January ran by way faster than I was expecting! Since my engagement on December 31st, my life has been a whirlwind of wedding planning, and while the distance and time difference have posed a few obstacles, I couldn’t be more grateful for my mom. She is the queen of research and has spent countless hours helping me to arrange the venue, the catering, the band, my dress, and every other detail big and small. The event is really taking shape now, and with only a few more months until the big day, I’m getting more and more excited.
I read the books I’m highlighting today back in December. I start us off with a fluffy (and at times frustrating) romance book for my Valentine’s Day themed readers and end with a nonfiction exploration of one of my favorite places: the grocery store. Looking ahead, you can expect to see reviews of one of the buzziest, most award-winning books of 2024, a nonfiction work I expected to love but left me feeling disappointed, and a historical-fiction book that I disagree with the public opinion about.
This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune
If you’re familiar with romance novelists, you know many authors have a common setting that ties their work together. If you’re Elin Hilderbrand, your characters live in Nantucket. If you’re Abby Jimenez, your characters live in Minnesota. If you’re Carley Fortune, you’re transported to the lakeside resorts and beachside small towns of Canada. This Summer Will Be Different was an especially magical and transportive read because it takes place on Prince Edward Island, the home of one of literature’s most beloved heroines, Anne Shirley. I’ve dreamed of visiting Prince Edward Island since I read L.M. Montgomery’s idyllic descriptions of the eternally beautiful town and watched Road to Avonlea (a way under-the-radar, under-rated show that gives you the best sense of nostalgia). Fortune does a great job of capturing the magic of found-family and creating a beautiful setting. However, the central conflict of the story is dragged out and, quite frankly, immature and reliant on a lack of communication, a trope I find tiresome.
In a nutshell, Lucy promises her best friend that she won’t fall in love with her brother, Felix, when they travel to PEI together a few years before the story starts. Lucy arrives in town first, meets a handsome man at a bar, sparks fly, and they spend the day together, and, of course, it turns out that he’s Felix! So, the only possible solution is that Lucy and Felix meet up in secret every time Lucy is in town, despite the fact that they are adults who are perfectly capable of communicating rather than sneaking around like a couple of guilty teenagers. Feelings, of course, get hurt, and the alternating timeline between past and present shows how their lives and relationship changed over time. In the present, Lucy is brought back to PEI by her best friend who seems to be in an unexplainable crisis before her wedding. Lucy puts her life and business on hold for her friend’s “emergency.” Spoiler, her friend is frustratingly and selfishly reticent to create a conflict and reason to keep Lucy in PEI.
Did I love the story…no. The setting was the real selling-point, but, for me, there were too many plot and pacing issues. If you know of any other stories that take place on Prince Edward Island, please let me know! I want to vicariously eat my weight in shellfish, look at flowers, and wear a dress with puffed sleeves.
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman
One of my favorite adult “chores” is to go to the grocery store. I love the thrill of finding an unexpected item that I enjoy. I love the seemingly endless bounty of food. I love seeing my cart filled with possibilities and the security of a soon-to-be-full fridge and pantry. Michael Ruhlman is probably the biggest grocery nerd. He has dedicated years of his life to learning how a family-owned grocery store operates, and this level of dedicated reporting adds a certain degree of awe and appreciation to an institution we often take for granted.
Ruhlman sees no detail as too small in his quest to deeply understand the modern grocery store. He spends time learning the art of bagging groceries, he attends a food trade show, he travels to a sheep ranch to learn about how lamb makes its way to the meat department, and he has the rare privilege of getting to see inside the minds, decisions, and feelings of a brand owner over the course of years.
The book is certainly informational, but it isn't a biography or a history. It’s honestly hard to categorize it, but that’s half the joy of it. It follows Ruhlman’s interests, and his journey is shaped by wherever he can procure an invitation. Surprisingly, the ending of the book had me feeling emotional as Ruhlman circles back to his ultimate inspiration for his research: his dad, an avid food and grocery lover.
Our food is not just something we eat. It is what fuels our body, fuels our mind, carries our culture, reflects our values, reflects our personality, and brings us joy and comfort. Food brings us together and is a marker of community. Food is special and sacred, and the work farmers and bakers and cooks and chefs and grocers do is so vital but so often taken for granted. My family owns a chemical-free farm and put so many hours into creating vegetables that they can sell with pride. They are proud to create food that is nourishing, accessible, and affordable, and as Ruhlman points out, there is a sore lack of nutritious food and knowledge around what is actually good and healthy for us. Grocery stores provide everything we could possibly want, but we often don’t know what we need as we are swamped with marketing and fads.
Watching: I love shows about love (as you can probably guess by my predilection for romance novels), and Virgin River has all of the romantic tropes in a beautiful small-town setting and enough drama to keep me constantly entertained. Has the series gotten progressively more and more cringe-worthy as it’s gone on…absolutely! Have I stopped enjoying it…absolutely not! If you’re caught up on the most recent season, we need to chat!
Eating: I’ve been cooking my way through the Skinnytaste Meal Prep cookbook on a mission to find delicious, easy, satisfying, and nutritious meals that will last as lunches and dinners throughout the busy week. Cooking with chicken always makes me nervous about giving myself food poisoning, but I’ve slowly but surely been making a couple of varieties of chicken meatballs and chicken breast. The best thing I’ve made in the past two weeks, however, were banana muffins made with local fruit I picked up at the Night Market. The recipe from Sugar Spun Run was a hit with my coworkers and one I’m planning to repeat again soon. I’ve previously found that my muffins were too dry and tasted more like bread with a hint of banana, but the flavor really popped and the muffin was much softer.
Doing: Settling into Guam means that my schedule is starting to fill with more commitments, both fun and professional:
I taught a gratitude-writing class at R-Cubed Coffee a couple of weeks ago, and it was exciting to teach my first self-care themed class. I am hopeful that there will be more opportunities to offer writing classes in the community in the coming months.
Before leaving Virginia, I had started to explore yoga again through a local studio. As an anxious person, taking an hour away from technology and focusing on movement, breath, and quiet is really beneficial for me in all aspects of my life. I’ve been enjoying revisiting yoga with Ina Wellness at her Monday sunset classes. The view is tranquil, the movements are challenging, and the peace I feel at the end is restorative. I love that I can start my week with it, and I’m excited to see myself become stronger and more flexible.
Tom and I have been doing pub trivia with coworkers, and our team has won the past two times we’ve gone. Tom’s mind is a steel trap of information, and I’m always blown away by all of the random things that he remembers.
In partnership with Catholic Social Services, I will be teaching a writing class for women living in a shelter beginning at the end of this month. I feel really grateful for the opportunity to support this community through my passion, and I will have the opportunity to present a couple of my activities at a conference next week. Being able to help spark creativity and to help nurture people’s voices is my dream, and it’s amazing to see it realized.
I am teaching three sections of mythology this semester, and I love that my knowledge of culture, history, and archetypes has grown so much through my preparation and lesson planning. This is definitely the most interesting class I’ve gotten to do in my five years of teaching!
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