Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 4

Le Renard Doré + Le Renard Café

I am hopelessly behind on my posts about my trip to France this summer, but…better late than never? After I returned from Switzerland, Isabelle and I went into Paris on the 4th of July to visit the bookstore Le Renard Doré, which specializes in manga and Japanese literature. Earlier this year, Isabelle designed a bookmark for the store, which customers received with any purchase during the month of April. Her illustration for the bookmark showed two foxes in Japanese dress enjoying tea, sweets, ...

RAGBRAI 2023

If you’re not from Iowa, you may be wondering, What is RAGBRAI? Well, it’s the Register‘s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, the Register being the Des Moines Register (a newspaper). Until this summer, I’d been dimly aware of RAGBRAI as a big Iowa cycling event but did not really know anything more about it. This year, though, Grinnell was a pass-through town on the RAGBRAI route (which I gather changes every year), so the riders were coming, and it was a big deal. It was also RAGBRAI’s 50th...

Trip to Switzerland

When I was in Europe earlier this summer, I had the chance to visit my relatives in Switzerland again (after the family wedding this spring!). As in March, I took the TGV from Paris to Zürich on a Friday afternoon. Then I took another train from Zürich to Baden, where my father’s cousin Patty and her husband picked me up. (Next time I’ll know how to take the postbus from Baden to the village where they live! Relatedly, 2023 is the year I was won over by public transporation apps. Getting a new p...

La Bibliothèque nationale de France

Toward the end of June, I flew to France to visit Isabelle in Meudon. One sunny Tuesday, we went on an outing to Paris. We first had lunch at La Taverne de Zhao, a Chinese restaurant group with multiple locations in Paris (we ate at the newest one, in the Opéra neighborhood, which has many Asian eateries). The menu at La Taverne de Zhao featured some items, like liangpi and mo, that I’d first encountered at Qin, a western Chinese restaurant in Westwood, when I was in grad school. But the special...

Moon Palace Books and the New Uncle Hugo’s

On Sunday, I attended an author panel on middle grade fantasy at Moon Palace Books. Although I’ve known about Moon Palace for a while, it was my first time visiting the bookstore. It’s located in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood and is known for its engagement with the local community and its activist and social justice-oriented stances. In 2020, during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, the plywood boarding up Moon Palace’s storefront bore the slogan Abolish the Police pa...

Merry May

Nothing terribly exciting has been going on, but I have some cheery highlights from this month as May draws to a close. I mentioned in my 2022 in Review that I’d joined the Collegium Musicum, Grinnell’s early music ensemble, this academic year. I have been playing the bass viol (viola da gamba). At the beginning of May, the St. Paul-based Baroque ensemble Flying Forms came to campus to give a concert, as well as a series of lessons, master classes, and workshops for Collegium members. We in the ...

Trip to Zürich

The title of this post is a slight misnomer because this is actually the account of my spring break travels to Paris and Zürich. But in my case, Zürich is the less frequent destination, and I wanted to keep the post title format consistent. (Also, is it true I’ve never written a “Trip to Paris” post?! The English country dance Trip to Paris is the source of title format!)

Ahem, anyway. Late last year, my family learned that Katlyn, one of my Swiss second cousins, was getting married right in the...

Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes

A couple of weekends ago, I went to the exhibit “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was somewhat reminiscent of the last exhibit of Chinese art I saw at MIA, “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” which placed Qing dynasty artwork amid various roomscapes, some dark, some brightly lit, and many with music or a soundtrack. “Eternal Offerings” featured painted scenes on the walls of some galleries, music or sounds of activity in the background, a...

Cats of Grinnell

A post on a Tuesday, look at that! I had to, because today is the last day of February, a month in which I have yet to post, and I’m stubbornly refusing to break my streak of posting at least once a month. And so today I give you an incomplete list of some cats of Grinnell.

Grinnell has many cats. From what I observe, overhear, and am told, not a few residents are feeding stray cats or wind up adopting cats that walked into or otherwise appeared in their lives. My personal experience of the cats...

The Books I Read in 2022

I read 89 books in 2022. As I’d predicted, that was fewer than I read in 2021 (but still more than in 2020!). I served on the Kids All Iowa Reads committee again, which ensured I read a decent number of middle grade books. I still tend to be most excited for adult (and sometimes YA) SFF, though.

Here are the books I read in 2022, rereads bolded, with links to any related blog posts:

The Girl Who Drank the Moon Kelly Barnhill
The Night Country Melissa Albert
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hat...