Bread and Bread

Every day contains years, like how yesterday was briefly 1985 and Jenessa's dad was right there, his glasses and strawberry blonde mustache and crew socks, groaning "Ness" about something she said. What she said as we stood in the fog watching our children climb rocks forty years later— my god—is that he was okay for a while after treatment, and then he wasn't, but he refused to talk about it. It's almost next year now. This morning at the kids' museum, I watched my toddler climb a contraption made of fiberglass and fisherman's nets, which dredged up from the seafloor another museum— The Museum of Memory is always open, always dusty— in which my older child pined to ride The Red Bikes on the mini track outside. He was the right size for the low yellow four-wheelers, but the red tricycles had the candy apple sheen of the future. (The Museum of the Future only comes in two flavors, shiny and apocalypse, and sometimes it is closed for repairs.) You probably s...

At Thanksgiving, my uncle asked how I was doing. I said not much was new, and that I was old enough to understand how that was a good thing. He agreed. He’s going through treatment for prostate cancer (fortunately he has a good prognosis), and his stepson died suddenly in October. I want to be hopeful and creative and ambitious, but in 2024, I was grateful for a quiet year. If I weren’t so superstitious, I would say that I did some healing from the tumult of 2020-2023 (pandemic, adoption fails, new baby, job loss, new job). Meanwhile, it was a devastating year–yet another one of those–globally.  And in my personal quiet, I read 60+ books. I watched and listened to some things too, albeit less rigorously. I finally discovered what the fuss is all about re: The Great British Baking Show (it’s so charming! Perhaps you’ve heard?). So here is my annual roundup, with my annual caveat that a lot of these recommendations aren’t new, just new to me.  Books I’m grouping my top three bo...