Read With Us: Gilead

If you’re in the mood for a book that rewards slow reading, deep thinking, and a little quiet awe, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a perfect choice for Read With Us.

Set in a small Iowa town in the 1950s, Gilead takes the form of a long letter written by Reverend John Ames to his young son. Ames is elderly and ill, and what unfolds is not a plot-driven novel so much as a meditation on life: faith, grace, forgiveness, love, regret, and the strange beauty of ordinary days. If that sounds heavy, it can be, but it’s also gentle, luminous, and surprisingly warm. So what are some good reasons for reading this book?

One of the great pleasures of Gilead is Robinson’s language. Her prose is precise and unshowy, yet often breathtaking. She has a gift for making small moments feel sacred: light falling on water, a child’s laughter, a simple walk through town. This is a book that makes you want to pause mid-paragraph just to sit with a sentence for a moment.

This is also a novel about empathy. Even when characters disappoint or frustrate us, Robinson invites us to see them whole, shaped by their pasts and their fears. That generosity of spirit is one of the reasons Gilead has stayed with readers for years and continues to feel relevant.

For discussion purposes, Gilead offers so much to work with. It asks big questions without insisting on easy answers: What do we owe the people we love? How do we live well, knowing we are flawed and finite? What does forgiveness really cost? The relationships, especially between fathers and sons, and between old friends carrying long histories, are nuanced and quietly powerful, leaving plenty of room for interpretation and our discussion.

If you enjoy books that are reflective rather than fast-paced, rich in ideas, and written with extraordinary care, Gilead is well worth your time. It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t shout for your attention, but once you settle into it, it has a way of lingering, quietly, long after you’ve turned the last page.

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout February. Discussion day for Gilead is scheduled for Tuesday, March 17, 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 educational and illuminating Zoom discussion. 

I hope the promise of breathtaking prose, a book full of empathy, and one that I think will be the basis of a rich discussion will make you want to read Gilead. We hope you'll Read With Us and discover this quietly reflective novel. 

A Few More Good Things

Welcome to my version of a Few More Good Things! I've been looking for good things this week, and even the act of looking for them has improved my outlook. With further ado, here they are:

• We actually got above freezing for a few hours the week, and this happened on two different days. I'm still dressing in turtlenecks, woolly knit items, and fingerless gloves, but the slightly warmer temperatures were nice while they lasted.

• I visited Ryan earlier in the week and he made me lunch. My grandmother always said that food tastes better if someone prepares it for you, and I find that to be true. He made me supper on a bread slice (a combination of venison, bacon, and cheese on top of split halves of French bread and baked for a few minutes) and it was delicious.  

 

• I haven't rewatched Schitt's Creek, but I probably will sometime in the future. This list of gleeful words from Moira Rose made my day and hopefully some of them will make you smile also. I'm hoping I can use balatron in my conversation this weekend, and I'm pretty sure I know who I'll be speaking about. 

Please add anything good that you've noticed this week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend with plenty of good things! 

Unraveled Wednesday: 2/4/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today, with some completed thumbs, progress on the Hitchhiker, and something else. 

First, I did knit thumbs for the fingerless handwarmers. They fit well and I've been wearing them all the time. 

The Hitchhiker is progressing, albeit slowly. I think I've got enough left of the main color to finish the current strip of six teeth, but after that I think it will be more of the soft gray. That's fine, but the rows are getting a lot longer a bit too long. 

 

 

The "something else" is a Melt the Ice Hat. I bought the pattern thinking it was a small donation to immigrant aid associations, but then I remembered that I had leftover red yarn from the mittens, so I cast on. The pattern is written for fingering through worsted weight, and my yarn is bulky. After looking through the other projects knit with bulky, I cast on 72 stitches and I'm just using up my leftover yarn on ribbing. I'm thinking about unraveling the first pair of mittens that I knit (the ones with uncomfortable thumbs), but I do have a few more skeins of yarn coming this week. I may still unravel the uncomfortable mittens and use the yarn to finish the thumbs on the comfortable mittens since the yarn will be the same lot number, but it's not like I don't have plenty of projects to knit before my red yarn arrives. 

 

 

Last week Sarah said this book was bonkers, and she was right! I went into Best Offer Wins expecting to suspend my disbelief a bit in exchange for an entertaining, exaggerated look at the insanity of today’s real estate market. I’m more than willing to do that for a novel that provides a somewhat believable premise, but this book asked for far more suspension than I could manage.

The protagonist, Margo Miyake, quickly goes well past believable and into territory that feels completely disconnected from reality. What might have been a satirical or darkly funny exploration of housing desperation instead becomes implausible to the point of distraction. I found it hard to stay engaged once the story lost any grounding in how actual people behave, even under stress.

I also struggled with Margo herself. She is an unabashed whiner, and despite having $1.3 million to spend on a house, she refuses to settle for anything that deviates even slightly from her idealized life plan. Rather than coming across as sympathetic or self-aware, her complaints grew tiresome and made it difficult to root for her in any meaningful way.

The bright spot here was the audiobook narrator, Cia Court, who did an excellent job bringing energy and nuance to the material. Her performance was easily the most enjoyable aspect of the experience.

Overall, this one didn’t work for me. The premise had promise, but the execution veered too far from reality and left me more frustrated than entertained. I should pay more attention when books are described as bonkers!

What are you making and reading this frigid week? 

A Few More Good Things

I never post in the afternoon, but I've felt lifted up by Kym's Happy Hour, Vicki's Good Things, and Sarah's Good News so I needed to share a few more good things. I think this should/will be a regular Friday thing. Be sure and check out their blogs if you haven't already. 

Just in case you didn't read my frozen finch story over at Kyms, I'll repeat myself here. I got to see a frozen finch come back to life. Sunday as the storm was winding down I saw a finch lying down in my window feeder. Its feet were curled up and it was covered in sleet and freezing rain. I felt sad that this poor bird had died, but Monday morning when I came downstairs, I saw the finch sitting on the edge of the feeder and warming up in the sun. I was thrilled and put off getting my tea so I didn’t disturb it, but I just sat at the kitchen table, watching and hoping it would get warm enough. After about half an hour it did, ate a few seeds and flew into the closest oak to sit in the sun some more. It felt like a miracle! 

It's not a great photo, but I took this on Monday morning as she was reviving herself. You can still see some of the sleet/freezing rain on her wing feathers, but she did eventually manage to fly away. It was a wonderful way to start my day (and probably hers, too).

This one is going to sound a bit weird, but alpha-galactosidase is also a good thing. Before the storm, I made big pots of bean soup and chili. Even though we didn't lose power, John and I enjoyed eating the, but by Day 3, both of us were in gastric distress. I ventured out and got some Beano. The active ingredient is alpha-galactosidase which prevents gas and bloating caused by complex carbohydrates by breaking them down in your stomach. It works wonderfully and we're finishing up the last of the chili tonight. 

I took some venison stew over to my neighbors the other day and we sat and had a cup of tea. I asked what kind of tea it was and my neighbor said it was some kind of ginger-turmeric tea that she had gotten but she didn't really like it much. I said I loved it and she gave me the rest of the box. That certainly sounded like a fair trade to me. I think the tea is great!  

 

Feel free to add any good things you can think of in the comments and join me in the future for a few more good things. This doesn't mean that things are all okay in Minneapolis or many other places in the US but we all need a few good things now and then.

Unraveled Wednesday: 1/28/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today, with evidence of my aversion to knitting thumbs. During the snowstorm I finished the second mitten and because my hands were so cold, I also used the same pattern and knit a pair of fingerless handwarmers. Alas, the thumb elves did not show up and finish them for me so I will be forced to complete them myself. I will certainly do that because our high temperatures are not supposed to be above 15-20 degrees for the next week or so. I think once I actually sit down and just do it, it will be much less of a chore than I am imagining. I've watched this youtube video several times and I like how it shows exactly where to pick up stitches to achieve a thumb with no gaps. I'll report back next week!

The storm also gave me plenty of reading time so I finished two books. The first in an ARC that won't be published until April, but there is a current goodreads giveaway if you are interested. Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry is a slim book that manages to feel both intimate and expansive. Ada Limón writes with the same clarity, warmth, and emotional intelligence that make her poetry so resonant, and here she makes a compelling, generous case for why poetry matters, not as an academic exercise, but as a part of being human.

Drawing on her experience as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Limón reflects on poetry as a force for connection, healing, and attention. Her prose is accessible without ever being simplistic; it’s thoughtful, inviting, and deeply humane. This is not a book that tells you what poetry should be, but one that gently opens a door and says: come in, this is for you, too.

One of the most moving threads in the book is her insistence on tenderness, not as weakness, but as courage. Limón writes about worthiness, about paying attention to the natural world, and about the way language can tether us to one another in fractured times. Her You Are Here project, which centers place, environment, and belonging, underscores how poetry can reorient us toward care, for the land, for others, and for ourselves.

What I loved most is how welcoming this book feels. It doesn’t demand prior knowledge or reverence for poetry; instead, it meets the reader exactly where they are. Limón’s writing reminds us that noticing is an ethical act, and that beauty and grief often coexist.

Against Breaking is a refuge, a rallying cry, and a reminder. If you’ve ever felt intimidated by poetry, this book will help dissolve that fear. If you already love poetry, it will renew and deepen that love. And if you simply need reassurance that being tender, flawed, and attentive still matters, this book offers that, generously and without pretense.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on April 7, 2026. 

The second book was written for middle grades but it was just what I wanted to read. Pocket Bear by Katherine Applegate is a tender, quietly wise story that feels like it was stitched together with equal parts gentleness and heart.

Born during World War I and small enough to fit into a soldier’s pocket, Pocket Bear remembers every moment of his creation, the needle, the thread, the careful hands that shaped him for comfort and luck. A century later, he finds himself at Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured, serving as its unofficial mayor and moral center. From this vantage point, alongside his delightfully mischievous feline friend Zephyrina (aka “The Cat Burglar”), Pocket reflects on love, loss, bravery, and what it means to be cherished again.

Applegate excels at writing for readers of all ages without condescension. The prose is simple but never simplistic, carrying emotional weight in deceptively small sentences. Pocket’s perspective, rooted in observation, memory, and compassion, gives the book a fable-like quality, while the setting offers a gentle metaphor for healing and second chances.

While the story occasionally leans a bit too sweet and tidy to fully surprise, its warmth and sincerity are undeniable. This is a book that invites you to slow down, to consider the quiet lives of objects we outgrow or discard, and to remember that love doesn’t end.

A lovely, comforting read that will resonate especially with readers who believe in kindness, resilience, and the enduring power of being held close.  

What are you making and reading this cold and snowy week?

No More Snow, Please

Officially (though I’m not sure who is in charge of officially measuring) we got 15 inches of snow, topped with another 1–2 inches of ice. Clearing all of that, on top of what was still hanging around from two weekends ago, was not exactly fun, but we managed to get it done.

John handled the snowblower, and I shoveled places where the snowblower couldn't be used. It was 12 degrees when we started and eventually warmed up to 18. I don’t mean to just complain about the weather, especially since we were incredibly lucky and never lost power.

Ryan spent around seven hours clearing his sidewalk and driveway, but Justin wins the prize. He worked 16 hours of overtime on Sunday plowing and shoveling, then another eight hours of overtime on Monday cleaning up more snow, shoveling, and salting. Hopefully, those 24 hours of overtime will help cover his slightly exorbitant gas and electric bill.

I didn't take any photos because I was shoveling, so I’m including a couple that friends sent me. It all looks very picturesque and peaceful, but no more snow, please!

Just a Few Photos

We're getting ready for another snowstorm this weekend, along with much of the country. The predictions seem to range from 4" to a gazillion", but they all agree that temperatures will be frigid next week. I thought it was painfully cold in the middle of this week when we had temperatures below zero, but apparently that was nothing according to the forecasters. 

I've been getting ready for the storm this week by finishing all the laundry, getting all my post office and bank errands done, making a big pot of bean soup, baking bread, and making carrot cake. I'm not sure what carrot cake has to do with storm preparations, but I found frozen shredded carrots in the freezer, so of course, I had to bake a carrot cake. I think cake should always be part of preparing for a gigantic snowstorm. 

I only took a couple of pictures after last week's "dusting" (which amounted to 8-10") but it was a pretty snowfall. 

 

This is a nice view of a nearby creek, after last weekend's snowstorm but before it got really cold this week. 

 

 

And then when it got really cold, I drove to the Delaware River to check out the river ice. There is a lot of it!

 

And because many things besides scenery are delightful, here's a photo of the winter carrot cake. I wish I could share it with all of you.

 

I hope you have a good weekend, stay safe and warm, and maybe even enjoy a bit of cake.