7ToF: there was no rain in Spain when we flew in on a plane, but it rained one day when we got there on the train

Portugal and Spain trip report! You've been warned.

1. We spent 12 days in Portugal and Spain in the first half of October, and I will first of all state the obvious: that is not enough time. We knew that when we planned the trip, but at the time, it was either go for 12 days or not go. We were able to do Lisbon (with a day trip to Sintra), Seville (with a day trip to Cordoba), Granada, and Madrid. We'd previously been to Barcelona, so we didn't go on this trip. It was fantastic and amazing, but as is always the case, now that we've been, we'd do a better job if we ever go again. And I really wish we'd had 3-4 more days. Or twelve.

2. I'm not going to try to give you travel advice because of course I'm not an expert. But I have a few observations to pass along. I was a little worried about managing the train. It was a bit awkward the first time, but after that it was a breeze and so much easier than using regional airlines. We did one regional flight, from Lisbon to Seville, because the train connections on that route are awkward and make it into a 12-16 hour ordeal. The flight was a hassle from start to finish, although it did get us to Seville by early afternoon. But for travel within Spain, the train is great. Just go to the Renfe website, choose the English option, tamp down your nerves, and buy your tickets. The farther in advance you do it, the cheaper it is. Or use a travel service, more about that below.

Cordoba

3. I've discovered that my travel tastes have changed. When we were young and adventurous, I wanted to go all the places and do all the things. We were smart enough not to overload ourselves too much on this trip--we went several different places, but we never planned more than one big thing per day. But now that we are old, I think for future trips that involve major jet lag (7-8 hour difference for us from Montana), I would spend at least five days in the first location, then maybe do 3-4 more locations over a minimum of three weeks. Since we didn't really have enough time to get over jet lag on the front end, we were playing catch up with sleep almost the entire trip. We finally adjusted just in time to do it all again after we returned home.

4. Another thing that has changed is that I found myself more interested in Madrid than the smaller towns. The smaller towns were charming and beautiful and more oriented toward tourists, but maybe since we live in a tourist-y area, I wasn't all that charmed. I'm not sorry we went to any of those places-- there was amazing history and architecture and art--but I found myself more comfortable in Madrid. It's a big enough city that the tourists are only a small part of what's happening. I love people watching, and it felt much more like we were seeing the real modern Spain but with fabulous art and architecture everywhere. Probably many people feel the opposite, but I'm glad to know this for my own future travel plans. 

5. We thought October would be less crowded and blessedly cooler, but we were wrong. We happened into an unusual October heatwave (it was over 90 a couple of days in Seville), and there were crowds every where--apparently this is the biggest travel year Europe has had maybe ever. I hope those are situations that were specific to this year and if you go, you'll have better luck. That's not to say it was awful, and the locals were surprisingly cheerful and friendly given the heat and the crowds, but it wasn't what we were expecting.

6. One thing that was different than the last time we traveled in Spain (Barcelona, 35 years ago): women used to need a scarf to cover their head and shoulders in a place of worship. So I came prepared, and even had a scarf with me the first day. But apparently this is no longer a thing-- almost no one was wearing a head covering in churches, and there were no signs recommending one (unlike our last trip).

In fact, I was a little worried about clothing in general since I thought that Europeans dress more conservatively than Americans. But not to worry. I could not believe the clothing--teensy shorts, crop tops, low necklines--and although it was mostly young people, it wasn't just Americans. Asians, people from other parts of Europe, locals, pretty much everyone was wearing the minimal amount of clothing-- which was at least in part because of the heat. It was hot. Anyway. Not to go all grandma on youngsters wearing what youngsters will wear, but apparently it isn't even considered disrespectful any more, which is the only reason to worry about it. My shorts with the 7" inseam were completely unremarkable.

The Alhambra in Granada

7. We used a travel service, which we've never done before. In the past, I've used Booking.com for hotels (way before Idris Elba starting making commercials for them)(but what's not to love about Idris Elba, whatever he does). But we did the first part of our trip with friends, and they recommended Tour Tailors, based in Lisbon, so we decided to try them. It's not a tour, per se. You tell them your budget and they make hotel reservations, buy your train tickets, and buy tickets to the sites that require advance purchase or have "skip-the-line" tickets. Other than that, we were on our own. It was great. Highly recommend. There was a 24-hour hotline if you had any problems, but we luckily never needed it.

Regrets? I wish we'd had more time in Madrid. We arrived late one afternoon, had the next full day, and then flew home the next morning. We spent an afternoon in the Prado, but we didn't get to see the Guernica, which is at a different museum that had huge lines waiting to get in-- since our time was so short, we decided we'd rather wander around than wait a couple of hours in a line. We also didn't make it to Porto in Portugal, or the almost-completed Familia Sagrada in Barcelona, or Toledo, or the Basque country--all of which I would love to do--but those would make do-able future trips, so they seemed like acceptable compromises. The only thing I would skip is Sintra, our day trip from Lisbon, but mainly because it was so crowded. We were shuffling along through the royal palace with about a thousand of our closest friends.

Senior travel tip #1: I will never travel again without an inflatable pillow. The one I have is about 12"x16" and it inflates to about 4" thick (I think I got it at REI), but you can under-inflate it and use it to make a wafer-thin hotel pillow work for a 62-year-old side sleeper. In fact (should I be embarrassed to admit this?), I've already traveled for years with a smaller inflatable pillow that I use for between my knees to relieve pressure on my hips. Yup, two inflatable pillows. Insert ribald jokes here, but I am a huge fan. 

Senior travel tip #2: If you're choosing between the comfortable shoes and the stylish shoes, pick the comfortable ones. Not kidding.

Oh-- also, totally worth it to pay for international roaming for your cellphone. We're on Verizon, and it was about $100 each to make our phones work throughout our trip. It was invaluable--Google maps, calls, texting, and airline apps all worked just as they do in the US. You just call your cell provider before you leave, they add the extra charge for one month, and then it is automatically deleted.

That's everything I can think of. If you have any questions, comment below or email me and I will answer in a future post. Thanks for stopping by! Have a great weekend!

Moving Mom

It will come as no surprise to anyone that an 87-year-old is not excited about moving. In fact, in a perfect world, all of us who are lucky enough to live into our 80s will already be settled into a vibrant community of seniors, with lots of activities, a communal dining area, and the opportunity for increased care as needed.

And that’s where my mom has been for the past eight years. She might occasionally tell exasperated tales about her neighbors or the food, but for the most part, she had found a situation that was good for her. It was near one of my sisters and her teenagers, who could drive for her—mom reluctantly gave up driving last fall— and run errands as needed.

But times change and things happen, and the best laid plans, etc. My sister needs to move, leaving my mom without local support. Which means my mom needs to move, too.

At the same time that she has continued to be as upbeat and positive as always, she has also managed to make it clear that she is not happy about this move. After spending most of her life in Texas, no one thought she was going to be able to tolerate the weather in Montana. My other sister lives six hours away in Louisiana, and she found a beautiful senior community that is in some ways a better fit than mom's current place. We hope she will love it. But this isn't easy for anyone, and especially not for mom.

She's having to do it while in a fair amount of constant pain. She can still walk with a cane, and she has a walker, though she mostly uses it to transport things she can't carry. But she isn’t exactly mobile. Arthritis in her ankles, knees, hips, and, well, everywhere, means that most movement is painful for her. She feels best when she is in her recliner. 

But she rarely complains, and as she frequently reminds us as she slowly moves to do something one of us could easily accomplish, she needs to keep moving. 

She’s right. She does. I have to stifle my instinctive “helpful” response to do things for her and let her do it herself. As any number of people before me have noted, it’s remarkably similar watching your toddler defiantly struggle to do something herself (me do it, mama!) when you could, in an eyeblink, do it for her. 

Slow down, I remind myself. It’s not about getting things done, it’s about spending time with her. Which isn’t going to be an option forever, lord knows. 

But unfortunately, sometimes when a move is imminent, it is about getting things done, and I’m afraid my temper didn’t always match my good intentions. Over the week I recently spent with her trying to help her pack, my good humor and patience wore down from abundant to nonexistent. I was not always my best self, although I think I managed to hide that from her. My texts to my sisters became increasingly, uh, salty.

I have no wisdom to impart here. I know almost everyone our age is going through this, except those of us whose parents are already gone, who probably wish they were still going through it. My mom and I have never been close--we are both alike and as different as two alike people can be-- and we've always had a hard time understanding each other's priorities. 

But she has been there for me at various different times in my life when support was fairly thin on the ground. She hasn't understood me, but she always tried to do the right thing by me, whatever she thought that right thing might be and however crazy it made me. I'm old enough now that I can appreciate the effort.

And we have our moments. We drove up to the bank one afternoon since she needed to close out her safe deposit box before relocating to the city where my other sister lives. I pulled up to the point closest to the bank and said, in my most annoyingly cheerful voice, "OK, you hop out, and I'll be right in!" She turned back and glared at me. "I'm not hopping anywhere," she said, and although she didn't follow it up with young lady as she might have fifty years ago, I heard it. And suddenly we were both cackling with laughter. 

Because what else can you do.

a late boomer reflects

There's no denying that by the generally accepted rules of who-is-in-which-generation, I am a baby boomer. Officially, boomers were born during the years 1946-1964, and I was born in 1961. But the oldest boomers are nearly 80, and I am 61. 

If you're under 50, that may not seem like a big difference, but it's actually fairly huge. The oldest boomers were in their early 20s during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967, bursting the confines of propriety after growing up in the straightlaced 50s and early 60s. I was barely old enough to know what was happening.

I think of those of us born from ca 1959-1964 as Late Boomers, but I've heard that we actually have an official name, The Jones Generation-- because of keeping up with the Joneses, which was a thing back in the day. 

But that doesn't feel accurate to me. The so-called hippies, with their wide bell-bottom jeans and their headbands and the constant presence of some kind of smoke dangling from their fingers or lips, were people we saw on the nightly news, in alternating shots with mud-covered soldiers in Vietnam. They might as well have been Martians for all I had in common with them.

We were grade school kids, wide-eyed and a little terrified, as uncomprehending as our Silent Generation parents. Hippies were the college kids of our neighbors down the street or the kids who were rioting after hours at the high school we were still years away from attending. 

I don't exactly know where I'm going with this, but I recently read another list of "12 things Boomers do that Drive Millennials Crazy," and there was only one thing on the list that I do (at the moment, I can't even remember what it was, so there you go-- Millennials definitely have sharper minds than we do, my memory is shot). 

In fact, several things on the list made me think, that doesn't have anything to do with being a Boomer, it's just a dumb thing to do. I haven't seen a fully carpeted bathroom since the 80s, but "They still think carpet in a bathroom is a good idea" was on the list. 

The first time I heard about identifying the different "generations," it was a way to help us understand and relate to each other. But it has ended up being just another way that we accuse and mock and blame. I count myself among the people who are having a hard time being emotionally generous and empathetic these days. What is wrong with us? (that's a rhetorical question.)(sort of.)

In other news, I told you I was going to start posting again, but I didn't. Partly because I'm not completely out of touch, I realize blogging isn't a thing anymore. No one would care if I quit. 

Not long ago, I cleared out the list of blogs I follow--which at one point numbered in the 30s-- and realized that only three of them are being actively updated these days:  two that are run by teams of writers, and one that has expanded from being a one-woman blog to a one-woman blog with six or eight employees. 

I think people who want to do the kind of online writing I used to do have moved to Substack, where you can charge a subscription fee. My musings will never be a money-making proposition, so I'm not doing that. But I'm also not sure I have the momentum to push against the tide and keep going. 

I've had a couple of people--neither of whom reads here, as far as I know--be surprised and somewhat embarrassed for me that I "still" have a blog. It would be easy enough to quit, and I'm not sure anyone but me would even realize that I had. But then I think of something I want to say. And then I go back and read old posts that I still like. So here's another one. Maybe there will be a few more.

Book Review, etc: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

This post got long because I had a surprising number of thoughts. Since I can't imagine anyone is all that interested, I decided not to divide it in two. This is the goodreads review I wrote of Funny You Should Ask, a romance novel by Elissa Sussman, followed by further reflections, because the book has been the subject of a minor controversy that I knew nothing about until after I was done reading (and writing my review).

----------So the review I wrote, slightly edited:

Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

Ten years ago, Chani Horowitz was just starting out as a journalist when she was handed the chance of a lifetime, an interview with Gabe Parker, the actor who had been chosen to be the new James Bond. The story she wrote after spending a crazy weekend with him ended up going viral and changing both their lives.

They've barely seen each other since, but now Gabe’s career has nosedived and his PR team wants her to do it again. Funny You Should Ask is a complicated story that moves back and forth between ten years ago and the current time, but it reads easily— Sussman does a great job of managing the timelines so we get just enough information to move the story along. What did happen during that weekend?

What worked really well for me was the story of a smart, maybe over-educated writer who is trying to reconcile her career of writing “puff” pieces with the more serious careers of her former grad school friends. Chani’s story was pitch perfect. 

What didn’t work so well for me is the same old stuff that hasn’t worked well in almost every recent romance novel I’ve read. And since I’m clearly in the minority, I’ll just make myself sound ridiculous by saying it, but I find it tedious to read through (literal) pages and pages of how strong their sexual attraction to each other is. OK, so you want to lick him. Got it. I don't need two pages of elaboration. That stuff is easy to skim over, though, so not necessarily a deal breaker if the rest of the story is good, and in this case, it is. 

There’s another aspect of the story that had me doubtful, though. I’ve lived in Montana for thirty years, and it’s rare that a writer who doesn’t live here gets it right. So when Gabe turned out to be a Montana native, I rolled my eyes. Montana so often means some symbolic thing to people — it’s romanticized and westernized and sanitized; people who have only visited in the summer in the tourist areas, or winter in the ski towns, don’t get the reality of life here.

But I'm giving Sussman a pass on this, mainly because she didn’t make the mistake of trying too hard. In fact, you have to wonder why she picked Montana, because the handful of scenes that are set here could have been in Wyoming or Colorado or even the Sierra Nevadas. At least there was no wrinkled old ranch hand named Willy who’d known Gabe since he was knee-high and taught him everything he knows about riding a horse. In fact, she leaves horses out of it entirely. There are a lot of people who ride horses in Montana (and more who don’t), but again—super hard to get it right, so good for her.

Besides the obvious wish-fulfillment/fantasy aspect of a world-famous movie star falling in love with a nerdy nobody, the development of Chani's and Gabe's story is believably done. I read it on vacation, and it was exactly the kind of book I wanted to read at the time. Highly recommended if you're in the same sort of mood.

p.s. Gabe is from the fictional town of Cooper, Montana. It didn't occur to me until after I was done reading the book that that is probably a nod to Gary Cooper, the actor and star of many westerns, who was from Helena. 

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(If that sounds appealing to you, please stop here and read it before continuing on.) 

Then at some point I was reading reader reviews on Goodreads and discovered that Sussman has come under fire for writing this book for a reason that struck me as puzzling. Apparently, Sussman said in an interview that the original idea for the story came from an interview that another writer did with Chris Evans (of Captain America fame) that appeared in GQ. The most upvoted review related the reader's outrage that Sussman never says this in the acknowledgements, never name-checks the other writer, plus more, and is therefore a reprehensible human being because she stole the idea and etc etc etc.

I disagree with the commenter on two fronts, and but it turns out that she changed my experience of reading the book for a reason I don't think she intended. So here goes: First off, she claims that a journalist having a drink with the subject of her interview and interacting with him/her on a personal level is unethical and unprofessional. I'm not a journalist, so I don't know if there are professional ethics standards here, but I call bullshit on this. 

For one thing, it's hard to imagine a similar claim being made if the interviewer were male. For another, there's a long, complex conversation already occurring around the impossibility of any journalist being able to remain "objective" and personally uninvolved in the story they're telling. The myth of the passive observer journalist is just that, a myth. At least in this case she is upfront about her involvement.

Also there's the claim that since Sussman started with something that someone else wrote, she is stealing someone else's idea. I didn't go check, but I don't think there's any accusation made that she actually cut and pasted the words of the GQ article, so I'm inclined to let this one go, too. If you handed the original interview to a room full of novelists and told them to go write a book loosely based on that article, you would get a room full of entirely different ways of working it out, even if you restricted them to writing romance novels. Are there any novels that spring up whole cloth out of the writer's imagination? It's hard to believe that there are.

I do agree that it might have been nice for Sussman to own up to the original spark for her story in the acknowledgements, but seriously-- I am not going to start judging authors for what is and is not in the afterword. Up until the 80s (90s?) or so, most books didn't even have acknowledgements. This is not as big a problem as the commenter wants it to be.

But on the other hand, having a real person identified as the fantasy Gabe really changed my feelings about the book. Chris Evans is someone I follow on social media, and he's someone I like and admire. Putting a real person's name and face on the character of Gabe gave it a ewwwwww factor that wasn't there while I was reading and just imagining some impossibly handsome nameless movie star. 

Honestly, it's surprising to me how much this changed my attitude toward the book, all in retrospect. I originally gave it five stars (I've told you before that I believe strongly in star-inflation, but let's not get off on that right now), and I even considered going back and knocking off a star or two just because of this. The older I get, the more sympathy I have for celebrities and how their "adoring" public must make it practically impossible to have a real life. Which I suppose you could argue, they are complaining about all the way to the bank, and you have a point. 

Trying to think of some smart thing to say in summary, but I can't. That's all. 

7ToF: crone-y

1. Everyone knows about dry, chapped lips in the winter, but a few years ago my lips were so unusually dry and cracked that it was painful. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that a couple of weeks before I had started taking a daily cranberry supplement on the advice of Somebody On The Internet. "UTIs are the cause of all kinds of trouble for older women, take a cranberry supplement to keep them at bay!" 

I stopped taking the cranberry, and my lips were back to normal in a few days. It is actually true that UTIs can be the cause of all kinds of trouble, but apparently a daily cranberry supplement is too much for me. Now I only take cranberry (or drink some cranberry juice) if I feel something coming on.

2. This winter, it happened again, but my painful lips were so painful that it was keeping me awake at night. Believe it or not, it was a couple of weeks before I thought about what supplements I was taking, and realized that the culprit might be an anti-migraine supplement I had spotted at the health food store a month before. 

The supplement had several different herbs/minerals that I had heard were helpful for migraines (ginger, feverfew, etc), so I thought I would try it. I have no idea which ingredient was causing the problem, but once again when I stopped taking the supplement, my lips were better within a couple of days, although it was about ten days before they got back to normal. 

3. Moral of the story: not sure, because I'm not going to stop taking all supplements. A couple of them seem to be helpful. How about this: if I'm going to try something new, be on the lookout for unusual symptoms for a few weeks so it doesn't take so long to figure it out.

4. Switching gears: thirty years ago, I believed that for the most part you were done changing and growing by the time you hit 30. At that age, I had a child, my spouse and I were both working and keeping ourselves afloat, we had even bought our first house--a shabby rancher in a 1970s subdivision. We were fully grown adults, right? But by my 40s I knew that wasn't true-- I was learning new stuff all the time. And now I'm surprised to find out how much I'm still learning in my 60s. It's not a small amount. I'm learning a lot these days. 

5. One of the many new-age teachers I knew back in the 90s when New Age was still a thing (I posted a bunch about this many years ago, here is the most interesting of them) said something that still comes to mind. If you open yourself to growth, you will grow. I hate to use the phrase "setting an intention," but she probably said, if you set an intention to pursue spiritual growth, the resources you need will find you. 

6. I get less and less woo-woo as the years go by, but I have to admit this has been true every time I've tried it. As long as I stay open to growth, the tools and information I need come to hand--in the form of books or newspaper articles or podcasts or even conversations overhead at the post office-- anything. To try it for yourself, just say, maybe even out loud, I'm ready to grow whenever you think of it. I was feeling kind of stuck a few weeks ago and tried it. It's such a relief to find out that I can still grow and change at age 61. 

Make of that what you will. Of course, it could be things that would have happened anyway, and the only change is my level of awareness. Be skeptical if you want, you have my blessing.

7. A few days ago, I was looking for a post I wrote years ago. Instead of finding that one, I ran across a half dozen other posts that said pretty much exactly the same kinds of things I've been thinking about in 2023. Apparently, I can grow and change, but yup-- also I'm still exactly the same. I think it was Karen Armstrong who wrote about growth being a spiral: you keep circling back around to the same issues, but you're in a different place each time you visit them. 

Wow, I wasn't intending to go that direction when I started this. We're headed south for a couple of weeks in search of (we hope) some sun, so I'm not sure if I'll post again until we get back. Have a great weekend and enjoy the rest of January, wherever you are.

another grumpy old person unpopular opinion. I seem to have a lot of them these days.

One of the reasons I was so underwhelmed by Top Gun Maverick when I saw it last summer is that I'm so tired of mavericks. The basic mythology of ONE MAN, ALONE, breaking rules and flouting authority and saving the day is practically wired into our brains. It's part of our national character. There's Pete Mitchell/Tom Cruise in Top Gun. There's John McClane/Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series. Han Solo, Iron Man, Ocean's Eleven. There's a million westerns and heist movies and military guys gone rogue that all feed our need to see that the status quo is inherently bad and only a disruptor, a troublemaker, can make things right.

I've been as big a fan of the idea as anyone in the past, but I'm just so tired of it. I only saw the new Top Gun movie once and it was several months ago, so I don't remember the details. It was fun-- there's no denying it was fun to watch. But the whole thing was so obvious it makes me roll my eyes. Of course after he gets fired or pulled off the team or whatever it is, he's going to steal a plane and defy his superiors and get back in there and use some good old-fashioned American ingenuity to do the job the average people think can't be done. OF COURSE. Because he's Tom Cruise, and he's a maverick, and we have infinite belief in the power of a troublemaker to overcome the forces of mediocrity and save the day.

It's all fun and games when Tom Cruise flashes his cocky grin and faces down the boring authority figures, but is it so much fun when a handful of congresspeople can hold up the entire process of government for a nation of 330 million because they believe they are lone warriors standing up to big government? How fun is it when a wealthy sloganeer spends four years in the White House because he's convinced his base he's a disruptor who can clear the swamp? There's a big cesspool of fat cats in Washington and only an outsider, a maverick, can save the day! 

At some point we need to start valuing functional systems again. We could show some respect for the people who show up for work and get their jobs done, even if it is in the service of the status quo, because it is in the service of the status quo. Maybe we could acknowledge that even if there is some deadweight in government and civil service, there is also a whole lot of stuff that works just fine, because regular, boring people follow the rules and do their jobs. And thank God for that.

Some mavericks are just a pain in the ass.

And that's (another of) my unpopular opinion(s). Next thing you know I'll be stopping gen Xers in the street and telling them to get a haircut and get a real job.

P.S. I wrote the first version of this post on Friday morning. The post title was "I am So Tired of Disruptors" and since I was trying not to target the new Top Gun movie specifically, I had only used the word "maverick" once. Then Saturday night we watched Glass Onion (not to get sidetracked, but we thought it was fun, and at least it was different--no sci-fi, no dragons, no superheroes, no romance). If you haven't seen it, the word "disruptors" plays a large part in the movie, and even though the writer used it in a way that was sort of similar to what I mean here, it just felt wrong to leave the post the way it was. So I re-wrote it a bit, and now it is much more directly about the Top Gun movie. I know a maverick and a disruptor are not exactly the same thing, but at least in the way I mean here, they are in the same group of provocateurs who think their job is to shake things up instead of being "boring" and playing by the rules. Apparently, I'm a fan of boring people at the moment.

My So-Called Reading Life: 2022 Wrap-up

I read 92 books during 2022, which will seem like a lot to some of you, and laughably few to others. That's about the same as last year, but there was a major difference: in 2022, I did a lot of re-reading, especially during the summer. I was stressed about the wedding and I didn't have enough energy to tackle anything new or challenging, so I fell back on books I already knew I would love. 

So it was kind of a strange reading year. Another way that it was strange was that I didn't read anything that had that immediate knock-your-socks-off this is one of my all-time favorites feeling. Last year there was Deacon King Kong. The year before that, there were a bunch. This year, there were several good solid reads, but no real standouts. 

For the record, probably my favorites were The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, and Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Apparently I just read what everyone else is reading. Honorable Mention to What are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Hell of a Book by Jason Mott, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

Maybe the best book I read in 2022 was an oldie, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), that I finished about two days before the year ended. I didn't think I was going to like it because I'd heard so much about it and it didn't seem like my kind of book. But the sequel, The Candy House, came out in 2022, and it sounded intriguing. So I decided it was time. To my surprise, Goon Squad was great. Then I proceeded on to Candy House, which I didn't like quite as well, but they're both good. 

And the two of them together are astonishing. You can just breeze through them, and they would be great that way, but being as obsessive as I am, I spent a lot of time tracing the connections between the two. There are a lot of them. I have no idea how she kept track of everything while she was writing. I would have needed color-coded spreadsheets and half a dozen poster boards. (I just finished Candy House yesterday, so officially speaking it is on my 2023 list.)

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When I started this blog back in 2015, I was determined that it would not be a book blog. At the time, it seemed to me that there were thousands of bookish-women-of-a-certain-age who were writing book blogs. I haven't exactly avoided writing about books, obviously, especially not recently, but for the most part, I've stuck with my determination to keep the book talk to a minimum. 

Almost eight years later, hardly anyone is blogging about anything anymore, let alone books. And most of the writing I've done in the last few months has been the brief reviews I write on Goodreads for (almost) every book I read. 

They're only "brief" in that they aren't full-scale, professional-level book reviews, because some of them have ended up being pretty damn long, at least compared to the average Goodreads review. Since I haven't had all that much to post about here recently, I think I may back off on my determination to avoid being the stereotypical book blogger and start posting some of the more interesting ones here. You've been warned.

I was talking to some other book lovers last fall and mentioned that I review the books I read on Goodreads. They were a little put off by that, partly because Goodreads is owned by Amazon and we all know how problematic that is. But partly also because, as one of them put it, "I could never believe that anyone wanted to read my opinion about a book." 

Which is also true of me. I can never believe that either. But that's the thing about both Goodreads and blog posts--you're not forcing anyone to read them. I'm not even really expecting anyone to read them. I just like writing them. 

That Reminds Me of a Story™: about ten years ago, I was chatting with a woman sitting next to me at a writers conference. She told me that she was about to start a blog and she had a professionally designed logo and a tagline and a marketing campaign all lined up. I told her that I've had a blog since 2003 (there were three before this one), and she eagerly asked me for advice. Since my blog (and my Goodreads reviews) have never really attracted much attention, I was pretty sure I shouldn't be giving anyone advice, but I told her, well, it helps if you like to write. And honestly, from the look on her face, I'm not sure it had ever occurred to her that she was going to have to actually write posts if she wanted to have any content on her new blog.

I think I might have told you that story before, and come to think of it, she is probably killing it as an influencer on TikTok these days. 

I didn't quite make it through all the reading life topics I had in mind, so this may be continued next week. Or maybe we will move on to bigger and better things. Have a great weekend.

A Grumpy Old Person and her Unpopular Opinion about the Movies

I think you can tell that time has truly passed you by--that you have, in fact, become irrelevant-- when the big blockbuster moments that are moving the culture at large leave you shrugging your shoulders. 

I've seen three big, successful films this year, and I had the same reaction to all of them: pretty or even spectacular visuals, seamlessly made, but shrug. They were OK. A bunch of hackneyed clichés, plot points that feel like they came from a checklist, all put together with beautiful actors, polished cinematography, and outstanding costume design. (For the record, the ones I'm talking about are Top Gun: Maverick, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Avatar: Way of Water.)

People talk about those films as if they are all-time classics, pure magic on the big screen. But I came out of them feeling a little disappointed and, maybe weirdly, a little manipulated. It feels like the filmmakers have sucked you in with addictively gorgeous visuals and Meaningful Archetypal Plot Points, but left you with nothing to think about, nothing to chew on, so to speak. It's all stock characters and ham-fisted morality. Even when I agree with what's being preached, I hate being preached at. 

Yesterday I listened to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (Dec 16 2022 episode) where they discussed Avatar: Way of Water, with a panel of commentators who are all probably 30+ years younger than me. They are smart and literate and their opinions make sense, but listening to them is what made me realize, oh, the problem is that I am old. I have different expectations going into a movie. 

They were in complete agreement with me that it was a humorless, heavy-handed, ponderous plot, but they didn't care. They were so transported by the immersive visuals that they barely noticed the generic story. The innovation of what they were seeing on the screen meant more to them than an innovative plot.

They walked out awed by the groundbreaking technology that made the CGI so spectacular; I walked out thinking it was just a remake of the first Avatar movie set underwater (and on the Titanic)(you practically expected Kate Winslet* to run around the corner shouting Jack! Jack!).

I'm not sorry I saw it. It was a decent use of three hours of my time. I was invested enough that I was teary-eyed when someone dies toward the end. But I guess I'm just not a visual person, because for me all the visual wow was not enough to make up for the stock characters and derivative plot. 

That's my unpopular opinion, and I know it is, and I understand that it just identifies me as a grumpy old person. But seriously. Maverick is such a stock plot that they never even named the enemy country, because it doesn't matter. Whoever it was, Tom Cruise and all those exceptional Americans would have defeated them. The Crawdad movie was practically an entire movie about a white woman's tears and the stock characters surrounding her. It's beautiful. The acting is moving. You feel like an old grinch for even complaining, but I found myself thinking (like Timon), and... everybody's OK with this? 

The exception is the only other movie that I saw in a theater in 2022, the new Black Panther. It checked all the boxes of blockbuster budget, gorgeous costumes, pretty to look at, etc, but the way it dealt with grief over the death of T'Challa was genuinely moving to me. It had its own problems--it wasn't nearly as seamless-feeling as the other three, for one thing, and I suppose MCU movies will always be bound by the expectations of people who have read the comics-- but I came out of it thinking, that was a great movie, which I did not think of any of the others.

Those other three were fun, enjoyable blockbuster movies if you could turn off your brain and just watch. They weren't a waste of time. Maverick took the standard "arrogant hot shot young guy saves the world" plot and changed it to an old guy. Way of Water made its heroes parents with a blended family and children who misbehave. Crawdads is at heart a movie about a woman who is fed up with sexual harassment. Those aren't meaningless ideas. But they all felt so slick.

If it weren't for the way people are talking about them, my irritation would be at a level that wouldn't even be worth mentioning. But I heard someone say that Maverick is one of the ten best films ever made, and the swooning praise I've heard about the Way of Water makes me wonder if we actually saw the same film.

So, that's all I have to say. I deleted two paragraphs of further moralizing and trying to justify my opinion because there's no need. Who cares? I'm writing this out here because every time I've tried to say this irl, I've been booed down, so if I type it here, maybe I'll get my grumpiness out of my system and I can keep my mouth shut. Because entertainment is often a good thing, and those three movies were certainly entertaining.  

* Kate Winslet voices one of the characters in The Way of Water. When you see it, see if you can figure out which one it is without looking at the credits (I couldn't).