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With the year coming to a close it’s a good time to reflect on the offerings that enriched my days and nights. I read newspapers, magazines, works of nonfiction, but my true love is fiction. In these three novels, the characters and situations were so alive to me I didn’t want their stories to end: Jonathan [...]
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In the months after summer’s heat, Chicago’s crisp sunny days pull me, and my dog, to the beach. There’s no one there! My North Avenue beach is banked by man-made dunes. Get yourself beyond those and the beach offers a wide swath of sand pebbled with crushed shells. Also washed-up wood slabs from wave-smashed piers, [...]
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After a particularly brutal winter and a long, cold spring we here in Chicago are desperate for sun and warmth. People stand at street corners or outside office buildings, faces lifted to the sun. Not waiting for the Rapture. Or sneaking a smoke. They’re jones-ing for a hit of sunshine. So it’s understandable that we [...]
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I confess: I loved Borders. I spent many hours and countless dollars there. Not the store on North Avenue so much, but the one on Michigan Avenue. HIgh ceilings, four full floors of pricey real estate, a cafe with a spectacular view of the avenue, deep collections of poetry, travel, photography and fiction (who cares [...]
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I’m posting this out of frustration with the bland, dated advice in yesterday’s New York Times Travel section. A couple celebrating their 25th anniversary plans to spend a few days in Chicago in early December. What to do, where to go? Agreed. It will be cold. Let’s review the reasons to visit Chicago any time [...]
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From all the press I’d read, I felt certain I was going to walk into a market of French foods. Instead, this market is global, with 30 local vendors putting out native produce, Vietnamese sandwiches, Mexican fare, Polish sausage, Italian coffee, exotic pastas, fish and meat, French pastries, artisan soaps, cut flowers, crepes — and [...]
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In Chicago, we savor every warm sunny day in September. Last gasps of summer happen all over the globe, of course, but in Chicago each day of warmth and sun is one we soak up and store within ourselves. We’re like Lionni’s Frederick, who uses those rays to soothe his fellow mice during the bleak, [...]
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I’m often in awe of museum art; how or when it was created, how it’s presented. It’s a quiet, passive pleasure. Delight, joy: at a museum? That’s rare. Olafur Eliasson is the Danish-Icelandic artist whose installations can be seen and experienced at the Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago Ave.) through Sept. 13. Go. [...]
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A friend who owns restaurants says patrons come back, time after time, for a signature dish. Something no other restaurant makes or prepares in the same way. I’d widen the reasons for returning to a restaurant: portions, presentation, ingredients, certain servers, a special view. Two restaurants in my Old Town neighborhood, opened within the past [...]
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