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. 

--------------------

(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.)

-------------------------

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).

the sadly all-too-common tale of my social media woes

My social media starter drug was Facebook. I was an early adopter. I don't remember exactly when I joined, but it was shortly after they opened it to non-university students. I loved it for a very specific reason-- I had young children, and we didn't live near our extended family. I had been tediously taking my rolls of film to a drugstore, having them developed, having reprints made, writing a note to include, going to the post office, and sending out photos of our kids. On Facebook, I could post the photos and be done with it. I strong-armed my parents and several other friends and relatives into joining -- you've got to try this! It's so fun!

And I did think it was fun. I loved it. I was caught completely off-guard when there began to be pushback. If you posted pictures of your kids on facebook, you were showing off. You were bragging about how great your life is. You were only showing the good parts and not being honest about the hard things in your life. Whaaaaat? No, honestly, I'm just posting pictures of my kids. There was zero intent on my part to make other people feel bad about their lives. I deleted it off my phone and quit posting almost entirely, but I still checked it daily from my laptop.

And then 2015/2016 happened, and people who would never have dreamed about posting their political opinions online suddenly started to do so, and FB became toxic. I still check in a couple of times a week, because I'm in three online groups that became FB-only years ago, but I rarely scroll past the first two screens. I really do not want to know what my neighbors think. Like everybody, I miss the days when you could be friends with anybody without thinking about it, because we were all smart enough to keep our political opinions to ourselves.

My first switch was to Instagram, and at that time, Instagram was what I had originally joined Facebook for--people posting pictures of their kids and their vacations and the birds on the bird feeder outside their window. I was really into it for awhile. I even started a separate #bookstagram account as a way of talking about what I was reading and hoping to find other book nerds.

But you know, the internet has a way of poisoning everything. Somebody figured out that you could monetize your account, and you could pose your six children in cute outfits and businesses would send you free stuff if you mentioned their brand because nobody (including me) could look away from the cuteness. Or publishers would send you free books, and you could post a highly-edited shot of the $250 set of Jane Austen novels you received for free with the caption, Aren't these pretty? I should read them someday! and get a thousand likes, and I lost patience with the whole thing. 

So then I turned to Twitter, which I had joined years earlier but never really used. It had a reputation for being brutal (the reason I had stayed away), but I found that by following the right accounts and not reading the comments, I could avoid the ugly bits. Finally, I thought, I had found the right place for me. Smart, funny people were being smart and funny online, and it was the kind of commentary that is hard to come by in the area where I live. I assiduously avoided, blocked, and unfollowed anyone who made my blood pressure rise--but honestly, once you make it clear what kind of stuff you're interested in, that's not hard. The Twitter algorithms are pretty good at showing you what it thinks you want to see. I didn't post very often--maybe half a dozen times a month--and when I did, no one seemed to notice, so I didn't have to worry about people coming after me.

And then Elon happened, and now even Twitter is ruined. I haven't deleted my account yet, because (to my untrained eye) he's driving it into the ground so fast that it's too soon to tell what will happen. But it definitely has a different feel than it did even a few months ago. Now you see a blue check mark and you think, wait, you're paying for that? Who on earth would hand that man more money? I check in some, but it no longer brings me joy, which it frequently did when it was intelligent people being funny about books and movies and Life In These Difficult Times. 

I miss it. I really miss it. Social media is great for someone like me whose favorite way to socialize is people watching. It's a continuous stream of people-doing-things that's available around the clock while you're still at home in your sweats. 

But someone always figures out how to weaponize it. Isn't that the sad thing about life these days? Someone always figures out how to weaponize everything. I've been listening to teenagers this week (more on that another time), and it occurs to me that our culture has become like a bunch of teenagers--gossipy, cruel, relentlessly critical, going for the thing that will get us noticed or liked or envied. 

This is turning into me being a gripey old person so I'll stop. Re: the long gap between this post and the last one: I decided at some point over the past couple of months that the time for blogging is past, so I was going to stop. I figured that last post would be my last post. 

But the thing is, blogging is good for me, in a purely selfish, mental-health kind of way. There's a specific atmosphere that happens in my head, a boggy, bored-with-myself feeling of blah-ness, that is at least somewhat alleviated by writing here. So, I'm not sure exactly how often I will continue to post, and lord knows, and you know, you certainly don't need to read it. But apparently I'm not giving it up.

Another book review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

I listened to an interview with an artist last week who said that the best, most interesting art is art that surprises him. I don’t know enough about art to know if that’s true, but I do know that a book that surprises me is one of my favorite things. This one did.   

Standard Deviation can be read as a funny, absorbing story of marriage, advancing years, raising a special needs child, and managing relationships with relatives, exes, and house guests. Graham is approaching sixty, and his second wife is a younger woman named Audra who has no filter— which is sometimes hilarious and sometimes appalling. Their son Matthew is an endearing Aspy kid with a passion for origami. That version of the story is enough on its own to be funny, heartwarming, and even sometimes wise. I was startled into laughter more times while reading this book than any book in recent memory.

But it seems to me there are other layers, and I’m making my spouse read it now so I can have someone to talk to about this. Am I making it up? Did she really intend to get into the moral ambiguity of the second half of the novel, or am I over-reading? 

(If that sounds intriguing, stop now and go read it, especially if you live nearby and we can go for coffee (tea), because I really would love to discuss this, and you should go into it without knowing the stuff I'm talking about below.)

***spoilers ahead***

I think the way you read the second half depends mostly on whether or not you think Audra is having an affair. I think she is— maybe not with the mysterious Jasper, but what else was she doing in that hotel? She certainly has no problem talking about the multiple married men she slept with before she married Graham. And then you find out that Graham cheated on his first wife not just with Audra, but with Marla, and then later he mentions “all the other Marlas” and you start to wonder if these people are really at all what you thought.

There are a whole lot of layers of truth and falsehood — from the amusing social lies/fabrications that Audra spins effortlessly to the lies of omission from Graham. Is Heiny’s point that speaking truth doesn’t really matter? I've told plenty of social "white lies" myself, usually in the name of not hurting someone's feelings, but I'll say it plainly: the deeper lack of honesty bothers me.

But even I can see that I’m being a bit of a killjoy and a preachy bore to suggest that the fun and hilarity of reading about life with Audra has darker underpinnings. What's the problem with serial adultery if it's so much fun to read about? Graham seems to consciously decide that he doesn’t care if Audra is unfaithful—which is totally his choice—but that’s not the same thing as Heiny as an author giving the impression that telling the truth to your partner doesn’t matter. Is it really true that as long as everything looks good, it is good? As long as we're having so much funnnnn, as the kids say on snapchat, does that automatically mean anything goes?

Or did Heiny actively intend all the intricate, ambiguous implications? Is her point that we lull ourselves into complicity because we want to be in on the joke? Maybe Standard Deviation is a fun-hall mirror of seeing our own distortions.

Or maybe I'm over-reading again. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

(a slightly modified version of the review I posted on Goodreads)

Here's something you did not expect me to post about today: LIV Golf

I live with golfers. On my own, I would probably pay exactly zero attention to golf, but like most parents, I become interested in what my family is interested in, and my spouse and my younger (25-year-old) child, who was living at home until six weeks ago, are total golf nerds.

I have at various times in my life become interested in sports, but it's the personalities that interest me. I'm not an athlete myself, so their prowess and skills aren't as much of a draw. My eyes glaze over almost instantly when the conversation turns to the angle of the club face or the purity of someone's stroke. 

But if you watch these kids--because they are kids when they start out--over the course of several years, and learn their backstory, and their ups and downs, and then they get married and have kids, pretty soon they're like your own friends. You care about what happens to them.

So the whole dilemma around the recent development of a Saudi-funded golf league, known as LIV Golf, and the exodus of several prominent golf stars to play there, has been a topic of much conversation and even some emotional turmoil at our house. 

#LIVGolf is backed by the almost unlimited wealth of the Saudi ruling family, and the players who have chosen to play for them are making more money just by signing up for the league than they might in their entire career with the PGA (at least, that's how it looks-- I have no idea what's actually happening).

I'm no expert, but of course like thousands of twitter users, that's not going to stop me from giving you my opinion. I'm definitely #TeamPGA. My sympathies are with the players who want to play the best players in the world at the historic, traditional tournaments and courses of the PGA and the majors. 

But I also think a lot of the hysteria is over-the-top. When it was first announced that some of our favorite players were leaving the PGA, I will admit that we were upset-- especially my son, who idolized DJ for years. 

But now that the dust has settled a bit, I'm finding it hard to stay that way. As plenty of LIV supporters have pointed out, the PGA has advertising contracts with a number of companies who do business with the Saudis. That's not exactly the same thing as being bankrolled by the Saudi Private Investment Fund, but it does blur the lines. 

If I were making the decision for myself, I wouldn't be able to do it, but I can see how someone who is looking at his career as a business would see the move to LIV as a smart decision. 

It isn't hard to imagine that players like Brooks and DJ are looking beyond their limited shelf-life as tournament winners and seeing LIVGolf as a way to continue to play golf while at the same time giving them the time and funding to pursue other interests. And there are the Asian and Australian players who say they want to spend more time at home. I'm more sympathetic with the players who have stayed with the PGA, but at least I can understand that.

What I don't get at all is the urge to destroy the PGA in the process, and as a long-time non-fan of the shark guy, it's hard not to believe he is the source of that. Sure, go ahead and set up an alternative league with a new format. Maybe it will be fun and exciting for the players and the fans. Let the players decide who wants to play in it and let the fans decide if they're interested. Go for it.

But why the lawsuits? Why the temper-tantrum-level subpeonas? why the shady, strong-arm recruitment methods? The LIV players made the decision to leave the PGA, and they've been well-compensated to do so. End of story. Just stop already and let us get back to cheering for Rory and Scottie and Max and Tony and Jordan and Sungjae and Xander, and a whole bunch of other players who are more motivated by the love of golf.

To list or not to list

Oddly, the closer the wedding gets, the better I feel about it. I'm still anxious, and there are about a gazillion details to attend to, but at least now I'm worried about very specific things and not just freaking out over the entire idea of hosting a wedding. By the time this is published it will be two weeks until the day of the rehearsal. I'm starting to believe I will survive it.

A theme for me recently has been realizing how people are wired differently. Obviously all of us are different, and I've already told you what a game changer it was for me to understand the difference between introversion and extroversion. But I don't think I realized until the last 2-3 years how many of the ways we are different go down to our core. No amount of therapy or personal growth is going to clear them up.

The difference that feels particularly relevant to me right now: some people handle stressful situations by meticulously preparing for them; some people find that preparation makes them more stressed and they'd rather wing it.

I think I am by nature a person who is more successful in coping with stress by being prepared. But I was raised to admire people who wing it, and by a dad who was charismatic enough to be able to pull off most situations just by letting his charm flow. So I've had to learn that I'm better off if I prepare. I've been making lists for the past week and every time I get through another round of list-making, I feel more confident and less stressed. 

And then, like all list-makers, I get the joy of marking things off the list as I do them. There's nothing better. 

-----------------------------

Books I've loved this summer, besides the previously mentioned The Road: Emily St. John Mandel's new one, The Sea of Tranquility. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (I know, late to the party). Surprisingly (to me), Jessica Simpson's memoir, Open Book. I didn't realize until I just went and looked at my list how many re-reads I've done this summer: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, Archangel by Sharon Shinn, Good Omens (the audio version is fantastic). Those last two are a bit dated, but I still enjoyed them thoroughly.

And the Narnia books. Like most adults I know who are former evangelicals, I've had to re-think my childhood obsession with C.S. Lewis's series of seven books about the magical kingdom of Narnia. It turns out they're really pretty problematic. For example, in The Last Battle, Susan is banished from heaven because she's interested in nylons and lipstick (not kidding--I just went and looked it up to make sure I had it right)(she is no longer a friend of Narnia, Peter pompously announces). 

And then there's the blatant Orientalism in The Horse and His Boy. They're just dated. Until this summer, it had been fifteen or twenty years since I'd read them because I was more than a little embarrassed I'd loved them so much.

I was obsessed with them as a child. I re-read them every year until I was twenty. Even though I was raised thoroughly evangelical, it wasn't the Christian allegory that drew me in. In fact, I think I was on my second or third time through The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe before I realized it was a thinly veiled account of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and then it was only because my mom pointed it out to me. I just loved Mrs. Beaver and Mr. Tumnus and the Bulgy Bears, and the triumph of the Good and Kind over the Mean and Cruel. And the magical door into a secret kingdom, which caused me to furtively check the back of every wardrobe I encountered until I was eight or nine.

Anyway. I was on a road trip this summer and the audiobook I had picked out was not holding my attention, and I remembered I had picked up the entire Narnia collection for one credit on Audible at some point. So I started with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and then The Silver Chair (which is probably the one that holds up best), and I'm halfway through the aforementioned Horse and His Boy. The narrators are excellent.

I think there's enough water under the bridge now that I can revisit them as an expression of a past way of thinking, sort of like reading Little Women or Anne of Green Gables with their pious moralizing, or Georgette Heyer, who has a Jewish money-lender in what is arguably her most popular book, The Grand Sophy. And anyway, Evangelicals can try as they might, but C.S. Lewis, a high church Anglican, would never have been an American-style Evangelical. Not a chance. 

But that's an entirely different topic. I'm enjoying them. I will probably skip The Last Battle--no amount of time is going to clear that one up. 

If you made it all the way through this mess, I'm grateful to you for sticking it out. Have a good weekend.

Thoughts on Reading The Road

I've been meaning to read The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2007) for years, but had been put off by other readers' comments that it was unrelentingly joyless and despairing. But I've read a few too many light romances recently, to the point where I was starting to not enjoy them, so I decided now was the time to tackle a dark classic.

Those other readers are right that there is no hope of hope in this gritty post-apocalyptic story of a father and son searching for a place to call home. The nature of the disaster is never specified, and that's at least part of why it can work-- is there any disaster, even a nuclear one, that would cause the absolute destruction of all plant and animal life and yet leave humans alive? There is no food to eat at all, outside of finding caches of pre-apocalypse food in half-rotting houses, or cannibalism. The man and the boy (they are never named) travel several hundred miles south in the course of the novel, and there is nothing anywhere other than desolation and coldness and ash.

But there are also plenty of good reasons to read it. The relationship between the father and son is tender and sweet and beautifully rendered, but not cloyingly so--they often argue and disagree. McCarthy may be describing a bleak, dead world, but the language he uses is beautiful, sometimes even brilliant (and also sometimes self-conscious and pretentious). You can't help but keep turning the pages, because you want to know what is going to happen to these two characters.

And there are also many things to think about. For one, there is the moment when the man is standing in a crumbling library holding a ruined book, and he is surprised to realize that all art is "predicated on a world to come" --on there being a context, or even just someone there, to appreciate it. "The space which these things occupied was itself an expectation." True? 

For another, the man and the boy frequently speak of themselves as "the good guys," and they are looking for the other good guys, but when they (rarely) encounter someone new, the man is too damaged and cynical to even begin a conversation. At what point does fear cease being a useful survival tool and become an endlessly self-reinforcing feedback loop?

But ultimately, I'm not sure if this novel will hold up over the long-term. If we survive our current mess, a hundred years from now I can imagine a university course on "Post-Apocalyptic Fiction 1950-2030" that would include The Day of the Triffids, The Stand, The Broken Earth trilogy, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games (read it before you sneer), and lord knows what else. Will this novel be there? 

*scratches head* *thinks* *thinks some more*

Well, yes. Of course it will. But it is not without faults. There is a tacked-on ending that feels false (you wonder if his publisher made him add it). And by the end, the boy has become irritating in his unrelenting purity of heart--did McCarthy take that too far? And over-arching it all, there is what reviewer David Edelstein called McCarthy's obsession with "the end of the Age of Good Men (which never existed, but don't tell him that)." When I read that, I thought, yes! that's it exactly. In that context, the novel could easily be called The Last Good Man, and you could hand it to your class and let them have at it. There are plenty of single moms out there who would argue vociferously that it's not the women who disappear into the night.

So: definitely worth reading, but don't tackle it if you're already in a depressed or despairing mood. It's thought-provoking, if nothing else. And I kind of wish I could take that class.

(This is a slightly expanded version of the review I posted on Goodreads)