Joan Vassos doesn’t mind when strangers ask if she’s been on The Golden Bachelor. “I had the time of my life,” says the 60-year-old widow, who lives in Rockville and works at Landon School in Bethesda. Vassos was one of 22 contestants selected from 30,000 applicants to be on ABC’s new reality show last fall. She withdrew from filming early to help her daughter recover from giving birth. Still, the experience opened her heart to dating again, Vassos says, and she hopes the show will make single people in their 60s and 70s feel less invisible.
Ariel Djanikian pored over letters, stories and newspaper articles about her family’s involvement with the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800s in Canada before writing her new novel, The Prospectors (William Morrow, October 2023). It’s a fictionalized saga that bounces between the family’s exploration and its descendants in 2015 who attempt to compensate the First Nation people in the Yukon Territory. “I just wanted to throw open the doors to this fascinating moment in our past” says the Bethesda author, who worked on the book for years.
Wanting more coverage of local happenings in schools, businesses and politics, Suzan Pitman and Jaime Espinosa decided to produce a podcast they call Hey, Rockville! They recorded about one episode a month in Pitman’s garage in 2023 and plan to invite the new Rockville mayor and city council members in for a conversation this year. “We take a neighborly, friendly approach,” Espinosa says of the nonpartisan podcast. “People really care about the city, but they are busy. We’re just getting information out there.”
For five years, Bernard Jankowski commuted from his Poolesville home to Southwest Washington, D.C., to teach special education at Amidon-Bowen Elementary School. Now he has woven vignettes, poems and stories into a memoir, Music in the Halls: The Heart and Heartbreak of Teaching at a High-Poverty School in Washington, D.C. (Regal House Publishing, January 2024). Jankowski was struck by the enormity of the problems students faced, but also their resilience. “It gave me a [new] perspective on [kids’] hopes and dreams and challenges,” he says.
Here are the most-requested books at Montgomery County Public Libraries
Fiction
- Tom Lake | Ann Patchett
- The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store | James McBride
- Lessons in Chemistry | Bonnie Garmus
- Iron Flame | Rebecca Yarros
- Fourth Wing | Rebecca Yarros
- The Covenant of Water | Abraham Verghese
- The Exchange: After the Firm | John Grisham
- Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver
- Happy Place | Emily Henry
- None of This is True | Lisa Jewell
Non-fiction
- The Woman in Me | Britney Spears
- Killers of the Flower Moon | David Grann
- My Name Is Barbra | Barbra Streisand
- Elon Musk | Walter Isaacson
- Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing | Matthew Perry
- Atomic Habits : Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results | James Clear
- Enough | Cassidy Hutchinson
- Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity | Peter Attia
- Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon | Michael Lewis
- Prequel: An American Fight Against Facism | Rachel Maddow
This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.