Bread and Bread

Years ago, when I was deep in the grief and angst of cancer and infertility, a lay counselor at church shared a Buddhist saying about everyone having ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows in their lives. It didn't do much for me at the time, but I think about it a lot now. Stories have arcs and meaning. Real life is more scattershot. I got through the sorrows of my 2010s and went on to have more joys and more sorrows...and 2025 was a bit heavy on the latter, to be honest.  I am so superstitious that I don't want to say "it was a bad year" because It Could Have Been So Much Worse, because it still could be [insert evil eye emoji], but a year that kicks off with your city catching fire isn't the easiest thing to bounce back from. ("But Cheryl," says my inner Cheryl, "YOUR neighborhood didn't burn.") Then Joey landed in the hospital for a week ("Only a week! He was fine! Antibiotics did the trick!"), which tipped my hyper-vigil...

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...