The Alice Trail

A few months ago, I wrote about a trip I took with my bezzie mate to Liverpool. On that trip, we also took a side quest to Dublin and drove through north Wales. When we were in the planning stages of the trip, I mentioned it to a friend of mine – who told me about how twenty years ago, she had gone to Wales with her family – her girls were little then. The next day, she texted me a photo she had dug out – her two little girls running up a lush green hill in a town by the name of Llandudno. I’d never heard of it, wasn’t quite sure how to even say it. But I looked it up – and it was on the route we had talked about driving. So I let me fingers do the walking.

And color me surprised to learn that this town, straddling a small peninsula on the north coast of Wales, was where Alice Liddel (the ‘real’ Alice of the Wonderland) spent summer holidays with her family (the first of which was in 1861 when she was eight). It’s been speculated, though not proven, that Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) visited the family in their summer home and was inspired to write his story based on Alice’s adventures. True or not, the town has taken on this speculation as truth. So much so that in 1933, the then Prime Minster unveiled a White Rabbit statue – the start of the Wonderland Town Trail (also referred to as the Alice Trail).

If you’ve been following along with my journey of my book All Falling Things, you’ll understand my love of Alice and Wonderland – so this little town I’d not heard of before became an absolute must on this trip (thanks to my friend Amy for bringing it to my attention!). (It was on this trip, though in Dublin, that I held in my hands a signed, first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I have a thing about holding history – and this was a moment for me, y’all.)

The trail contains twelve statues, though thirty-four points of interest. You can purchase a map upon arrival, which makes pre-planning tricky – I may have spent time searching and finding points on a map for the statues I’d like to see. We did not see them all – but I guess that means we’ll just have to go back. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The town was truly lovely, and I could see spending more time there.

We started by parking downtown (again – small town) and walked over to the pier, which takes you out for beautiful views of the town, and then to a small park up the hill (there’s a cable car you can take to go higher up, but we didn’t…this time…). There, we saw two caterpillars, the Mad Hatter, the thrones, and the tea party table:

From there, we walked across the peninsula (it’s about a mile wide), which took us through a residential area – and my goodness, what an idyllic place to live! The homes were utterly charming.

On the other side, we sought out the marble White Rabbit and a rather sinisterly carved wooden Cheshire cat (not posted is the pic I took of my bezzie with his head between Cheshire’s paws):

After another mile walk back through a different part of the residential neighborhood (again, swooning the entire way), we found Alice (looking a bit sinister herself), the wooden White Rabbit (looking quite dapper), and (after a bit of frustration because the GPS took us to the completely wrong spot) the Mad Hatter just chillin’ by the water:

Strangely enough, as much as the town has embraced this tie to Wonderland, there didn’t seem to be an Alice-specific shop from which to purchase souvenirs. (Some shops had Alice-themed things, but most were clearly created with AI.)

It was so lovely to walk around this little town – and we had such a beautiful day for it! Wales is indeed as stunning as it seems, and there’s so much more of it I’d like to explore someday. For now, I’ve got memories of the Alice Trail.

And of the town with the ridiculously long name (something I had seen a lot on Insta – and it just happened to be on the route we had wanted to take):

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch roughly translates to “St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave.”

Da Bears

On January 26, 1986, wee little me watched the super bowl with my family where the Chicago Bears went on to defeat the New England Patriots 46-10. This was the heyday for the team with the likes of Jim McMahon and William “The Refrigerator” Payton and Mike Singletary – not to mention Walter “Sweetness” Payton. My sister and I wore Bears sweatshirts and shared a set of pompoms – one pom was silver, the other gold. It was a glorious day and a glorious defeat.

Followed by a somewhat embarrassing rendition of the “Super Bowl Shuffle,” which my family did end up owning on VHS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And then we spent forty years uttering the phrase, “Welp, maybe next year.”

Last year, though, it felt different. The Bears had a killer season. It felt more reminiscent of those heyday years – where the Bears were great and the Packers less so (we used to lovingly torture our Packer-loving uncle…we didn’t anticipate how quickly that torture would turn…or how long it would remain).

If you had asked me which football stadium I would visit first, I would have, without a doubt, said Soldier Field (current home of the Bears*). Turns out, that wasn’t the case.

The first time I stepped foot inside Lambeau, it was in June of 2017 to see Billy Joel. I figured a concert would be the only way I’d ever step foot in there. But then a few months later, I attended a football game in the role of supportive girlfriend. (How supportive? My team wasn’t even playing. And yes, I did wear a Bears sweatshirt, and yes, I will take credit for the fact that the Packers didn’t score one single point suring that game against the Ravens.)

Picture on the left is taken from the upper corner bleachers at Lambeau field, home of the Green Bay Packers

The following August, I did finally see a Bears game at Soldier Field (a pre-season game because wow are football tickets expensive!). We played the Buffalo Bills. In typical Bears fashion, we excelled in the first half, then fell apart and lost it in the second half.

You’re probably wondering why on Earth I’m writing about an American football team on writerly blog. Well, because I’m more than simply a writer. I’m also a fan of the Bears (and Cubs) (yes, it’s difficult to live in Packer/Brewer land). And we’re about to start up our new season – with a renewed hope that hits a bit different than past years.

Maybe this year.

*And yes, I am living in complete denial that my bears might be moving to Indiana… -_-

They’re BAAaaack

The same year that @m@zon hung up it’s “Yes, we sell books, too!” banner, there were about 5500 independent bookstores with 7K locations in the U.S. Just two years later, the owner of that online juggernaut hand delivered it’s millionth book order. Having already been battered by chain bookstores, these indie shops struggled even more (chains struggled, too – B&N being the only one from that time that managed to survive). I remember hearing how the indie bookstore was going to become a thing of the past – and it sure felt like it would become a reality as one after another shuttered their doors for good. By 2009, the number of individual locations dropped to 1651 stores. The conclusion surely felt foregone.

But those of us who love our indie stores, even those who may have been wooed by the easy access and cheap prices initially, have continued to (and have returned to) support local shops. While an online platform may grant access to far more titles, and chains can house more books on site, a local shop can better meet and shift with a community’s needs. They are beholden to no one but themselves. Yeah, they may have smaller spaces that hold fewer physical copies, but they can order any book you wish. (Though some, for obvious reasons, won’t order from KDP – and I gotta say, I respect it.) Better yet, the money you spend at your local shop stays within the community.

@m@zon thought they had won. They had no interest in actually selling books – simply another product that they could monopolize. But the tides turned. While we are no where near the number of locations of indie stores pre-you-know-who, they are on the rise – there are currently 3200 members of the American Booksellers Association. And they ‘outpaced most other publishing industry metrics, growing faster than overall unit sales of print books.’ In 2020, an online platform launched to help even more – you can purchase a book online and choose what independent bookshop you wish to support. The proceeds are split. So if you had been using @m@zon out of necessity (because you don’t have an indie shop nearby), you’ve got an alternative – Bookshop.org. In 2025, they sent over nine million bucks to indie shops. That money means something to those shops and those communities.

In a time where we are continually told that certain things (like the death of print books and the death of indie shops) are inevitable, we continue to prove that’s not the case if we don’t wish it to be. Indie shops are thriving.

Makes you wonder what else is maybe not as inevitable as they are telling us.

Who doesn’t want more busywork?

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of generative AI. I can feel my colleagues’ eyes rolling before the words “but the copyright infringement and environmental impact” slip from my lips yet again. (Well, not all my colleagues. Some are staunchly anti-GenAI, as well.) I have no interest in using it to “make my job easier” or to write things for me – or to have it hallucinate incorrect answers to research questions that I would have otherwise rabbit holed down. (I mean, seriously, stop trying to take away my joy.)

Then I read an opinion piece that added to my list of reasons of why I will continue not to use GenAI: busywork.

According to this piece, more and more people (at a seriously alarming rate) are turning to GenAI to ‘help’ them with things. According to the piece, people are feeling more independent. But in reality, AI is creating a massive transfer of labor.

You have my attention.

Consider this analogy provided by the author Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey – the washing machine. In the 1800s, laundering was an occupation (mostly in cities and for people who could afford to pay someone to do their laundry). This was a lot of work: “hauling water, chopping fuel, boiling linens in lye, scrubbing each garment by hand against a washboard, wringing, drying, starching and ironing with heavy flat irons heated on a stove.” A lot of work – and it was all paid labor.

Enter the washing machine. It changed laundering – but it did not disappear the labor. It instead shifted it, unpaid, onto the household – “The laundress lost her job. The housewife gained a chore.”

This is a pattern we can see repeating over time. Consider self-checks at stores. Consider the last time you consulted a travel agent (ask youngsters what a travel agent even is…). You don’t even need to visit a bank to deposit a check anymore. Each of these shifts the labor (again, unpaid) onto you. Not a big deal, no.

Until you realize that people are using platforms like Ch@tGPT to answer medical questions or even do their taxes.*

There is nuance in both those examples that an LLM just cannot replicate. But also – it’s shifting that labor, unpaid and (more important/scary) unskilled, onto us. We are doing more with less. While we may not notice the additional labor when we scan and pack our own groceries, these smaller tasks add up. As the opinion piece points out, there’s a name for that: “opportunity cost neglect — the well-documented tendency to overlook the value of what we give up when the cost is time rather than money.” And maybe the time is worth painting that fence rather than paying someone to do it. But asking Ch@tGPT how to paint that fence? Well, we need a new word that talks about “opportunity cost neglect” in addition to “extra resources wasted when there are already other options available to us.”

Making the choice to add this busywork (i.e. unpaid labor) onto ourselves, we do change the way the world works. No one is measuring the time you spend scanning your groceries or doing your taxes at home or painting that fence. As more of us do these things, the labor stats disappear, along with the jobs. Corporate profits go up – and we’re left feeling overburdened. From the opinion piece: “The laundress disappeared from the statistics long before she disappeared from memory. Many more trades and professions are on the verge of the same shift. The A.I. revolution may not have taken your job yet. But it has already put you to work.”

(*Some people will say that platforms like Ch@tGPT are democratizing because not everyone can afford to pay a professional. BUT. We don’t need to ask Ch@tGPT what we can make with the ingredients in our fridge – there’s already an app for that. We don’t need to ask it how to fix our fridge’s ice machine – there are already YouTube videos by experts that can walk us through that. Ch@tGPT is not solving new problems. It’s poorly attempting to solve problems we already had solutions for – and doing so using more energy/resources and built on the theft of other people’s work.)

First Friday Rec: The Bookshop

Title: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
Author: Evan Friss
Genre: Nonfiction
Pages: 416
Publication Date: Aug 6, 2024
StoryGraph* Moods: Informative, Reflective, Inspiring
How I Stumbled Upon This Book: Saw it in a bookshop. 🙂
Other Books by this author: On Bicycles: A 200 Year History of Cycling in New York City and The Cycling City
*StoryGraph also offers content warnings.

Description: A history of bookshops drawing on “oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers” is probably the unsexiest way to describe this book – but that is what it is at its most basic. On the page, it’s a fascinating look at the U.S. institution that reaches all the way back to Franklin’s first shop in Philadelphia up to today’s battle against big box stores and that mammoth online platform that sells, well, everything.

At its heart, this is a love letter to bookshops – it’s charming in its understanding of what a sanctuary bookshops can be, as well as their importance in our history and in our present. If you love bookshops, you will love this book about bookshops.

Why I recommend this book: It’s probably not a shock, given the description, why I would have been drawn to read this – and why I would love it. And of course I’m going to recommend it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the fact that it’s about bookshops is not the only reason I’m recommending it – it’s simply the reason I picked it up when I saw it on a table in at my local bookshop.

It is, quite honestly, interesting to see how the bookshops we know today came to be – not only the indie ones we love, but also those big box shops and the online platforms. Because, well, we can’t talk about one without the other. Their histories are intertwined.

Bez0s “was, however, an excellent student and signed up for Bookselling school. Or the closest thing to it – a four-day workshop held in conjunction with the ABA conference in Portland. The instructor was Richard Howorth, then president of the ABA, and owner of the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. Bez0s was one of fifty pupils taking notes on the basics: inventory, marketing, accounting, and customer relations.”

“Years later, Howorth regretted having taught that one student who kept quiet about his intentions. ‘If I saw him today,’ he said, ‘I’d probably whop him upside the head.'”
~ Evan Friss, The Bookshop

James Burrows, Final Cut

I still remember seeing the first advertisement for a ‘new sitcom coming soon’ – Will & Grace. A show about a man and a woman – she’s an interior designer, and he’s a lawyer; she’s straight, and he’s gay. I remember being drawn to it – excited to watch it. Though I couldn’t have told you why then.

Well, it was the late 90s, and I lived in a small town (I mean, really small – not small when someone says they come from a small town and then measures their town’s population in the tens of thousands – smaller) – and it was pre-internet for us. Our connections to the outside world were the tourists that flooded our town every summer – and TV.

And so, this little show gave me a connection to a (couple) worlds I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to connect with before.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the director of this little show (which would go on to be not so little) was a man by the name of James Burrows (or Jimmy Burrows). This man who was responsible, already, for some of my favorite TV, would go on to direct every single episode of this new show that would change very important things in this world (actual studies have been done). Just a little sitcom about four friends that would have an impact on the way the world saw people.

I ended up loving the show, and early in the run, my best friend also came out to me – he was the Wilma to much less neurotic Grace. I would have given just about anything to hop on a plane, fly to LA, and watch a live recording – but alas, I was a broke high school student and then a broke college student while it was on the air.

I did own all the seasons in DVD (still do) and watched all the commentary and bloopers (blooper reels are the BEST thing to come out of the DVD era). During it, the cast often spoke about Burrows – how he worked, how he listened to the music of the comedy. How he would walk back and forth off stage, not watching the actors, but listening. How he cared about the stories and these characters. (I mean, did you catch the part where I said he directed every single episode? All 246 of them.)

The show went for eight seasons before ending its run – and my hopes of ever getting to see it live.

Well, chances are, you probably know where this is going. The era of the reboot. Most of which, honestly, sucked and never should have happened. But despite all that, when W&G announced a return… I was ecstatic. Now, it wasn’t a perfect show. It had some problematic storylines, and some aspects didn’t age well. But nostalgia is strong, and this show was a lifeline. So it was coming back – and I was hoping and praying that they didn’t ruin it.

Plus – I finally had my chance.

I registered for and received a guaranteed ticket to the recording of the second episode of the third reboot season, hopped a plane to LA, and sat front row for the live recording of this not-so-little show and got to see the magic for myself.

And, I got to watch as James Burrows paced back and forth, as he listened to the music of the comedy, as he ‘bupped’ when something felt off to his ear. He was the conductor who was so in tune with his cast and crew, who all so clearly respected the man, that a simple ‘bup’ brough the entire production to a halt.

Click image to see original on Instagram.

I loved the entire experience (aside from how hot it was in LA that day), and when I opened up my insta the next day (already back home because I was in LA for less than twelve hours), I found the photo to the left in my feed with an announcement that the current reboot season (the third reboot, eleventh overall) would be the last. I couldn’t help but be quite relieved that I had gone. I hadn’t missed my chance after all.

This announcement was also why I found myself back there two weeks later. My friend had gotten tickets to another recording and asked me to come along. Why wouldn’t I say yes? More magic. More laughter. And more watching James Burrows doing the thing he did so very well.

I had to laugh a little when on the fight back home, on a day I should have been in in-service for the new school year (I took a personal day – I’m allowed), the plane seemed to have gone out of its way and dipped it’s wing at this precise moment:

That’s the college where I teach. Down there, all my colleagues were in in-service, and I was not – because I was up above them flying back from LA. It was almost like the pilot wanted to instill some guilt. But it didn’t work. I had had an excellent adventure with my friend seeing a live recording of a show we both love.

So why this reminiscing all of a sudden? Well, if you’ve not heard, James Burrows passed away last week. It’s hard not to reminisce when things like this happen. And I can’t help but feel lucky to have been given the opportunity to see him work his magic in person – not once, but twice.

Twisters

Here’s the thing – I love a good storm. Have since I was a child. I great up in one of those midwestern towns where the storm rolls in, and you can see everyone out on their porches watching. My favorite activity is to curl up on a couch with a comfy blanket, a cup of tea, and a book and listen to the rain outside. I also believe that rain makes for the perfect lullaby when one is trying to fall asleep.

But the second it tips over into the possibility of a tornado, I’m a complete mess.

Maybe this stems from growing up in tornado alley in a home without a basement. Maybe it stems from that time my extended family all had to cram into our bathroom during my first communion party and hope for the best. Maybe it was watching the film Twister and then having nightmares for weeks or me-sized tornadoes chasing me around. Who can say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ( (And, no, I did not see the sequel.)

When my family moved to a small town in Wisconsin, I didn’t know that we were moving to a place that got a tornado once every twenty-five to thirty years (nor was this a reason for moving there) – but I was glad for it. (Not-so-fun fact: My mom and I almost drove through the one that hit in 1998 because cell phones weren’t that common, and we had gone to sturge to run for errands – bet she’s glad I begged to stop at the CD store before heading home. Did I mention this was 1998? 😂)

I’ve moved a bit around the Midwest during my life, mostly hopping across the WI/IL border and back (plus one side question to MN). I currently live in WI, which sees, on average, about twenty-three tornadoes in a year. June is our twisty-est month, followed by July.

Well, we got an early start this year. We’re not even halfway through June, and we’ve already had thirty-one touch downs.

(For a comparison, IL averages sixty to sixty-two a year and has so far had a hundred and forty, making it the fourth year in a row with more than a hundred. I’d been thinking seriously about moving back to IL, but I have to say that this little stat is enough to keep me where I am.)

You know who don’t get (many) tornadoes? The Scots. Just sayin’. 👀🤣

Are tornadoes a thing where you live? Or do you have to deal with other things like hurricanes? Earthquakes? Volcanic eruptions? It’s sort of amazing we’ve managed to survive on this planet at all sometimes.

Wonderbox: Five Brilliant Things

I tend to consume a lot of British content. Through this, I have also stumbled across some fun podcast formats. In many cases, the format involves learning about someone’s life through a very specific lens, which I find rather enjoyable. (If you have read past blogs of mine, you likely already know this – I’m quite fond of Brett Goldstein’s Films to Be Buried With, which uses the lens of films to learn about people.)

While listening to these sorts of podcasts, it’s hard not to think of what my own answers might be, so I thought I’d do this exercise out loud again. In this case, it’s Five Brilliant Things with Russell Howard (British comedian). This podcast “celebrates the stuff in our lives that makes it worth getting up in the morning. Each week a different special guest sits down with Russell to explain the things from their lives that bring them happiness.”

The podcast starts off with this sort of intro: “Hello, I’m Russell Howard, and this is Wonderbox. A Wonderbox is a place where you keep the things that remind you of the stuff you adore. So I thought it would be cool to do a podcast where I ask some people what they put in their Wonderbox and have a chat about the most amazing moments in their lives.” The guests are mostly other British comedians, though there may be names you recognize if you scroll through – he’s so far got over a hundred episodes.

Item 1: A stuffed Donald Duck that my parents bought second hand at a garage sale for a quarter when I was a toddler. It became my favorite toy, and I imbued him with so much juju that my mother couldn’t bring herself to put his head under water when she would give him periodic baths. Mostly, it’s the stories surrounding this duck (which yes, I do still have) – like how when I was four or five, a boy up the street, who was ten, took my duck and wouldn’t give it back. I don’t remember this, but apparently I decked him and knocked him out cold. (That last bit may be apocryphal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but it’s a family story that’s still told to this day.) I also once rewrote the lyrics of The Beatles’ “Taxman” to “Quacksman” and was just wandering around the house making Donald sing it (I think I was seven?) (My dad called out, “Those aren’t the words,” and I, probably rather sassily, called back, “They are when Donald’s singing it!”). A lot of memories from my childhood are tied to that duck.

Item 2: My nana’s sweatshirt. It’s a sweatshirt she kept in the coat closet that she would wear on her walks around the neighborhood when the temps dipped. It has a design on the front of folks walking with umbrellas – all you can see are their booted feet, a long jacket, and the umbrella. Above it, there is text that says, “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow shall keep my from my walk.” And until about eight months before she passed, it didn’t. She was my favorite person – there’s just something magical about grandmothers, and I had the best ones. I hate talking on the phone (Hate. It.), but I could spend hours chatting away with her. The sweatshirt now hangs in my closet – it’s not something I ever wear; it’s simply a reminder of her. I actually just searched online for it to see if I could find an image:

I don’t love that the site that the image comes from calls it vintage when it’s from the ’90s… I mean… Ouch.

Item 3: A recipe that my papa wrote out and is framed in my kitchen. It’s for his Brandy Old Fashioned. My mom has never been much of a drinker, but every Christmas, Papa would make her his old fashioned. I remember she let me try it once, and I hated it (but I was also in my teens and not well-versed in the way of booze…despite living in the booziest of states at the time). I had no idea that one day it would be my favorite cocktail (though with whiskey – not a huge fan of brandy). When my papa was diagnosed with cancer, he wrote out the recipe for me on a notecard so that if there was ever a Christmas he wasn’t around, we could make Mom her drink. There are a number of things in my house that remind me of him (he gifted me his hole-in-one golf ball), but I love his penmanship – it’s so much like him, ordered and neat. Makes me smile when I see it.

Item 4: My dad’s drum set. Some of my best memories as a child were when he’d set up his drums in the living room, put on a record, and play along. We’d have a little party, my sister and I dancing and singing along. I know he was disappointed when neither of us picked drums when we joined our school band, which is certainly not the hope most parents have regarding their child’s choice of instrument. These days, I’d love the chance to learn how to play them. There’s still time.

Item 5: My first passport. While we ‘traveled’ a lot growing up, we traveled to the same spot (sometimes thirteen treks in one summer). We went camping in Door County. And then when we moved there, we traveled back to IL to see family. And we had one side quest to Mayo Clinic when I was thirteen. But that’s it. I didn’t travel out of the Midwest for the first time until I was in college – and I fell in love with it. I loved experiencing new places and learning about them. At the time, I didn’t have my own car, so the thought that I could just hop into one and go anywhere…well, it felt out of my reach. But I caught the travel bug. Hard. I took every chance I had to travel – I was a member of my college’s Habitat for Humanity chapter, and we did collegiate challenge trips every winter and spring break. These trips opened my eyes to the fact that I really could just get in a car and go anywhere. (Well, assuming I had money for gas and food. And a car to get into.) The first time I left the country, I got that same feeling – like, holy s#|t, I really can just do this… I had so many opportunities drop into my lap – a chance to go to Kenya (my first trek out of the states) to volunteer at a school for girls, to be the assistant director of a study abroad, to participate in a professional exchange with an English Translation professor in China. A simple passport could open the world to me. That first trip changed me, and I’m grateful for it. So that first passport with that first stamp acts as a representation of that.

What five brilliant things would you put in your Wonderbox?

First Friday Rec: My Friends

Title: My Friends
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translation by: Neil Smith
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 436
Publication Date: 6 May 2025
StoryGraph* Moods: emotional, hopeful, finny
How I Stumbled Upon This Book: tasked it for book club
Other Books by this author: A Man Called Ove, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, Anxious People, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, The Deal of a Lifetime, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, Us Against You, Winners
*StoryGraph also offers content warnings (highly recommend checking those out first).

Description: It’s all tied to a painting. When most people view it, they see the sea. Louisa, however, sees the three tiny figures on the end of the long pier. What started as a life goal of simply seeing the painting in person takes her on a journey to discover what ever became of those kids.

Why I recommend this book: I knew nothing of this book aside from a lot of people were talking about it (and even that I learned second hand). I was tasked this for one of my book clubs – and I DEVOURED it. I’m a fan of character-driven stories. Check. Braided stories. Check. Reveals that are surprising but also earned. Check.

I know I know – a story all spurred by a painting of the sea? I promise – it’s tender and joyful, filled with emotional moments but also laughter. The deeper into the stories of those tiny figures, and Louisa herself, the more the writing propels you forward.

But if for nothing else, read it for the writing. It’s a masterclass in voice, as well as building characters.

As I noted above, I would recommend checking out the content warnings before you begin. There are plot points that are not easy. They do make the high points all that much higher, though.

I don’t read reviews of books before I start because I don’t want them to color my reading. I did take a peek after, though, and it’s interesting to see how polarizing this book was for Backman’s readers. This is my first Backman, so I don’t have the others to compare them to – I might feel differently if I did. (I did see the Hanks film A Man Called Otto, but I didn’t know it was based on a Backman book until after I read this.) Also, my book club was pretty well split on it – so take the above with a grain of salt. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the crap on the planet…but then can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”
~ Fredrik Backman translated by Neil Smith, My Friends

AFT: The Art Garage

The Art Garage is one of the featured locations in my novel All Falling Things. In the story, it’s an old mechanic shop turned art gallery in Chicago – five stall capacity with the glass garage doors left in place, concrete cleaned of all stains and polished, and moveable walls constructed to section off individual spaces or shorten the galley if a show can’t fill the entire thing.

In reality, this is an art gallery in Green Bay, WI, that I first encountered when I lived there for college. I thought the concept was great, and I opted to transport it to Chicago for this story.

Photos from Trip Advisor

If you are ever in the city (Green Bay, that is), stop by and check out the latest show or shop the local author fair, maybe take a class.

If you want to visit the Chicago version of the gallery, well, you can once the book comes out. The gallery becomes a second home, a sanctuary, for one of the characters to find their path in life. It was fun to get to live within its walls, even if on a page, and create shows and art pieces to fill the space.