I’m here (maybe, hopefully, joining Kat) with some actual unraveling for Unraveled Wednesday. After finishing Justin's socks, I knew I needed to finally cast on for a Hitchhiker. I went through my stash, culled and organized it a little bit, and thought these yarns might work nicely.
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.
Crooker, Barbara. "Praise Song". Radiance. Word Press, 2005.
Here's hoping you can find a reason or two of your own to praise our "crazy fallen world".
It’s the third Thursday of the month, which means it’s time for A Gathering of Poetry - welcome!
Last month I posted a poem by Barbara Crooker. She was a new poet to me then, but in the month since, I've been reading more of her poetry and I continue to be impressed. The poem I chose this month spoke so clearly of the landscape, what I've been seeing outdoors, and how I've been feeling that I had to choose Barbara Crooker again this month.
I always look forward to Wednesdays, but after reading Kat's incredibly sad news yesterday, things are different. I'm still going to write about Justin's bigfoot socks and some books I read, but mainly I'm thinking about Kat, her son and daughter-in-law and wishing I had something more to offer than thoughts and prayers. But that's all I can do, so I will be thinking about the whole family, every day for a long time.
I had another good reading week and finished two books. The Heart-Shaped Tin is a warm,
contemplative blend of memoir and cultural history, and Bee Wilson shows
her gift for uncovering the emotional lives of everyday objects and the
people attached to them. The book begins with a quietly devastating
moment: several months after Wilson’s husband abruptly walked away from
their marriage, she stumbled upon the heart-shaped tin she had used to
bake their wedding cake twenty-three years earlier. That discovery
becomes the emotional spark for a book that manages to balance a
scholar’s curiosity with a memoirist’s vulnerability, offering a reading
experience that is both intellectual and profoundly heartfelt.
The
author moves gracefully between her own post-marriage reflections and
the stories of others whose wooden spoons, saltshakers, toast racks, and
tongs become touchstones for grief, comfort, creativity, and
connection. Some of the most memorable sections are the deep dives into
objects with long histories: the 5,000-year-old Ecuadorian chocolate
vessel, the stoneware inscribed with defiant poems by an enslaved
potter, the ceremonial tools, the heirlooms passed down through
families. These moments broaden the book’s scope beyond personal
storytelling and remind the reader just how universal these attachments
are.
This was four stars for me, but what kept this from being a five-star read for me is also
part of its charm: the book meanders. While Wilson’s writing is
consistently sharp and lovely, the structure can feel a bit diffuse, and
some chapters linger longer than they need to. Still, the overall
effect is soothing, curious, and unexpectedly moving.
If you enjoy reflective nonfiction, especially books that blend history, anthropology, and personal narrative, The Heart-Shaped Tin
is a rewarding, empathetic read. The author has written a wide-ranging
exploration of how kitchen tools hold memory, identity, and sometimes
even a kind of quiet magic. It’s a reminder that the mundane objects we
reach for every day often hold our most intimate stories.
Before I Forget is that rare novel that
manages to be both warmly funny and quietly devastating, often in the
same paragraph. Tory Henwood Hoen follows Cricket Campbell, stuck in
neutral, grieving an old tragedy, and now reeling from her father’s
Alzheimer’s diagnosis, as she abandons her running-away city life and
returns to the family’s Adirondack lake house to care for her father
Arthur. What unfolds is a late coming-of-age story that feels sharply
contemporary yet deeply timeless.
Hoen writes beautifully about
the disorientation of early adulthood, the slippery nature of memory,
and the uneasy push-pull of family history. Cricket’s narration is wry
and self-aware, but it’s her vulnerability that makes the novel so
affecting. As she settles back into life at Catwood Pond, she has to
confront the versions of herself she’s been avoiding and the ways grief
quietly calcifies into habit.
Arthur, meanwhile, is a revelation.
His Alzheimer’s is rendered with compassion and nuance, and the novel’s
magical-realist twist, his growing ability to predict the future, is
handled with surprising tenderness. Rather than feeling gimmicky, it
becomes a thoughtful metaphor: as his past recedes, the future sharpens,
and father and daughter meet each other in a liminal, often luminous
space.
I loved how Hoen ties the emotional arc to place. The
Adirondacks are drawn with crisp, lived-in detail, and the lake house
and Catwood Pond become a site of both rupture and repair. Cricket’s
slow reclaiming of memory, her own and her father’s, feels earned,
moving, and often unexpectedly hopeful.
A funny, heartfelt, and
insightfully crafted novel about what it takes to move forward when the
past refuses to stay put. Four and a half stars rounded up. Thank you to
NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a copy of this
book. It will be published on December 2, 2025. This was a good one, but thankfully, you won't have a long wait before publication day. There is also a Goodreads giveaway if you are interested.
What are you making and reading this week?
... 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.
I had a pretty good week in reading, and I'd like to tell you about the books I read.
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.
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.
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!
