1. .

    After finding a banana in the smaller pocket of Junior’s backpack Monday morning that had probably been there since the school handed him breakfast Friday morning, Mom asked, “Why is this banana in your backpack?”

    “Because I like using it as a bananaphone.”

  2. Sky Daddy

    Kate Folk

    Cover of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, published 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton, 368 pages
    Figure 1. Cover of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, published 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton, 368 pages.

    Most of what I want to say about Sky Daddy would spoil the afterword, which was a minor revelation for me. “Oh, jeeze.”

    Set in San Francisco and viciously deadpan about it.

  3. coyote!

    Figure 1. A map of San Francisco, California. The path of a two mile (three and a quarter kilometer) walk is indicated. About 3900 steps and 322 feet (98 meters) elevation over three quarters of an hour.
  4. I mistakenly ignored the Wachowskis’s Speed Racer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Racer_(film)) on release and now junior has asked to (and so I also get to) watch it a second time (with Mom this time) this year, and it is really pretty incredible. Wildly underrated.

    “assault [on] every single modern aesthetic”. --Lana Wachowskis

  5. Beautyland

    Marie-Helene Bertino

    Cover of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, published 2024-01-16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a 336-page hardcover
    Figure 1. Cover of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, published 2024-01-16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a 336-page hardcover.

    A lovely coming-of-age (I learned from a Bookwyrm post that you can call these a Bildungsroman) New York City story with a lot of heart. Another reviewer called it a “funny-sad” which: yeah it’s that too. While I also more than enjoyed Auster’s similar 4, 3, 2, 1, in this case, the same kind of story (or, one quarter of the same kind of story), follows someone just under two years older than me to New York City so rather than the former’s dips into period-overexposure I had lots of “yes, hello” moments. I’m not a nostalgic person but that was a nice personal bonus.

    (Also Cheers gets another well deserved tip of the hat in Beautyland, like it did in Exit Zero.)

  6. lolsob

    Figure 1. A map of San Francisco, California. The path of a three and a quarter mile (five and a quarter kilometer) ride is indicated. About 164 feet (50 meters) elevation over a quarter hour.

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