. (And honestly, he’s right.) These days he often asks if there’s anything we’re hungry for, and I usually tell him it’s chef’s choice - whatever he feels like making is fine with me. He’s made us omelets, egg salad, grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, sausage corn chowder, “supper on a bread slice” (a dish my mother used to make, but Ryan’s version is much improved), and his absolutely stellar onion soup gratinée.

Last week I was grumbling about a disappointing canned clam chowder I’d tried, and Ryan offered to make some from scratch. He watched Jacques Pépin (I’m not sure clam chowder really needs leeks or corn like Jacques adds) and then checked out a few more videos on youtube. He decided the method was similar to sausage corn chowder, just with clams and clam juice instead. So that’s what I was served for lunch yesterday, along with Ryan's special cheese toast. 

And of course, it was fantastic! I've never had homemade clam chowder before, and it turns out the canned stuff doesn’t even come close. Ryan’s version had onions, garlic, celery, potatoes, butter, half-and-half, bacon, clams, clam juice, chives, parsley, a little hot sauce, and plenty of seasoning. I'm not sure whether this is my favorite or if his onion soup wins, but I will take either one of them any time he is willing to make them.

And one of the best parts?

Ryan sent me home with the leftovers. I am, without a doubt, very lucky.

 

Banned Books

Every year when my library puts up its Banned Books display, I can’t resist spending a little extra time browsing. There’s something both funny and thought-provoking about seeing which titles have landed on that list, and, in many cases, why.

This year, a few of the choices made me laugh out loud. Right there among the “dangerous” and “controversial” works were Bad Kitty and Captain Underpants. Really? Those mischievous cats and underwear-clad superheroes are what we’re worried about corrupting young minds?

When my sons were growing up in the 1990s, Captain Underpants books were a fixture in our household. They made the boys laugh, and, truth be told, they made me laugh, too. The idea that they’re banned for “offensive language,” being “unsuited for their age group,” or “encouraging disruptive behavior” is almost too funny to me. My kids were perfectly capable of coming up with their own disruptive behavior without any help from a cartoon character in his underwear.

As for Bad Kitty, it turns out some of the books have been challenged because they include a lesbian couple and use symbolic expletives (those cartoon-style symbols like @#$%! that suggest a swear word without actually saying one). Hardly scandalous, in my opinion, and certainly not something worth banning.

I ended up checking out two books from the display that I’d read before: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I had to look up why they’d been banned or challenged, too, themes of witchcraft, madness, and repressed sexuality for the first, and profanity and atheism for the second. It made me realize how easily books can be misunderstood or reduced to a single “offensive” element, when what they actually offer is depth, empathy, and perspective.

 

 

I completely support the idea that parents should decide what they feel is appropriate for their own children. That’s a personal and important responsibility. But I draw the line when someone tries to make that decision for everyone else’s children, too. One family’s comfort zone shouldn’t define another’s reading list.

Banned Books Week (it was October 5 -11 this year) is a good reminder of why libraries matter so much; they should be able to offer everyone the freedom to explore ideas, to question, to laugh, and to learn. Standing in front of that display each year, I’m grateful for the librarians who work hard to ensure those stories stay on the shelves, waiting for curious readers to discover them all over again. Checking out the books that make people uncomfortable are often the ones most worth reading.

Unraveled Wednesday: 10/22/25

I’m happily joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with what I hope is almost the end of the rainbow scarf.

I haven't yet tired of knitting rainbows but I do want to finish the scarf so I'm ready to start Justin's Christmas present. He's a little more difficult to knit for but I had what I hope might be a good idea - slippers. I've made him a gazillion hats and he wears size 13 boots, so socks are quite an undertaking. I found a slipper pattern that I think will work and have even ordered yarn that will be here later this week. If Justin ends up not wearing them, maybe Nugget and the kitten can sleep in them. 

I read several books this week but I'm saving a couple of them for a post I have planned for Friday. In the meantime, here is a slightly strange yet interesting book that I also read. Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo is one of those quietly unusual novels that sneaks up on you with its tenderness. I picked it up from my library’s shelves without quite knowing what to expect, and I ended up genuinely touched by its mix of fable-like wonder and small-town realism.

The story follows Gabriel Fisher, an orphan born extraordinarily large (eighteen pounds and twenty-seven inches at birth) whose life unfolds somewhere between myth and Midwest. Raised first by an older brother and later by strict Amish grandparents who try to hide him from the world, Gabriel’s journey is both physically and spiritually outsized. When a high school coach discovers him working in the fields, his secret life bursts into the open, setting off a series of events that test faith, love, and community.

Rindo writes beautifully about rural Wisconsin and the complex, sometimes claustrophobic ties of family and belief. There’s a quiet moral weight to the story, a sense that kindness and cruelty coexist in the same hearts. I especially appreciated how the novel balanced magical realism with grounded emotional truth.

That said, the pacing felt uneven at times, and a few plot turns veered toward the sentimental or predictable. Still, Gabriel himself is such a memorable character, both gentle and formidable, that I found myself thinking about him long after finishing.

A strange, heartfelt, and reflective novel about belonging and difference, Life, and Death, and Giants earns 3.5 stars from me. It may not be perfect, but it certainly has heart.

 

What are you making and reading this week?

 

Sometimes Monday ...

... you start out reorganizing the freezer and somehow end up baking a cake. It was one of those “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” kind of days, but with a very happy ending.

We have three chest freezers, mostly because we freeze a lot of garden produce, and both John and Justin hunt. Every fall, I have to clean them out and reorganize things so I can actually find (and use) what’s inside. I finished one freezer and had just started on the second when I discovered a bag of cranberries I’d frozen, probably last Thanksgiving. I moved them to the fridge to thaw, and then thought about them every time I opened the door.

At first, I considered making cranberry-orange bread, but since I didn’t have any oranges, and wasn’t in the mood for a grocery run, I started thinking about Nantucket Cranberry Pie instead. I went to look for the recipe but couldn’t find it in my box. I was pretty sure it was by Laurie Colwin, so I pulled out Home Cooking and More Home Cooking.

Of course, that led to taking all the cookbooks off the shelf, dusting, vacuuming, and then spending a lovely afternoon reading through Laurie Colwin’s essays (which, honestly, was half the fun). Eventually, I did find the recipe in More Home Cooking.

And since it made such a satisfying bake, I thought I’d share it here as both “blog fodder” and a handy place to keep the recipe for next time.

Here’s Laurie’s recipe, in case you’d like to try it, too:

Nantucket Cranberry Pie

1. Chop enough cranberries to make 2 cups and enough walnuts to make 1/2 cup.

2. In the bottom of a 10-inch pie plate or springform pan, place chopped cranberries, chopped walnuts, and 1/2 cup of sugar.

3. Mix 2 large eggs, 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) melted and cooled butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon almond extract. Stir till smooth.

 

4. Pour over cranberry-walnut mixture and bake for 40 minutes at 350 F.

 

I didn't have any walnuts so I added an extra 1/2 cup of cranberries. I used 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 1/4 teaspoon almond extract, just because I like vanilla better than almond. I don't know why it's called "Nantucket Cranberry Pie" when it clearly makes a cake, but it's delicious no matter what you call it. The cake does have a lot of butter and sugar, but I think I will decrease the sugar sprinkled on the cranberries to 1/3 cup or slightly less the next time I make it. After cleaning out freezers I felt like I deserved something good. 

 

I hope your week is off to a good start and includes some kind of treat! 

A Gathering of Poetry: October 2025

It’s the third Thursday of the month, which means it’s time for A Gathering of Poetry - welcome!

There are plenty of mornings when I open the New York Times, NPR, or the BBC online, glance at the headlines, and think, I wish we didn’t live in such unprecedented times. I’ll admit that back when there wasn’t a new crisis every ten minutes, I took things for granted. I assumed the world was humming along about as smoothly as it could, and I could focus on my family and the small stuff of everyday life.

These days, I take very little for granted and often find myself longing for an ordinary day, just a calm, uneventful, ordinary day. This poem captures that feeling beautifully for me, and maybe it will for you, too. 

 

Ordinary Life

by Barbara Crooker  

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
remembering their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch's little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa's ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

==== 

Crooker, Barbara. "Ordinary Life". Selected Poems. FutureCycle Press, 2015. 

 

You can read more about the poet here. 

 

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Thank you for reading and joining us for our monthly Gathering of Poetry. You are

more than welcome to add your link below if you would like to share one of your

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Unraveled Wednesday: 10/15/25

I’m happily joining Kat and the Unravelers today, with a completed pair of shortie socks. (Kat is on vacation but Wednesdays are always Unraveled for me.) I tried to take a photo in the wild, but it was disappointing at best.

 This one on Ryan's dining room table is a bit better. 

I'm not sure Jess will be as excited by these as I am, but I knit socks for her before and she hasn't yet said, "Stop knitting me these stupid socks." My idea of a fun time would be to wear contrasting socks as a pair but I like to live on the wild side. :-) I'm back to happily knitting the rainbow scarf, but that might also be finished soon, so I should think about casting on another project - maybe something for Justin for Christmas, but he's a little bit more difficult to knit for than Ryan. 

I finished two books last week. They were both four stars for me but I'll apologize up front since they are both ARCs that won't be published until next February. This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman is a beautifully written collection of interconnected vignettes that together form a warm, funny, and deeply human portrait of a family that can’t seem to stop tripping over its own love. The Rubensteins, particularly sisters Sylvia and Helen, anchor the stories, but Goodman widens her lens to include their children and grandchildren, capturing the shifting dynamics, misunderstandings, and enduring bonds that stretch across generations.

Goodman has always had a gift for observing the small gestures and quiet tensions that make family life both maddening and precious. Here, she distills those moments into perfectly honed snapshots, tiny domestic scenes that tell a much larger story about belonging, memory, and forgiveness. Whether she’s writing about an argument over an apple cake or the unspoken expectations between parents and children, Goodman does so with warmth, wit, and compassion.

Though the Rubensteins are a Jewish family, Goodman’s insights into sibling rivalry, parental pressure, and the ache of loss are universal. Readers of any background will recognize their own family in these pages, the love, the stubbornness, and the moments of grace that somehow keep everyone tethered.

This Is Not About Us doesn’t demand to be read in a single sitting, but it rewards those who linger over its pages, letting the connections between stories reveal themselves gradually. A wise, affectionate, and quietly powerful book about the way families fracture and heal again and again.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on February 10, 2026. 

Sadeqa Johnson’s Keeper of Lost Children showcases her gift for weaving complex histories together with deep emotional resonance. Set in the aftermath of World War II and spanning decades, this novel brings together three seemingly separate lives, Ethel, Ozzie, and Sophia, whose stories eventually converge in unexpected and moving ways.

Johnson’s premise is powerful: she shines light on the “Brown Babies” of postwar Germany, mixed-race children born to Black American soldiers and German women, often left in social limbo in both Germany and the United States, and ties that painful history to questions of belonging and identity in the U.S. Civil Rights era. The sections set in Occupied Germany are particularly vivid; the imagery of ruined cities, loss, and resilience lingers long after reading. Ozzie’s perspective, especially, offers a poignant look at the contradictions of fighting for freedom abroad while facing racism within one’s own ranks.

That said, the novel doesn’t always maintain even pacing. The transitions between timelines can feel abrupt, and at times the emotional impact of one story is diluted by the quick shift to another. Some character motivations, especially Ethel’s, could have used a bit more depth to match the strength of the historical backdrop.

Still, Johnson’s elegant prose and compassion for her characters carry the book. Keeper of Lost Children is both heartbreaking and hopeful, a meditation on motherhood, legacy, and the ways love can endure across distance and time. It is a thoughtful, moving, and worthwhile read for fans of layered historical fiction. This was 3.5 stars for me, rounded up because I learned much more about the mixed-race children born to Black American soldiers and German women and how some of them fared after the war.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of this book. it will be published on February 10, 2026.  

What are you making and reading this week?