Two Books and a TV Movie

A Selection for My Sister’s Book Club

This is an adventure story centered on a woman much older than the usual heroine of a novel. When a persecuted (or at least mistreated) character takes charge of her life and gets even with her tormentors, it’s a fun read. When the character is 69 years old and her family have tried to see that she has a premature end, at least as a drugged resident of a nursing home — if not an actual untimely death  — it’s even more satisfying. I appreciate the creation of this exceptional character who defeats the forces that are trying to betray her, to get their greedy hands on her money (inherited from her recently deceased husband) and destroy her independence. Here’s the narrator’s summary of the first half of What Rose Forgot by Nevada Barr (published 2019) —

“She’s lost her husband. She’s been locked away in an Alzheimer’s ward. She’s had the flu. She’s been in a brawl with a big nurse. She has slithered beneath a planting of hostas like a cottonmouth, to watch for a person who might come to kill her. Drugs she doesn’t even know the names of still enjoy half-lives in her tissues. Prescriptions she’s been on for years have been scrubbed from her system by time and illness. Her brain floats in a chemical soup concocted by evil toddlers in a devil’s pharmacy.” (p. 165)

And a kind of meditation on plot —

“What is it about human beings that so loves violence? Gladiators, football, war, hunting, cockfighting, books and television and movies filled with bombs, guns, and gigantic beasts of various origins all wreaking the most horrific havoc: people love it.” (p. 239)

The adventures of Rose — as she became an escapee from the clutches of the evil nurse named Karen — is kind of zany, with escape episodes on a rooftop, petty revenge on the nasty and unlikeable tormentors. You can’t avoid loving an all around settling of scores with unsympathetic people, though never really ugly violence. 

As well, you can’t resist the wisdom at the very end that Rose imparts to her granddaughter Mel. It was Mel who was complicit in her effort to escape from the “facility.”

“Do you think Granddad will come back?” Mel asks softly. “I do,” Rose says. “You’ll have to become a vegetarian,” Mel says, “so you won’t accidentally eat him.” “It’s not like he’ll come back as a pig or a chicken.” Rose spreads her arms out. “He’ll be, you know … one with everything.” “Granddad is coming back as a hot dog?”  (p. 287)

To be more complete, here is the Kirkus Review of the book:

There’s a lot of stuff Rose Dennis doesn’t know. She doesn’t know when and how she got out of Longwood or when and how she arrived there in the first place. She’s surprised and pained when people remind her that although she grew up in New Orleans, she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with Harley, her husband of 15 years, and that he’s died. At one point she’s not even sure whether she’s 68 years old or 103. After a pair of orderlies hustle her back to Longwood, however, Rose resolves that it’s the medications she’s being fed that are sapping her powers of mind and will and vows to stop taking them and escape again, this time for keeps. Fortunately, her second attempt takes her to the home of Melanie Dennis, Harley’s levelheaded, resourceful 13-year-old granddaughter, who’s more than ready to do whatever it takes to keep Gigi, as she calls Rose, two steps ahead of her pursuers. Unfortunately, one of those pursuers, a shadowy man armed with a knife, breaks into the old house where Rose is hiding out and tries to kill her. More adventures follow, some of them involving Rose’s hermitlike sister, Marion Bliss, who offers all the help a life spent online allows, some involving Karen Black, the hapless Longwood nurse Rose gets the better of on three separate occasions. It’s both a nuisance and a personal triumph when the media get hold of Rose’s story and label her “Gun Granny.” (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nevada-barr/what-rose-forgot/)

Another Story of an Asylum 

What Rose Forgot reminds me a little of another novel set in a facility like this one, though One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (published in 1962) is in fact in an actual insane asylum, not just a place for inconvenient elders with coveted money. Ken Kesey’s character Big Nurse is totally unforgettable: also as a character in the film. But Nevada Barr’s Karen — at least once called “a big nurse” —  is pretty memorable as well.

Here is a summary of the plot of Kesey’s book: “Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of psychiatry and a tribute to individualistic principles.” (source: Wikipedia)

I don’t think that Nevada Barr is anywhere near as good as Ken Kesey. However, I think the comparison is deserved between the books. While I didn’t pick up any overt references to Kesey in What Rose Forgot I think it’s fair to make the connection. 

Published AND Purchased September 15

Brand new: the book I am reading next;
We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman. Review coming soon!

A Sweet and Sentimental Movie (But OK)

I read the book in March, 2025. The movie did a good job with the story, I think.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Three Beautiful Things

 

Carol invited us for dinner; she made a beautiful fresh-fruit tart for dessert.

Math and Beauty

For mathematicians a solution to a long-standing problem is a thing of great beauty. This week, a problem that was originally posed almost 200 years ago appears to have been solved by using artificial intelligence. Mathematicians, including a good friend of ours, have spent enormous efforts to find a solution to this problem which deals with the apparently chaotic behavior of fluids like the wake of a boat where water appears to churn without any definable pattern. The success by AI appears to be quite a surprise to the math community. The problem, known as the Navier-Stokes problem, was named for the two mathematicians who originally proposed it: Claude-Louis Navier (1785-1836) and George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1837). The result was achieved by 88 hours of computer time using 10,000 artificial intelligence agents. (source)

Photos © 2026 mae sander

“A Tender Age” by Chang-Rae Lee

 

A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee did not appeal to me as much as some other recent novels, but he definitely does a good job depicting the social discomfort of being a kid around age 10 to 16. In fact, maybe he captured this torment too well, so that I don’t find it really comfortable to read. The narrator, a mature man recalling a painful era of his childhood, comes across as sympathetic, and with years of looking back, he understands his parents well, and explains why he never asked them to help with his experiences in the high-rise apartment building where neighborhood kids had their own social structure nd their own rivalries:

“I didn’t want to add anything to their burdens, not my nasty little back-and-forth with Joshua Messing and the fight we were going to have, and certainly not the encounters I was about to have with Tommy Reilly, who was frightening enough that he seemed to be more a wraith than an actual person, much less a stocky, baby-teeth-missing, ginger-haired kid just one grade above me.” (p. 39)

I’m fascinated by the way that the book continues to reflect a trend that began over a century ago: each new wave of immigrants has inspired good novels about the experience of children living between their parents’ adjustment and their own life in school and out of school. Lee’s book follows the tradition of documenting the challenges of becoming an American. (Obviously, I particularly remember the Jewish immigrant stories from the late 19th to mid 20th century.)   

One of the areas of adaptation to American life is always food. Among other Americanizing habits, the narrator’s family went to a restaurant from time to time: “we ate out rarely, usually on Lunar New Year when we went to a nicer Chinese place nearby, or if my parents had a special visitor from Korea, we’d go to the city and have kalbi and naengmyeon at Woo Lae Oak, in those days the only Korean restaurant in the entire metropolitan area.” (p. 132)

Every mother in stories like this has her own version of ethnic food. Mothers in such novels also typically try to produce American food. As in this novel, various sources of food compete, including family meals; the food in the school cafeteria; and in this novel, the purchase of food from vendors like “the Good Humor truck that made its weekend afternoon stop right by our playground.” 

Then there’s the very American food: spaghetti. When the narrator pictures himself on a date with the girl he has a crush on, he pictures “sharing a strand of spaghetti at Antonino’s like those lovey dogs in the animated movie,” (p. 311) Not to mention Snickers bars — an utter favorite which the narrator loved; in fact, when his mother visits him at camp, that’s what she brings him. 

Above all is the social life of the narrator’s fellow kids, including both American/white children and Asian children. The setting of most of this social life is either the high-rise neighborhood or an overnight camp where the kids from all groups are separated from their families, and divided into the usual assigned groups with adolescent leaders rather than parents. Critical in the plot: the author and his fellow campers and counselors have meals at the camp where a lot of the action is set. About the camp food — “we were thrilled not to see any even remotely Asian-style dishes, thrilled not to taste flavorings of garlic or ginger or scallion, or sniff any kimchi gases.” (p. 182)

Finally, an example that I found interesting is how his mother used food to bribe or comfort him:

“…my mother came into my bedroom with a plate of freshly made gimbap. I was surprised, as her gimbap typically appeared at the weekend picnics we’d periodically have with other Korean families at the local state park, or else on a long car trip, when she’d pass a Tupperware full of the sliced rounds to us in the back seat. Even though it was one of Ella’s and my favorites, a treat we’d often lobby for her to make us, she rarely, if ever, served gimbap at home. Aside from her view that it was ‘traveling’ food, it was something of a hassle for her to prepare the various fillings of the spinach namool, the omelet egg, the pickled daikon, the minced bulgogi, then neatly roll it all up with steamed rice in sheets of gim.” (p. 123)

I looked up gimbap, which I do not recall at any of our local Korean restaurants. The google result:

Did I tell you enough about this book? There’s a lot here, including pretty dramatic plot, plenty of ethnic details, and the promise of a surprise in the final chapter. Also, the characters are vivid. But I’m done.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Do Leaders Matter — History by Jared Diamond

 

Jared Diamond’s books on history and anthropology have interested and entertained me in the past, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel,published 1997.

Diamond’s most recent book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, covers various impressive endeavors by individuals who enjoyed business success, sports greatness, political leadership, and religious charisma. His approach: “my focus is … on the opportunity, rather than on the particular person who seized the opportunity.” As in his earlier books, he engages you, the reader, with his own fascination with leaders you may never have heard of such as the African leader Botswana’s Seretse Khama, and a bit about leaders you have definitely heard of like Hitler.

The wrap-up is that “the political arena has offered us many opportunities to explore fundamental questions about leadership in vitally important contexts: did one person make a difference as a leader? Was that one person the only one who could have made a difference, at that time and place?” (p. 108)

While he acknowledges the success of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, he suggests that the types of business they founded would have come along in another way if they hadn’t started theirs. In contrast, he profiles another example of successful business leadership that is more obscure: he writes about the Resnicks, a couple who invested their money in pomegranate juice — specifically who farmed pomegranate bushes and created the brand of pomegranate juice Pom Wonderful. (Aside: I admit that I tasted it a few times when it first appeared on the market, but did not find it at all habit forming: my breakfast juice is orange juice, but whatever.)

Diamond writes that only a few people could possibly have done what the Resnicks did:

“The chances that anyone among that small fraction also had lots of pomegranate bushes and lots of money were vanishingly low. That’s why no one had founded a pomegranate juice industry in the centuries before the Resnicks. They are unusual people in many respects, but they are unique in the long history of pomegranates. Just as Shakespeare was uniquely qualified among the several dozen significant Elizabethan playwrights to write Hamlet, the Resnicks were uniquely qualified among California’s several dozen significant pomegranate farmers to found a pomegranate juice industry.” (p 119)

Several other leaders from many eras of history are also profiled, in this interesting and readable history book, but I don’t want to try to summarize the following chapters. On the whole, I think I liked Diamond’s other books better than this one. 

Review © 2026 mae sander

The Marlow Murder Club

 

We have watched the first episode. Looking forward to the rest of the 2026 season.

Labor Day

 County Farm Park

We took a walk in the park. We haven’t been there in quite a while, though it’s only around a mile from our house.

End of Summer Grilling

Farmers' market tomatoes that Alice brought to us up

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

World’s Greatest Wizards

 

We are continuing with our Harry Potter binge, so thinking about wizards and especially Dumbledore.

Friday Wrap-Up

(link)

In the Woods

A large fungus growing on the roots of a tree in the Arboretum.

 

Food

Salad with red peppers, snow peas, tuna, artichoke hearts, and lettuce.

Shaved beef stir-fry

Charcoal-grilled chicken legs 

Remembering Gloria Steinem (1934-2026)

“We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud”

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.”‬

“Honesty about our age would help. I always try to say my age because I figure it’s a form of coming out.”

“For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.” (link)

Update: A Second Death

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

A Snowy Owl

 

Harry Potter with his owl Hedgwig

We have started watching the Harry Potter sequence from the start. I don’t know if we’ll finish.

A snowy owl once strayed from its Arctic habitat and spent some time in our part of Michigan.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

In My Kitchen and in My Life

Nothing is really new in my kitchen this August, but we have been making good use of gadgets, furniture and so on that we already have. And we’ve enjoyed summer produce, buying local when we can find it, but also shopping at our most convenient local food store that happens to be Trader Joe’s. Here are a few photos of August foods from the market to our table and in our pantry.

August produce in my kitchen and at the markets.

Sheet pan chicken and potatoes.

Lamb stir-fry with rice and smashed cucumber salad. Trader Joe’s had great shaved lamb, perfect for this dish.

Charcoal-grilled lamb chops.

Corn is in season and local corn is delicious.
Unfortunately our next ears of corn were moldy and had to be thrown away. 

Ravioli toasted in a frying pan rather than steamed.

An omelet

Another omelet.

Fresh fruit from a neighbors trip to western Michigan.

Pancakes with the peaches and blueberries

Toaster waffles: a favorite breakfast this month.

Ice cream: always in my kitchen

In the Pantry

My messy pantry shelves.

Onions in the onion bin

Among other things: an order of jam from amazon.com

On the New Grill Pan

Chicken cooked on the new grill pan and served with a cucumber salad.

A few more dinners

Shrimp with rice and green peas

Vanilla pudding topped with local peaches

A Few More Thoughts for August

A Fascinating Artist Has Died

Yayoi Kusama (1929-2026) was a fascinating Japanese artist and sculptor. (link)

Summer Flowers are Still in Bloom

And I Got Snookered

Now in the pantry: a lifetime supply of off-brand peanut butter cups (note intentional misspelling).
I guess you have to be hyperaware ALL the time, even if you just want authentic REESES candy.

The real deal (that I don’t have)

Blog post © 2026 mae sander