Books

Best Books 2025

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Faithful blog readers! It’s time once again for my list of the best books I read last year (last year being 2025, in this case). A quick book story: When I was 12 or 13, a paperback came into my possession. I don’t remember how. It was called Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry. You might know this book because it is the best-selling true crime book of all time, and if you lived in the 1970s and 1980s, it was all over the place, or so it seemed: bookstores, airports, even my house. I don’t know if my mom was reading it, or if someone gave it to me because I liked the Beatles (Charles Manson thought the song “Helter Skelter” was speaking to him).

The book haunted me. I’m sure I was too young to be reading it. Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the successful cases against Manson and others, and he described in great, gory detail the evidence amassed against them. The specific chapters covering what happened when pregnant actress Sharon Tate and the other victims were tortured and murdered was too much for me. I lost sleep, I couldn’t stop imagining what it must have been like; my heart was heavy thinking about what the victims went through (and what their families had to relive every time they saw the book in public places). It’s part of why I dislike horror and bloody thrillers in books and film. I mention this because, if you read my next post about my favorite movies of last year, you might be surprised that one of them involves the Manson murders and is directed by someone whose movies I usually avoid because I believe he revels in depicting graphic violence.

Around the same time Helter Skelter was in my house, books by a similar-sounding author whose stories were nothing like Bugliosi’s popped up on the side table next to my mom’s favorite chair: the works of Leo Buscaglia, a motivational speaker and college professor who had a few popular hourlong talks replayed seemingly nonstop on PBS at the time. His nickname was “Doctor Love,” and he was an advocate of the power of hugs and human connection. He passed away in 1998, but his foundation still exists. It all sounds hippy-dippy, but Buscaglia was ahead of his time in advocating for empathy and kindness to help one’s own and others’ mental health. I used to tease my mom for reading Buscaglia’s books (they have names like Love, Loving Each Other, and Born for Love), but secretly I would flip through them, and think, This Buscaglia guy is onto something. I still think so; look up his foundation’s webpage if you get the chance.

Okay, on to the list. I read 38 books in 2025, averaging 1 every 9.6 days. Here were my favorites:

  1. Playground, Richard Powers, 2024 science-based novel. Powers is a master at telling deeply human stories with a solid foundation in science. This book is about Todd, a tech billionaire who created a social media/gaming platform called Playground, using the help and advice of his childhood friend Rafi, who overcomes his underprivileged background to achieve the same levels of success as Todd. Rafi and Todd attend a college in Illinois together (hello! It’s my alma mater, where Powers was actually a professor for most of his career!), where they meet Ina, a classmate from a Pacific island. Parallel to their story, we hear about Evie, a marine biologist facing sexism in her career, whose works profoundly influenced Todd as a child. After a falling out, Todd and Rafi lose touch, and Rafi moves with Ina to her home island, to get far away from Todd. But with the rise of AI and Todd’s quest to use his tech companies to further his vision for the world, his plans will affect Rafi, Ina, and Evie in ways they couldn’t have wanted or predicted. Hanging over this whole book is the fact that Todd is suffering from Lewy body dementia, and his AI program is telling this story back to him before he forgets it all. It’s a narrative structure that reveals a sleight of hand in the last few pages of the book that made me re-read sections and realize that I didn’t fully understand what was happening for most of the story.

2. Gliff, Ali Smith, 2024 dystopian novel. Scottish writer Smith uses semiotics and wordplay in her works, as weapons and double meanings when things must be hidden. This story follows young sisters Briar and Rose in a near-future version of the UK, where everything is corporatized and if a person doesn’t have a proper passport, they are “unverified” and cannot access services such as school, stores, and jobs. When the girls return home with a man (possibly their mother’s boyfriend) to find a red line painted around their house, the man tells them to flee then, meaning that they are about to be “displaced,” or wiped from the national registry. They get separated as they flee, one being caught and one finding her way between the cracks of the system and into the relative safety of an underground movement. We follow their lives as they both navigate this Orwellian world and search for each other. A prescient, frighteningly realistic tale.

3. So Far Gone, Jess Walter, 2024 novel. There’s a through-line here with my first four books: my mind is on the scary state of the world in which we find ourselves. And yet, this book is funny! I laughed out loud multiple times and made my lovely wife Jen sit through my readings of long passages. This is the story of Rhys Kinnick, a reporter whose son-in-law pushes his conspiracy theories on him to the breaking point in late 2016; Rhys’ actions lead to his estrangement from his daughter and ex-wife, and he does what many of us long to, throwing his phone out his truck window and moving to a remote cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Seven years later, two children show up at his door, and he doesn’t recognize them as his own grandkids. They tell him their mother (his daughter) has gone missing, and they can’t trust their dad/stepdad, who has taken up with a Christian nationalist cult. Gripping and funny, Walter’s book taps into the notion that hiding away from our families isn’t going to solve our underlying problems.

4. Beartooth, Callan Wink, 2025 novel. In some ways similar to So Far Gone above, in that both deal with enviromental issues in the West. In other ways it parallels Gliff above in that it involves siblings struggling to survive in the harsh realities of the modern world. Thad and Hazen are brothers living off the grid in a cabin in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountain range near Yellowstone; older brother Thad is capable of handling the bills and paperwork from their father’s recent passing, while Hazen is the more instinctually outdoors type. Desperate for money, when a shady, dangerous figure offers them the opportunity to poach elk antlers in Yellowstone (a federal crime), the brothers need each other to figure out how to survive. A page turner in the truest sense of the term.

5. We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind Of), Hannah Pittard, 2023 memoir with fictional elements. Pittard blows up the memoir genre with her story of discovering the affair between her husband and her best friend. Pittard skips around, back and forward to replay moments with her husband and friend, and even imagines conversations they had without her and things she would have said but didn’t. Funny, heartbreaking, and unflinching. This is the first in an unplanned trilogy of books: in this, she writes of her husband’s affair in a sort of revenge memoir. The next year, her ex, an author himself in real life, wrote a novel about a man having an affair on his wife and her writing a memoir about it. And finally, Pittard came out with a novel about a woman discovering that her ex wrote a novel about his discovering that his wife wrote a memoir…! (I am not making this up.) Who knows how long this will continue?

6. Deep Cuts, Holly Brickley, 2025 novel. Brickley’s debut novel is a music-heavy story best enjoyed with a playlist of all the songs mentioned throughout. It starts in 2000, at a bar in Berkeley, CA, where Percy, an undergrad and music aficionado, and Joe, a fellow student and member of a local band, strike up a friendship built on their mutual love of certain artists that develops into a long-distance songwriting partnership and will-they-won’t-they flirtation over the next decade, moving from Berkeley to Brooklyn to San Francisco. When I first started it, I thought, Jeez, this is going to be a pretentious novel, but it just kept roping me along.

7. The Dutch House, Ann Patchett, 2019 novel. Patchett is a heavy hitter in literary fiction (e.g., this book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), but she’s also famously an independent bookstore owner in Nashville who champions other writers. Her writing in this book deserves all the accolades; it’s the story of five decades in the life of two siblings, Danny and Maeve, and the mansion in which they grew up (the Dutch House). It’s a family drama involving evil stepmothers, stepsisters, failed marriages, career and legacy struggles, and ultimately how the weight of keeping up appearances can cause family members all living under one large, imposing roof to react in unexpected ways.

8. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter, 2015 novella. This book and the following one were head scratchers that had me wondering what the heck I was reading. The title is adapted from Emily Dickenson’s poem “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”; here, a London father and his two young sons try to come to terms with their wife/mother’s recent death. And the father is a Ted Hughes scholar. Oh, and a human-sized crow named Crow takes up residence in their house to guide them through the grieving process, in good ways and bad. Moving and full of humor.

9. Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett, 2015 short story collection. Although this is a collection of 20 short stories, they are all related and told in stream of consciousness by a narrator, an unnamed woman living in the countryside in Ireland, seemingly hiding out in a small farmhouse. We hear everything from her aborted doctoral studies to the proper way to make porridge to her failed relationships, all with ties to the nature around her, in a Walden Pond sort of way. A quick read as I tried to figure out where these stories were going.

10. Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 2024 novel. This story starts in 1980, when Carl Fletcher, a successful businessman and Long Island factory owner, is kidnapped and held for ransom. A few days later, he is freed, but the kidnappers are never found, and although Carl had no physical injuries, the psychological scars hang over him and his family for the next 40 years. We see the Fletcher family’s Holocaust horrors, journey to America to create a new life, seeming success, and generational trauma that never seems to go away, as his three children struggle to find their place in the world. Somehow, there’s humor mixed in there, too.

Books that just missed the cut: A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown, Hobson Woodward; I See You’ve Called In Dead, John Kenney; On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, Rick Steves; Farenheit-182, Mark Hoppus; A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck, Sophie Elmhirst.

Books

Best Books I Read in 2024

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It’s never too late for a “Best Of Last Year” list! (Checks calendar.) Well, I’m pushing it, faithful readers, but I have a valid excuse: We adopted a 6-year-old rescue dog who eats up all of my time. With zero information about what type of training she had had before, we’re trying to get her to follow some modicum of decency around us. She’s basically middle aged in human years; it’s like I’m mansplaining our house rules to a 42-year-old woman.

Anyway, the books. I read 35 books in 2024. I was selective and actually abandoned some books mid-read, thus much of what I finished was stuff that I liked. My top 10 could really be a top 20 (I wish I had time to give descriptions on all the “Books That Just Missed the Cut” below, but see above about timesucking dog.)

  1. Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon. A hilarious and heartbreaking historical novel unlike any I’ve read, Irish author Lennon’s debut and hopefully not his last. Based on the true events of the Peloponnesian War, when in 412 BCE the Athenian navy attacks Syracuse but is defeated; hundreds of Athenians are captured and imprisoned in a rock quarry, where they are guarded but not given provisions, left to waste away. (Bear with me here.) Two local Syracusans, Lampo and Gelon, come up with a plan to have the Athenian prisoners stage their countryman Euripedes’ recent play “Medea.” Uniquely told in contemporary Irish language, this book deftly maneuvers between comedy, tragedy, revenge, injustice, war, finding humanity in our enemies and inhumanity in our friends, love, and how to have hope when all seems lost.

2. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith. This memoir by the poet Maggie Smith is so specific that I couldn’t believe it would work: It starts when Smith discovers that her husband is cheating on her. What follows is devastating, wryly funny, and (of course, considering she is a poet) beautifully worded. This is a revenge memoir, but I am sure Smith would bristle at that description. Some chapters are just a few words long but still hit like bombs. You might recognize Smith’s most famous poem, “Good Bones,” which went viral when it was published. Here, she ruminates on what “success” means, how to protect one’s children, and how to live with and move on from heartbreak.

3. Sandwich, Catherine Newman. At this point, I would read Newman’s grocery list and probably be entertained. She tells stories that feel so real and lived-in. In this one, the narrator is Rocky, a 50-something woman who is planning her family’s annual weeklong visit to Cape Cod. Her kids are (nearly) grown up, her parents are aging and showing signs of losing their independence, her relationship with her husband has its fluctuations, and meanwhile she’s trying to keep everyone fed and happy. Very relatable, funny, and moving. Newman’s ability in particular to describe family dynamics and lay out what a healthy, respectful relationship with the younger generation can look like are what bring me back to her stories.

4. Intermezzo, Sally Rooney. At this point, I would read Rooney’s grocery list and…dang it, I already used this analogy. But Rooney’s grocery list would probably include graphic lovemaking scenes, so there’s that. Rooney is an Irish author who is so adept at illustrating modern relationship problems and getting the reader to root for multiple characters pitted against each other. This story is about two brothers, 10 years apart in age, in Dublin dealing the with death of their father and their strained connection to each other. Peter, the older brother, is balancing his law practice and situations with his ex, Sylvia, who has chronic pain, and a much younger college student, Naomi, with whom he has almost nothing in common. His brother, Ivan, is a socially awkward former chess prodigy who struggles to find his place in the world and falls in with a much older woman, Margaret, who runs an arts program in rural Ireland. Overlaying all of this is what each brother interprets about each other’s lives and what their father would have thought of them.

5. Practice, Rosalind Brown. English author Brown’s debut novel is for anyone who has procrastinated on a writing assignment (ahem, see first paragraph above). Low-key funny story about Annabel, a student at Oxford who is supposed to be writing an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. We hear about all the things that Annabel does as the minutes and hours tick away that don’t involve writing: heating up tea, having breakfast, doing yoga, reheating tea, going for a walk, ruminating on her not-great relationship with a much older man, recounting her sexual history, all told in a semi stream of conscious way. This reminded me of a college roommate I had who stated about 3 weeks before finals: “Okay, if I read 35 pages a day in all my texts, I’ll be caught up at the start of finals week and be able to study.” Next day: “If I read 36.75 pages a day, I’ll finish.” Cut to 3 days before finals: “If I read 245 pages a day…” Annabel puts herself in an untenable position in terms of finishing her essay, and we get to be along for the absurdity of it.

6. The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez. I’ve avoided reading “pandemic novels,” stories that try to set things in the near past to provide some sort of commentary on what we all lived through in 2020-2021. I didn’t think I could come across one that would distill things in a way that didn’t feel forced or obvious. Leave it to a National Book Award winner to produce this slim, page-turning story of an older woman who finds unlikely allies during the pandemic (a Gen Zer with whom she finds herself sharing an apartment, a parrot that she ends up long-term birdsitting). This was the type of story that I ended wondering what happened next, and when world events take a turn, I wonder how our narrator would be thinking about them.

7. North Woods, Daniel Mason. This weighty novel deviates from the fictional norm of following characters over the length of the story but rather stays in one place and tells the story of a cabin built in New England by two lovers escaping from a Puritan colony, and we follow the next few hundred years as various inhabitants take over the cabin as it gets expanded and renovated: a deserting English soldier, a pair of never-married twin sisters, a painter, and at times the wildlife that take over the abandoned property, including an ever-present panther, rumored to have survived in New England long after being thought wiped out in that part of the country. Told in the epistolary style (as a series of collected writings, letters, journal entries, nature diaries, etc.), somehow this whole mishmash works, and things that we see in earlier stories circle back and never quite leave. What’s fun is when, in later chapters, newer owners are trying to piece together mysteries (e.g., human remains buried in the yard), and the reader knows what they don’t.

8. Blood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Brian Merchant. This nonfiction work by Merchant, a technology expert, is really a tragedy whose end we already know before reading it. Merchant explains the origins of the term “Luddite,” and how our general knowledge of the meaning (i.e., someone who hates new technology) was purposely distorted by the factory owners who were exploiting tradespeople in England in the 1800s as factory work exploded during the Industrial Revolution. Merchant then connects the battle that English craft and trade workers waged but lost against both the owners and eventually the British Crown with our current dilemmas with artificial intelligence and the ever-increasing rise in automation that threatens to once again eliminate a whole class of workers. This is a tale we see playing out in the current US administration, where “efficiency” means “eliminating jobs to provide more money to the wealthy and corporations,” but we are sold the story that it means that everyone will have free time and get rich. It never works out that way, and learning the story of General Ned Ludd and his various incarnations offers just a glimmer of hope in how to set policy that doesn’t further the gap between rich and poor.

9. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion. If you’ve never read Didion, who died in 2021, I suggest revisiting some of her works, and her 1970 novel is as good a place to start as any of her works. It’s a searing tale of a woman who, we slowly discover, has suffered a mental breakdown that was treated with powerful drugs, and the story behind what actually happened in her hard life. The protagonist, Maria Wyeth, is a housewife in Hollywood, a far cry from her difficult childhood in a small Nevada mining town, and we flash forward and backward to hear her life. Maria’s young daughter, we learn, is institutionalized, and she wages a battle to get her out. Difficult topics covered include suicide, illegal abortion, lack of knowledge about mental illness, and divorce.

10-12. A trio of books by Sloane Crosley: Cult Classic, Grief Is For People, How Did You Get This Number. This is a cheat, I know, but I did a deep dive into Crosley’s writing, both fiction and memoir, and couldn’t choose just one. Her acerbic voice weaves through all three books: one (Cult Classic) a novel about a woman in New York City who keeps running into her ex-boyfriends and slowly realizes that these coincidences just might be a mind control exercise being performed on her by her ex-boss; the next (Grief) a poignant memoir about trying to move on with her life after two traumatic events within a month of each other: her apartment is robbed of her grandmother’s jewelry and her best friend commits suicide and leaves his loved ones no clues as to why; and the third (Number) an early collection of personal essays that showcase Crosley’s singular voice. I’ve been a fan of Crosley since reading her novel The Clasp; go back and read that one while you’re at it.

Books that just missed the cut (but they deserve your love and attention!): Wild Houses, Colin Barrett; Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner; Fire Exit, Morgan Talty; I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jeannette McCurdy; The Vacationers, Emma Straub; This One Wild and Precious Life, Sarah Wilson; What I Ate in One Year, Stanley Tucci; Brothers, Alex Van Halen.

Movies

Best Movies I Saw in 2024

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It’s Oscars weekend! Which can only mean one thing: I bloviate about the best movies I saw in 2024, regardless of whether they were released that year. Fun fun! This was another year in which I did not see anything in a movie theater. Very sad; I miss the filmgoing experience. Streaming services make it easy to stay home and watch flicks, but some movies made specifically for streaming services land with a thud. (Examples: “A Family Affair,” “The Instigators,” “Wolfs,” “The Family Plan,” “Me Time,” “Family Switch.” Basically anything with “Family” in the title.) I won’t get into the “why” of it, but to me, one reason is that many of us are going to watch whatever is new on Netflix/Prime/Max/Paramount Plus/Hulu/Peacock etc., quality be damned. “Hey honey, there’s a movie with Mark Wahlberg murdering people while a baby is strapped to his chest! It’s a comedy!”

Anyway, the plan for 2025 is to get me to a theater. Let’s do this! My lovely wife Jen doesn’t have the time or the interest, so hit me up, readers! I’ll buy the snacks. (Who are we kidding? I’ll smuggle in the snacks.) Okay, here’s my list:

  1. The Holdovers,” 2023 comedy/drama directed by Alexander Payne, starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa. I believe this film will hold up over time. It’s a less cloying “Dead Poets Society” (which I loved). Set in 1970, the film takes place over Christmas break at a New England boarding school, where classics teacher Paul Hunham (Giamatti), whose life has not worked out how he had hoped, has to chaperone for the “holdovers,” students who can’t go home for the break. He’s joined by a cafeteria worker (Randolph), who is dealing with deep pain and loss, and troublemaking student Angus Tully (Sessa in his debut film performance). Like anything Alexander Payne makes, humor and heartbreak go hand in hand.

2. “My Old Ass,” 2024 comedy/drama directed by Megan Park, starring Maisy Stella, Percy Hynes White, Aubrey Plaza, Maddy Ziegler, and Kerrice Brooks. This is very much a Gen Z film (not the only one on my list). It has a strange conceit as its premise: Stella (in her film debut) portrays Elliott, a teen on the cusp of leaving her small Canadian cranberry-farming community for college. She and her friends decide to camp out on an island and take mushrooms; while her friends (Ziegler and Brooks) have relatively expected hallucinogenic trips, Elliott is visited by the 39-year-old version of herself (Plaza), who gives her advice on how to change her life for better outcomes. What young Elliott does with the advice is where the problems lie. Low-key, moving, and funny; I look forward to more films written and directed by Park

3. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces,” 2024 documentary directed by Morgan Neville, with interviews of Steve Martin, Martin Short, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Gopnik, Tina Fey, Diane Keaton, and many others. You should read Martin’s memoir of his stand-up career, “Born Standing Up,” if this movie interests you. Part 1 of this doc focuses on what the book did: Martin’s childhood and how it shaped his meteoric rise to becoming the first comic to fill arenas, and his decision to walk away from stand-up at age 35. Part 2 is about him looking back on the next chapter of his life, up to his two-man revue with Short and their hit show “Only Murders in the Building.” For anyone who likes to see how a creative mind works.

4. “His Three Daughters,” 2023 drama directed by Azazel Jacobs, starring Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Rudy Galvan, Jovan Adepo, and Jay O. Sanders. A moving film about three women who come together as their father Vincent enters hospice care. Lyonne is particularly good as Rachel, the daughter who has taken care of Vincent in his apartment for the past several years. Tensions any family deals with are heightened as the sisters wrestle with guilt, resentment, and judgement over who has and has not pulled their weight, and what that means for them moving forward. Somehow, Jacobs finds humor in the darkest moments.

5. “A Good Person,” 2023 drama directed by Zach Braff, starring Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon, Celeste O’Connor, and Chinaza Uche. I delayed seeing this film, having a general idea of the challenging subject matter. Pugh is Allison, a musician who causes the deaths of two people in a car accident. Subsequently, she struggles with drug and alcohol addiction while her mother (Shannon) alternately coddles and pushes her to get help. If you have any experience with addiction, you half cover your eyes through this movie, hoping that each scene is rock bottom but knowing there’s more to come. She seeks help in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, only to be reunited with Daniel (Freeman, in what could have been a cliched role but not in his hands), a family member of one of the car-accident victims. We think he’s being the bigger person by befriending her, until we hear his own back story. Braff wrote and directed a film that you want to talk about with someone after viewing.

6. “Somebody I Used to Know,” 2023 romantic comedy directed by Dave Franco, starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, and Danny Pudi. A cringeworthy comedy about going home again. Brie (who co-wrote the film with her husband Franco) is Ally, who returns to her hometown in Washington state to lick her wounds after her reality TV show gets canceled. While staying with her mom (Julie Hagerty in a scene-stealing role), she runs into her old flame, Sean (Ellis). She accidentally invites herself along to his engagement party, and then to his destination wedding, and finds herself competing with his bride Cassidy (Clemons). So many awkward moments! A great supporting cast (Pudi, Hayley Joel Osment, Amy Sedaris, Sam Richardson, Zoe Chao). It’s “My Best Friend’s Wedding” with nudity and punk music.

7. “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” 2021 romance directed by Ian Samuels, starring Kyle Allen, Kathryn Newton, and Jermaine Harris. This film follows Mark (Allen), who is caught in a time loop a la “Groundhog Day,” repeating the same day of high school over and over. He perfects the day, hoping that this will jolt him out of the loop, to no avail. He eventually notices that a girl, Margaret (Newton), is suffering from the same fate, and they decide to make out a map of the best little things happening in their lives. As they come closer to solving the science of getting back to normal, they have to answer the question: Is what lies in the future actually better than being stuck in a perfect day forever?

8. “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” 2022 musical biopic directed by Eric Appel, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Toby Huss, Rainn Wilson, and Julianne Nicholson. I have to confess I was a Weird Al fan back in the day (by which I mean the 1980s because I am that old). This film is the only logical way to do a Weird Al biography: a bizarro, untethered from reality parody of Yankovic, with Radcliffe playing an Al whose father forbids him from playing the accordian and hanging out with polka lovers, and who dates Madonna, murders Pablo Escobar, and is upset because Michael Jackon’s song “Beat It” was actually a parody of Al’s “Eat It.” Hilarious and stupid.

9. “When You Finish Saving the World,” 2022 drama directed by Jesse Eisenberg, starring Julianne Moore, Finn Wolfhard, Jay O. Sanders, and Billy Bryk. Eisenberg is generating awards-show praise for his “A Real Pain,” and if you like that, you should check out his directorial debut. Wolfhard plays Ziggy, an Indiana teen who lives in the same house with his parents (Moore and Sanders), but they have no idea what he does with his time (mostly YouTubing music to an increasingly larger following). Ziggy is a loner at school. His mom, Evelyn (Moore), runs a domestic abuse shelter and develops a surrogate-son relationship with a resident to replace the estrangement of the son she actually has.

10. “Bottoms,” 2023 comedy directed by Emma Seligman, starring Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Kaia Gerber, Marshawn Lynch, and Ruby Cruz. This Gen Z over-the-top satire of high school life for queer kids follows Edebiri and Sennott as Josie and PJ trying to navigate a school that worships the football team and marginalizes anyone who is different. The principal and teachers are openly hostile to the girls (remember, this is a comedy), and Mr. G (Lynch, the retired football player) agrees to be the faculty sponsor for their fight club, which is actually just a chance for them to get physical with other girls. Josie and PJ end up trying to save the day when their football team faces their biggest rival. I had no idea where this movie was going. And that’s a good thing.

Films that just missed the cut: “I Am Chris Farley,” “Flora and Son,” “Love at First Sight,” “Theater Camp,” “Raymond & Ray,” “Meet Cute.”

High school, Running

From Also-Ran to All-State: How Our Daughter Planned Out Her Cross Country Success

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In October 2020, our daughter Joy, then a sophomore in high school, ran in the cross country sectional meet and qualified for the next week’s State meet…or would have qualified for State, except it had been canceled because of Covid. (Cue the sad music here.) So her season ended on a bittersweet note: she didn’t get the opportunity to run at the State meet, but she knew she was good enough to be there. We went home and celebrated by handing out, and snarfing down, a bunch of candy (it was actually Halloween). But then the excitement wore off for Joy, and she said to me like she was irritated, “I don’t want to just qualify for State. I want to be All-State. What will that take?” So I did some research, and we came up with a plan together. We had to answer two questions: 1. Statistically, what do you need to do to be All-State? And 2. Same question but from a different angle: What do you need to do to be All-State? Below, I list the changes that she incorporated to try to make it happen. Her teammates’ parents, other runners, and the parents of younger runners have asked us over the years what her “secrets” were. No secrets. 

Let me start by saying, and this is no slight to her, but Joy wasn’t the kind of gifted runner who would show up and win right away. There are two things that lead to success in running, or anything really: talent and hard work, and hard work is the more important one. Joy wasn’t the fastest girl on her team when she started out. Sometimes the best runners are the ones who just keep at it. There’s a well-known quote attributed to Tim Notre, a high school basketball coach: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” Joy was never going to out-talent some girls on the cross country course, but she decided to outwork them.

Okay, let’s look at the statistical deep dive that I did. First, our state’s high school sports website (IHSA.org) keeps an archive of State meet results, so I looked at a representative sample of the previous 10 years. All-State in cross country is the top 25 runners in the 3-mile race. In Illinois, there are three classes based on school size; our school is in Class 2A, the medium-sized schools. Note that each State meet race has approximately 236 runners (28 teams of 7 runners, plus the top 40 individuals whose teams didn’t qualify). In Class 2A for the previous decade, the 25th runner (the last All-Stater) finished in an average time of 17:58. (17:57.8, to be exact.) So, the objective answer to the question of what it takes to be All-State, for a Class 2A girls runner, is 17:58. For rounding purposes, I told Joy that she’d have to get under 18 minutes for 3 miles, or 6:00/mile. 

So next, we had to decide, was it doable? Did Joy have the ability to go from where she was to the top 25? We looked back at Joy’s first 2 years of cross country: as a freshman, her PR (personal record) was 21:05. Sophomore year, it was 19:14. So I took a few liberties and came up with this general goal: freshman year: sub-21 minutes (she was close); sophomore: sub-20 (she beat that); junior year: sub-19; and by senior year, be sub-18 minutes for 3 miles. That made it sound possible. 

Next was the challenge: What would Joy actually have to do/change to improve so much? Most importantly, she had to want to do this. How many times have you seen a kid forced by their parents to join a sport or activity? And how many times did that go well? With Joy, she was decidedly against joining cross country her freshman year until (surprise, surprise) her best friend asked her to.  (Thanks, Melanie!)

Keep in mind that many of these next suggestions are lifestyle changes. Any runner can do them. It’s just a question of who will stick with them. It can be hard to do things that other kids aren’t doing; sometimes we want to fit in, and if our friends or teammates aren’t making changes, we might feel awkward or embarrassed to do them ourselves. A teenager might read this list and say, “Seems a bit much. I don’t want to do that. I’ll just keep doing the bare minimum and enjoy myself.” That’s totally fine! No judgment. Just don’t expect improvement. I guarantee that the best runners in the state are doing hard things. All these suggestions are simple, but they’re not easy. That’s why there are only 25 All-Staters. 

  1. Listen to your coaches! If they’re halfway decent and dedicated to their athletes (Joy’s were awesome), they are prepared with plans for summer conditioning, in-season workouts, hard days and easy days, pre-meet exercises, etc. When Joy tried to run more than what the coaches suggested, the summer before her junior year, she got injured. Take the warmups, cooldowns, and other “little things” seriously. But do take the easy days easy. Not every day is a hard workout; that could lead to injuries. They also did a core workout most days; Joy was committed to that.

2. We happened to know a former cross country state champion, and we asked him for any suggestions. His main piece of advice: do pull-ups and handstands to work on upper back and core strength. Most runners, when they are tired in the late stages of a longer race, slouch and curl their shoulders forward; that’s when you have to maintain your stride and keep your shoulders back. Joy was dedicated with this: she made me buy a pull-up bar for our basement, and every night she would go down there and work on it. Also, every night she would do headstands (not handstands; she couldn’t quite get there) for us in the living room; this helped more than anything with her core strength. 

3. This is a loaded topic, but nutrition. Let’s not say “diet.” Food can be a challenging issue for teen girls, and far be it from me to offer any specific advice; this is just what worked for Joy. She didn’t go on a diet. She simply made adjustments to what she ate. Less “garbage food” (fast food, fried stuff, ultra processed foodstuffs). More actual food (fruits, veggies, whole grains, beans, nuts). But moderation; she didn’t eliminate anything totally. If she wanted a piece of pie, she had one. The former state champ’s suggestion was fish about two times a week. It’s massively important to note that we didn’t care about Joy’s weight. As a distance runner, the most important thing above all is getting enough calories; maybe ideally you’d eat certain foods over others, but getting enough calories is the most important. And every body type is different. Some runners are thin; some are muscular. (I have very tiny bones, but my chest and shoulders somehow have some heft? My lovely wife Jen calls me “dense.” I’m not sure how to respond to that!) Joy actually gained weight as she got older. Guess what? We didn’t care. It didn’t make her slower; it probably helped her, since it was muscle gain. “Healthy” means many things to many people. In the summers, you’ll find our freezer stocked with multiple flavors of ice cream. In addition, she found that eating three meals a day worked for her; instead of skipping breakfast, she’d have a big bowl of oatmeal each morning. She’d also snack when she was hungry. Again, nothing groundbreaking, just little tweaks here and there. 

4. Consistency of sleep, paired with consistent homework routine. In previous years, Joy would save her homework for late in the evening or stay up late once a week finishing it. She would cram for a test the night before. She instead started to go to bed the same time every night (usually 10-10:30). She would also utilize her study hall to do most of her homework; that way, she could return from practice most nights, have dinner, and relax in the evening instead of pulling late-nighters. 

5. This seems obvious, but hydration is important. She made sure she was taking in enough fluids during the school day and then before and after she ran. We’ve never been a soda family, so she mostly drank water, with some sports drinks after long runs or races. 

6. Focusing on mental health issues. If anyone is having problems, I’d suggest talking to their primary care physician for suggestions, and if needed to seek help with therapy. For Joy, mental health also meant focusing on a positive mental attitude. There’s a great book by the legendary American marathoner Deena Kastor called “Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory.” Not only is it a great read for young girls starting out in running because Kastor talks about her early experiences with the sport, but also it’s a wonderful resource for how to improve your thoughts during runs. Example: Kastor says that when bad thoughts would creep in (“I’m not winning! I’m too slow! My legs are dead!”), she would wipe them away and overwhelm them with preplanned positive thoughts (“You are strong! You are doing great! You are powerful!”). Eventually, what you think is what you feel. Joy also took from Kastor the idea that, if something is bothering her, she should instead focus on what is working: If Joy’s legs were hurting, she would focus on her arms or her form in other ways. 

7. This goes hand in hand with item 6 above, but Joy told me to add this: Another thing about mindset is visualization. During strides at practice, she would imagine that it was the ending sprint of a race and that (for example) she was in 25th place at the State meet and her teammates were other competitors trying to take it away from her! She also visualized races while lying in bed, but sometimes it would stress her out and her heart would start pumping, so she had to know when to stop thinking about it too much. Moderation: she wanted to prepare but not overthink. Similarly, Jen and I learned that we had to get out of the way of her positive thoughts. Example: in an early-season race on the State meet course (First to the Finish Invitational), Joy came in about 35th place. She came home flying high and talking about how she was ready to compete with the top runners in the state and only needed to figure out how to pass 10 girls and move up into All-State contention. I immediately started negative talking about, “Just remember, not all of the top runners and teams were there, so you’re actually further away from the top 25 than you think,” which was really just my not wanting to get too excited about the possibility. Joy looked at me like I was crazy and said, “You don’t think I can do it, do you?” And I recognized the importance of what I did or didn’t say. For the rest of the season, anytime Joy mentioned a wildly optimistic goal, I would agree: “You think you can run with the top runners in the state at your conference meet? Definitely! You want to push the lead early and see who comes with you at the sectional meet? Yes, you can do that!”

8. Have fun! This goes along with doing a sport because you want to do it, not because someone else wants you to. Of course it’s not going to be fun to work hard all the time. But Joy’s coaches incorporated games and play into practices, and she enjoyed bus rides and the non-running moments during meets with her teammates. 

9. Focus on your own improvement; try not to compare with competitors or teammates. Joy wasn’t the number-one runner on the team in every race. She didn’t win every meet. But her goal was to help her team and to be All-State by the end of her senior year. 

Those were the main things. Then there were some specifics that perhaps applied only to Joy. The biggest was, she got injured during her junior year and missed a month before returning for the postseason (so she never did reach the sub-19-minute goal that year). Turns out she had a stress reaction in her right tibia. Then when she came back, she didn’t have the same “oomph” or closing speed, and it still didn’t return that spring in track season. By the end of the summer before her senior year, we were so concerned that we took Joy to a doctor for blood tests; the results showed that she had iron deficiency anemia, very common in female athletes. A simple daily iron pill remedied that. Also, it’s important for each athlete to know their own body. Joy had Achilles problems (her Achilles heel was literally her Achilles heel), so she made sure to stretch and strengthen. She used a roller on all her leg muscles, too; she believed that this helped her.

Another secret that we would joke about: super power energy balls! I had found this recipe for blueberry-lemon energy balls (with cashews, dates, blueberries, etc.), and Joy faithfully ate two of them after every practice her senior year. Whether the benefits were measurable or if it was a placebo effect was beside the point: she believed that they helped, and I happily made them for her all season.

I supposed you’re wondering how it all played out then (I mean, you read this far already). Did Joy reach her goals? As I mentioned above, she got injured her junior year, midway through the season. So her goal of running under 19 minutes was derailed. She returned in time for the conference meet and went from first runner on the team to third runner but more importantly helped her team win conference. Eventually, her full team qualified for the State meet for the first time in school history. She was nowhere near top 25 at the State meet her junior year. After she was fully recovered (and after we figured out her iron deficiency), her senior year went mostly according to her plans: by the end of the season, she could consistently get under 18 minutes for 3 miles. She went on a postseason tear and won conference (for the second time in her career), won the regional (for the second time in her career), won the sectional (first runner in school history to do so), and entered the State meet being picked to finish somewhere between 6th and 24th place. As fate would have it, the weather that week was historically bad; it rained on the State course multiple times in the days leading up to the meet, and then it poured during the first few races. By the time Class 2A girls ran, there were many, many mud pits on the course, so time goals were thrown out the window. Ultimately, only four girls ran faster than 18 minutes. Joy found herself in a mud puddle early in the race, clawed back to the top 10, and hung on for an All-State 14th-place finish in 18:21. The 25th and final All-Stater ran 18:55. Joy became the first runner in school history to be All-State; amazingly, one of her teammates fought her way to 21st place, so the school had their first two All-Staters ever. Joy carried over her training to the spring track season and finished as an All-Stater in the 3200-meter run. 

End of parental bragging. Actually, I took quite a bit from Joy’s training and applied it to my own. Probably the biggest issue I have struggled with in running marathons is the mental aspect. I knew about having positive thoughts, but the notion of flooding my brain with pre-rehearsed positives has been invaluable. Also, I kept having lower-back pain at the end of long runs, and sciatica that extended down the back of my leg. It all goes back to the core strength. And as Joy ate less garbage food and went to bed at a consistent time, I found myself doing the same. Who knows? Maybe I can turn back the clock and get under 18 minutes for 3 miles for the first time in 20 years. I just mentioned it to Jenny; she called me “dense.” I don’t think she was referring to my body type…

Books

Best Books 2023

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Faithful blog readers (hi, Julie!), you might be wondering why I’m just now getting around to posting my list of favorite books that I read in 2023. See previous post about how I hibernate in winter. Wait, is “hibernate” a synonym for “procrastinate”? Then yes, that. Anyway, it was a strange year, a rough year, a busy year, and I only read 30 books. That’s about 1 every 12.2 days. My lovely wife Jen, on the other hand, is a speed reader. I know this because she doesn’t have her own library card and checks out e-books on my card. My checkout history reads like, “In the last month, you checked out 2 nonfiction books on early American history and 20 romance novels.” The librarians are probably looking at me when I’m in the library and thinking, There’s that guy who comes in here and checks out historical nonfiction but who’s really into the steamy Cynster novels by Stephanie Laurens. Weirdo. Ahem. Let’s move on!

  1. We All Want Impossible Things, Katherine Newman. I almost didn’t read this novel because it’s partially about the hospice experience, and we had just suffered a loss in our family. I’m glad I did though; Newman somehow manages to write the funniest and most searingly heartbreaking book of the year about Ash, a woman supporting her closest and oldest friend Edi, as Edi enters hospice. Ash, meanwhile, does not have her sh*t together, and she’s dealing with her two teenage kids, her ex, and several lovers/one-night stands. Very raw, very raunchy, very open-hearted. It was reassuring to read a story about how it’s okay to not be okay and that we all make questionable decisions in the grieving process, but whatever gets us moving forward is okay.

2. The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker. This novel was laugh-out-loud and mind-bending. It’s been a while since I’ve read a great stream-of-consciousness book. The action in this book is limited: Abby is an economics professor invited to give a lecture and is lying in a hotel bed with her sleeping husband and daughter next to her. That’s the plot. She is woefully unprepared for the talk and decides to practice it in her head using the “loci method,” in which you think about a place or building that you are familiar with and assign parts of the speech to rooms in the building. Her topic is twenth-century economist John Maynard Keynes, so she imagines herself giving imaginary Keynes a tour of her home. Hilarity ensues as she gets distracted by things in her (imaginary) house, by Keynes himself, and by thoughts of her past and her most recently denied tenure. Abby’s mind wanders into these topics: feminism, work/life imbalance, economic optimism, climate change, and the insanity of raising children in today’s troubled world. This was one of those books that I made Jen read because I kept reading paragraphs aloud to her.

3. The Happy Couple, Naoise Dolan. It seems as if every year I have a modern Irish novelist on this list, and here we are again. Dolan’s second novel is about Celine and Luke, a couple celebrating their engagement and getting ready for their wedding. Each chapter follows one of the main characters: Celine, a concert pianist who is feeling family pressure and cold feet as the wedding approaches; Luke, who has a history of infidelity and even colder feet; Archie, the best man and Luke’s one-time lover; Phoebe, the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister who in trying to protect Celine might be causing more trouble; and Vivian, a wedding guest who provides the (sort-of) outsider’s view of all of the wedding party’s dysfunction. Dolan’s writing is knife-sharp with wit and relationship analysis.

4. Whalefall, Daniel Kraus. I don’t even know where to begin describing this novel! Jay Gardiner’s guilt leads him to scuba dive off the coast of Carmel, CA, to find the body of his father, a legendary diver who committed suicide. A giant squid appears, and as Jay is escaping the squid, an 80-foot sperm whale rises up and swallows the squid, who in a last gasp reaches out and grabs Jay with a tentacle. Pulled into the whale’s mouth, Jay is forced to fight off the squid and attempt to get out of the whale (who is swallowing Jay through its digestive system), keeping in mind that he only has 1 hour of oxygen left. Gripping and scientifically enlightening (Kraus’ writing reminds me of Andy Weir), the reader is left gasping at every twist and turn in Jay’s dilemma.

5. The Guest, Emma Cline. This tense story is about Alex, a young woman who finds herself ostracized from the Hamptons house of Simon, the wealthy older gentleman who is hosting her (“hosting” is a nice way to put their relationship). Already living on the margins in New York City, Alex tries to find any means possible to staying the week on Long Island to make it to Simon’s Labor Day party and try to find her way back into his good graces. Emma’s poor decision-making (and her dying phone) throw many obstacles in her path; every night is a mystery of whether she will sleep in another rich person’s house, a servant’s quarters, or on the beach. Desperation, living on the margins, class divide, social media appearance vs. reality; this book has a lot to say about modern society.

6. I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai. This thriller gripped me, and I couldn’t shake it from my mind for weeks after finishing it. The protagonist, Bodie Kline, is a successful murder-mystery podcaster and college professor. She gets invited back to the Granby School, the private boarding school from which she graduated high school, as a guest teacher of a podcasting class. The recollection of her time on campus comes back to her, especially the murder of her classmate Thalia Keith during their senior year in 1995. As hard as she tried to put those painful memories behind her, she inexorably finds herself turning over the facts of the murder and subsequent conviction of a school janitor. Slowly, everything she thought she knew to be true falls away as her podcasting students dig into her history at the school and interview former classmates and faculty. This book explores issues of class, race, our society’s treatment of young women, and the sexualization of murder victims.

7. Liberation Day, George Saunders. This collection of short stories by Saunders, a Chicago-based author, is Literature with a capital L. Saunders bounces seamlessly among genres and creates mini-worlds filled with dystopia, oppression, absurdity, biting humor and sarcasm, and, surprisingly, nostalgia for our American past. You can’t help but see modern politics as metaphor in these stories. Even as we laugh at the bizarre circumstances in these stories, there’s an uneasiness or nervousness underlying them, as if we know we aren’t so far away from these unreal places becoming our American future.

8. Walking with Sam: A Father, A Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, Andrew McCarthy. GenXers will recall McCarthy as a reluctant member of the “Brat Pack,” a group of young actors lumped together by the press in the 1980s (in truth, we find out in McCarthy’s memoir Brat that he was not friends or socialized with any of the so-called Pack). For the last two decades, however, he has been a travel writer, and his latest book is a recounting of his journey with his teenaged son walking the Camino de Santiago, a well-known 500-mile pilgrimage across Spain. McCarthy is open and honest about his strained relationship with his kids, his attempts to improve them, and how his divorce from their mother affected them. We are following not just the 5-week trip by foot along the Camino and the characters they meet along the way (and the fights they have themselves), but also the story of their father-son journey so far. Anyone who has had a kid or was a kid (or has had to travel with kids) will relate.

9. They Called Us Enemy, George Takei with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker. Takei is best known as Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek series, for his deep voice, and for his activism. In this graphic novel, Takei tells the story of his experience as a Japanese American incarcerated in a “relocation center” by the US government during World War II. I think that young people might be surprised to find out that this happened in our own country, that American citizens were rounded up and basically imprisoned for their ethnicity, and that there are echoes of this happening in today’s society.

10. Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. Millburn and Nicodemus are the Minimalists, authors and podcasters who promote minimalism, a lifestyle advocating owning less stuff at its core. In their previous books, on their podcast, and in a documentary, they recounted their journeys to discovering the lifestyle and how it has helped their mental well-being, their health, and their relationships. Here, they further provide an outline for the reader to improve their relationships with their stuff and their loved ones; the end goal is to become unencumbered by material possessions and to live a more intentional life. Every few years, I need to come across one of their books as a reminder.

Books that just missed the cut: Fresh Complaint, Jeffrey Eugenides; Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld; The Trackers, Charles Frazier; I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven; Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge, Spencer Quinn; I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore.

Movies, Oscars

The Best Films I Saw in 2023

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I know it’s March, and I know I usually do some end-of-year posts, but things got a little away from me this winter (does the word “hibernation” mean anything to you? It does to me). Also, I was having tech problems with my computer and my website, so bear with me if anything goes off the rails. So, let’s finally get down to summing up my 2023 film faves.

Quick reminder: these are the best movies I saw in 2023, not Oscar predictions. Some were released in 2023, some were from the previous century (that makes it sound so long ago, but remember that I am also from the previous century), and some were about the early days of Hollywood (looking at you, “Babylon”). Here goes:

  1. Rosaline,” 2022 comedy/drama directed by Karen Maine starring Kaitlyn Dever, Kyle Allen, Sean Teale, Isabela Merced, and Minnie Driver. This comedy is built around a minor character from Shakespeare’s original play: Rosaline was a cousin of Juliet’s to whom Romeo was to wed, but instead he fell for Juliet. So the premise here is, Juliet asks her cousin to help her pair up with Romeo, so Rosaline pretends to help but actually wants to do everything she can to thwart Romeo and Juliet’s romance (because she thinks she’s Romeo’s true love). It’s a modern take with modern dialogue. No great revelations here, besides “be careful what you wish for” and “love blooms where you least expect it.”

2. “The Lunchbox,” 2013 drama/romance directed by Ritesh Batra starring Nimrat Kaur, Irrfan Khan, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. This Indian film takes place in Mumbai, where a lonely housewife attempts to spice up her marriage by cooking amazing lunches for her husband. A little cultural backstory is needed: thousands of home-packed lunches are delivered by bicycle, motorbike, and train across the city by various couriers. Somehow, the housewife’s meal gets misdirected day after day to a different man (the late, great Khan as Saajan), and a note-passing relationship ensues. Meanwhile, widowed soon-to-retire Saajan is training a co-worker to replace him, and his initial hesitation to get closer to him or anyone undergoes a change because of his budding pen-pal romance. This was a bittersweet look at how someone recovers from grief and gets on with life.

3. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” 2018 documentary directed by Morgan Neville. Neville examines the life of Fred Rogers and his long-running PBS children’s TV program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. If you grew up watching the show or had children who did, Rogers’ kindness and big heart in real life won’t surprise you. It’s a fascinating look at Rogers’ upbringing, his philosophy on producing valuable programming for children, his outlook on life, and his legacy. Years ago, I read a memoir called I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, by Tim Madigan. This doc reinforces what Madigan had to say about Mr. Rogers, which was that you really need to see this film or read that book to see what it means to be a decent human being and an example for all of us.

4. “Love, Gilda,” 2018 documentary directed by Lisa Dapolito. Built around the audiotapes and diary of Gilda Radner, this doc explores the too-short life of one of the all-time greats from “Saturday Night Live.” Radner was an original cast member whose long struggles with an eating disorder and then with ovarian cancer she shared publicly at a time when many did not. I remember her death (at age 42 in 1989) as a shock; what I had forgotten until I saw this doc was how off-the-wall she was on SNL and so willing to get uncomfortable for a laugh.

5. “Dunkirk,” 2017 war film directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Harry Styles, Fionn Whitehead, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, and Kenneth Branagh. There’s another big-budget Nolan film that is dominating Oscar talk this year (hint: it starts with an “O” and ends with a “ppenheimer”). This war movie focuses on the rescue operation on the beaches of Dunkirk in May 1940, when German troops pinned Allied troops. Every vessel that could float was called to service to evacuate around 330,000 Allied soldiers. Styles is particularly good as a soldier who is just trying to do what it takes to survive.

6. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” 2023 comedy/drama directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, starring Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Elle Graham, Benny Safdie, Kathy Bates, and Echo Kellum. Based on Judy Blume’s beloved young adult novel, they don’t make many movies like this anymore, meaning ones that deal with big topics (religion, race, girlhood) in a loving way. Would it help to read Blume’s book before seeing this? Not necessary. But for those of us GenXers who grew up with Blume, this felt like a time machine back to our childhoods. Compare to the next movie on this list, a modern take on similar topics.

7. “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” 2023 comedy/drama directed by Sammi Cohen, starring Adam Sandler, Sunny Sandler, Dylan Hoffman, Sadie Sandler, Samantha Lorraine, Jackie Sandler, Idina Menzel, and Sarah Sherman. Similar to the previous film on this list, this is a coming-of-age story of a girl named Stacy (Sunny Sandler, playing daughter to real-life dad Adam and sister to real-life sister Sadie) struggling with boy problems, FOMO, and the awkward two-step of one foot in childhood and one in adulthood. Loved how this movie captured the diversity that exists in modern Judaism and the challenges young kids face when pressured to celebrate their bat and bar mitzvahs with over-the-top parties. Adam is particularly relatable as a dad who can’t seem to tune into the right frequency with his kids, and Sherman is hilarious as the cool, young rabbi.

8. “No Hard Feelings,” 2023 comedy directed by Gene Stupnitsky, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, and Matthew Broderick. This one gave me the biggest laughs in 2023. Lawrence portrays Maddie, a thirtysomething bartender/Uber driver in the Hamptons who, through her own bad decisions, finds herself without a car or a job and at risk of losing her childhood home. She gets hired by wealthy parents to “date” their 19-year-old son Percy (Feldman) in exchange for a car, in the hopes of giving Percy experience before he heads off to college. So cringe, as the young folks say. I think people are afraid to make raunchy movies like this for fear of offending; thank goodness Stupnitsky and Lawrence did because (even though it’s not for everyone) I still laugh thinking of certain scenes. This one stayed with me, in a good way.

9. “Wham!,” 2023 documentary directed by Chris Smith. Talk about being the perfect audience for a movie: When I was 13 years old, my siblings and I went to see the massively successful but shortlived pop duo Wham! in concert on their first and what turned out to be only US tour. Imagine my shock when I wore the concert T-shirt to high school my freshman year only to find out it wasn’t cool to be a Wham! fan. That’s a story for another blog post. Similar to the Radner doc on this list, much of the film uses voiceover from the late George Michael and his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley to tell the story of their quick rise to fame from danceclubs in the UK to massive worldwide success, and then their just as quick disbanding after just 5 years and 3 studio albums. This film focuses mostly on that time and not Michael’s solo career. Much of the story is in Michael’s struggles with self-confidence, weight, and the challenge of when and if he should be open about his sexuality. I went back in time with this film.

10. “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” 2022 action/comedy directed by Tom Gormican, starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Lily Mo Sheen, Ike Barinholtz, and Tiffany Haddish. Bizarre film about an actor named Nicolas Cage played by Cage who is taunted by his younger, more successful self (also played by Cage with help of CGI to make him younger). When his film career stalls, Cage agrees to take a large sum of money to hang out with a billionaire in Majorca (Pascal). The plot turns ever more ludicrous as the CIA extorts Cage to spy on Pascal’s character, Javi, convinced that he is an arms dealer. Javi also has Nic reading a script he wrote for an action film involving drugs, arms, and kidnapping, and it all turns very meta. Highlights include Cage playing a heightened version of himself (if that’s possible) and an argument over the greatness of the film “Paddington 2.” It’s all too hard to explain.

Movies that just missed the cut: “Hustle,” “Ghosted,” “Babylon,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “The Machine,” “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Empty Nesting, High school, Kids

Watch Them Grow, Then Let Them Go…

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A few weeks ago, I was on a run in my neighborhood and passed a house where three kids were playing in the driveway. A boy about 6 years old was pulling his preschool-aged brother around in a wagon, and a toddler was running after them. Their dad was sitting in a camp chair just outside the open garage. He looked a little frazzled. We waved. I ran on. I wanted to stop and tell him a few things:

“Hang in there, buddy. It’s all going to be okay. Don’t blink. I know the end of this phase of your life seems far, far away and you’re just trying to make it until lunchtime, but I promise you that it all goes by So Damn Fast. Everyone says to enjoy it as it’s happening, which is almost impossible, but please, take it from me, enjoy it now because when it’s over and the last one moves out, if you haven’t lived in the moment with these kids, you’re going to be thinking, Where did all the time go?“

Can you tell that I’m a brand-new empty nester? It’s been a ride this summer. We were kind of spoiled in that our kids were spread out in age, so we had at least one in high school for the last 11 years. It was a fun decade: lots of soccer matches, cross-country meets, fall plays, spring musicals, speech competitions, etc. When our last one got to high school, I tried to imagine that day way out in the future when she would be walking the halls for the last time and we’d have no good reason to be hanging around the school; I couldn’t. And definitely when she hit senior year, things started accelerating. Most of the year, I was filled with excitement for the possibilities that were stretching out in front of her, but also a little bit of (actually a whole lot of) dread for what would come next for my lovely wife Jen and me.

Within days of our first child being born, a co-worker of mine said to me, “Hold them close as much as they will let you because before you know it, they’re grown up and gone.” I thought, Sounds like a you problem, lady. Then when our kids were entering their teen years, parents of older children were saying, “Wait until they get to high school; those years are going to fly by faster than you think.” So I thought I was prepared for how quickly those years would go. I was not. Days when I was trying to make it to the next one were days when I should have been present and engaged. As Rod Stewart sings in “Young Turks,” “Because life is so brief and time is a thief when you’re undecided, and like a fistful of sand it can slip right through your hands.” Ouch.

Near the end of our youngest’s senior year, I ran into a friend at the grocery store; she was going through the same impending empty nest stage that I was. She said to me, “I told my daughter, ‘I know it’s going to be hard on me, but I can’t imagine what Mr. Dudley must be going through. I mean, he’s so close with his kids and so involved with his last one.'” After graduation, another parent reached out to me and asked, “You ok? This is hard on all of us, but I’m particularly thinking about you at this time.” And just before our daughter and her friends went off to college, a few of them stopped by for one last visit. One of them told me, “My parents were talking about you. My dad said that even though I’m the last of his five kids to graduate, he can only wonder how Mr. Dudley is handling this.” What the heck? And keep in mind that these were all parents who were going through the exact same empty nest situation as me! I thought, Why is everyone worried about me more than anyone else? I’m fine; I will be fine.

Then we started packing stuff for our daughter’s dorm move-in journey. And it started to hit me. Oh boy.

Here’s where I should say, I realize we’re in a unique and (to use a word popular with the younger folks) privileged position, being able to afford to send our kids off to college and have that moving-out-at-18 experience. And even more uniquely, I’ve basically been a stay-at-home dad for (gulp) 22 years, save for a few stints freelancing and working as a custodian in an office. So part of the mixed-up ball of emotions I’m sorting through is the fact that I have major changes on the horizon. Over the years, when other parents have asked the inevitable, “So, what do you do?” question at social events, I’ve said, “I’m a stay-at-home dad.” But last year, someone followed up with, “Aren’t your kids fully grown humans by now?”

Jen has been a little more graceful with these changes over the years. When our firstborn was going off to college, I thought it would be fun to make a playlist for the 4-hour drive to their dorm, filled with songs that meant something to us as a family or had messages in them: several “High School Musical” songs, “All Your Favorite Bands” by Dawes, “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa, “Follow Your Arrow” by Kacey Musgraves, “Good Riddance” by Green Day. As soon as Jen and I said goodbye, watched our child walk into the residence hall without us, and hopped in the minivan, I was already a blubbering mess. “Can you put on the playlist?” I said between gulps. Gently, Jen said, “Maybe we should hold off on the playlist for a bit.” “PUT ON THE PLAYLIST!!!” I sobbed. So that’s how I’ve handled the big changes over the years.

This summer, on a walk, I said to Jen, “So that’s it? We’re just supposed to raise them up, watch them grow, and then let them go?” Jen said, “Pretty much. That was the deal.” Of course I knew this was the plan from the day they were born, to raise independent, resilient people who could go off into the world and survive on their own without me. I just didn’t think it would actually reach this endpoint so quickly.

This last year, I felt these big and small moments like depth charges going off in my soul’s ocean. I never knew when they’d hit or what damage the shock waves would cause. I’d be at a cross-country meet and think, This is the last time I’ll be at this park watching a race, and I’d have to choke back my emotions. My daughter usually drove to school, but one day in her last month she wanted me to drop her off and pick her up. As I waited in line for her to come out of the school, I watched the hundreds of students stream out and thought about the thousands of days I took her to school over the years, first when she was a baby and I pushed her in this purple jogging stroller as I walked the other two to grade school, then when she was mobile and would run ahead of me and I’d push the empty jogging stroller to keep up with her (for years, random people would approach me in the grocery store and around town and say, “Hey, you’re that purple stroller guy!”), then when she was walking to school alongside me, then when she wanted me to drive her to high school, and finally when she was old enough to drive herself. Sitting in the school’s circle drive, I had to blink those tears away, put on a smile when she got in the car, and say, “Yo! How was your day?”

I spent a lot of time over the last 4 years running or biking next to our youngest as she trained for her sports seasons. (The bike came in when she became too fast for me to keep up on her speed days.) This last year I felt as if I needed to pass along wisdom and advice to her that I may have forgotten. Sometimes it wasn’t well organized and I sounded like Polonius in Act 1, Scene 3 of “Hamlet,” giving advice to his university-going son Laertes (that’s a reference for the English majors out there). Hopefully some of what I said made sense and helps her in the college life. I’ll let you know in 4 to 5 years.

Our last child was our loudest, so the house is startlingly quiet now. I’m in the “look how clean I can make our closets and basement” stage of empty nesting. I go for long runs and long walks. I try not to end up wandering past the high school too much. I listen to music while I walk; the other day I had to turn off the “Hamilton” soundtrack. I was at “It’s Quiet Uptown”: “If you see him in the street, walking by himself, talking to himself, have pity, he is working through the unimaginable.” I know the next phase of Jen’s and my life is here; I’m trying not to get too attached to and nostalgic for the previous one. It’s important to make sure that when one door closes, you look for other ones and don’t keep trying to reopen the closed door. I’ll get there.

Last week, I ran into a friend walking her dog; her youngest kid is 4 years older than mine, so she’s a few steps ahead of us in the process. She asked me how I was hanging in there (again, I get it! No one was surprised that I was the sniveling crybaby!). I talked at length about how hard it is to adjust, and how I find it difficult even to walk into our kids’ empty bedrooms. Jen turned one into an AirBnB-quality bedroom; the other we’re not touching for a while, so it’s a shrine to our two younger kids. Finally, my friend said, “I know what you’re going through! But here’s the thing: You will get over it and get used to it. It’s going to be nice not to clean the house on a daily basis, there will be less laundry and dishes, and when all the kids are home and you have a full house, it’s a loud, messy hurricane rolling through and you will look forward to getting back to the clean, quiet life that you’ve gotten used to. Trust me.”

It’s been 2 weeks so far. And it’s everything I experienced with the first two, and it’s more intense than I thought it would be with the last one, but here’s a twist: I didn’t account for the fact that our youngest kid would text me many, many times daily and want to talk on the phone every chance we’re available. We’ve already visited her at school once, and she’s coming home this weekend. So maybe I didn’t raise the independent, leave-it-all-behind kid that I thought I was. (And maybe I’m not too upset about that. But don’t tell my kid that!)

Rod Stewart, “Young Turks”

Dawes, “All Your Favorite Bands”

Wiz Khalifa, “See You Again”

Kacey Musgraves, “Follow Your Arrow”

Green Day, “Good Riddance”

High school, Movies, Oscars

The Best Films I Saw in 2022

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It’s Oscars weekend! Who’s jazzed up? (Also, are the hip kids still saying “jazzed up”? Or “hip kids”? Let me check my TikToks.) Anyway, I saw 50 movies in 2022, or 1 every 7.3 days. Exactly zero of those movies was in a theater; I think that’s a first. Lame. However, I’ve never been a big theater-goer; this reminds me of a story…(fadeout with flashback music)

When I was 17 years old, I had a hot night planned with a girl who for some strange reason was into me. (It might have been my devastating good looks.) After a week of what we used to call “dating,” I asked if she wanted to see a movie on a Friday. “Yes! What time are you picking me up?” she asked. “Um, I was wondering if you could swing by my house,” I said. Because I was the youngest of four kids and a few of my older siblings were living at home at the time, I rarely had access to either of the family sedans. “Ohhh-kayyy,” was her hesitant response. “How about dinner before?” she asked. “Sure!” I said; “I can’t afford to take you anywhere, so what is your mom making tonight?”

We started the night (after she picked me up and drove me back to her house) with a spaghetti dinner with her mom, dad, and little sister. And now I’m about to age myself: Off we went to see the new  Tom Hanks movie, “The ‘Burbs” (1989). The trailer looked funny, and Hanks was in his wacky-comedic phase (closer to “Bosom Buddies” than to “Castaway”). If you don’t know “The ‘Burbs,” it’s a black comedy. Which is my least favorite kind of comedy. Usually it means there’s going to be death, gore, a mean-spirited tone, and a real lack of setting the romantic mood in a darkened theater, if you know what I mean.

I should mention that at that point in my life, I barely knew what I meant. I had hardly dated, and I spent most of the film in my own head, thinking about how our evening was going: Do I reach out for her hand? Put my arm around her? Get more popcorn? When does the kissing begin?!? Or do I just sit here like a mannequin? I went with that last option. Not to spoil the movie, but we left in a daze at what we had just seen. As we got into the car (“Shotgun!” I called out, to make her chauffeuring me seem a little cooler), she said, “Well, that was…something.” “Yeah,” I said. (Is this when the kissing begins?!?) She drove me home mostly in silence, except for the Milli Vanilli and Paula Abdul on the radio (this was 1989, remember). When she pulled into my driveway, it was only like 9:45 pm. “Well,” I said, “I guess this is it.” “I guess so,” she said, expectantly. (Oh crap, this is when the kissing begins!) So I went to lean over to her, got jerked back when I realized that my seatbelt was still on, undid my seatbelt, and finally got down to the smoochfest before saying goodbye. I’m sure you’re wondering, how great was the kiss? Do the words “like kissing your sister” mean anything to you? Let’s just say that I made such an impression on her that she dumped me by the time the next weekend rolled around.

Okay! Moving on! Now how about my list of the top films I saw in 2022? Keep in mind, these are the best movies I saw in the calendar year, not necessarily the best ones released last year.

everything-everywhere-all-at-once_nysayfbn_480x.progressive1. “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” 2022 comedy/drama/sci-fi directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, and James Hong. My teenage nephew told me he had seen this film twice and bawled both times, so I took that recommendation. It’s not for everyone; I know some people who though it too over-the-top or hard to follow or too clever for its own good. It hit me at the right time, and the portraits of parents and children struggling to connect with each other resonated with me.

Unknown2. “Don’t Look Up,” 2021 disaster comedy/drama directed by Adam McKay, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Timothee Chalamet. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I’ve seen my share of “this is how the world ends” films. This one, about two astronomers (Lawrence and DiCaprio) who become media celebs trying to alert the world to an impending meteor strike on Earth, deftly wove in our current climate of science vs. politics (the film’s title is from the politicians to who tell their followers to ignore the scientists). Thinking about the state of the world we’re leaving future generations, I can’t shake DiCaprio’s character’s line: “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”

Unknown3. “Life of Pi,” 2012 drama directed by Ang Lee, starring Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Gautam Belur, Tabu, and Vibish Sivakumar. How about some love to Lee, a director who went to the same university as me? Based on the heralded Yann Martel novel, this fantasy (or is it?) of Pi Patel’s travels after a shipwreck with a tiger make the viewer question what reality is, while also highlighting the resilience of people to overcome great tragedy with the stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves moving forward in a cruel world.

Unknown4. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” 2022 mystery directed by Rian Johnson, starring Daniel Craig, Janelle Monae, Edward Norton, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Madelyn Cline, Leslie Odom Jr, Jessica Henwick, and Kathryn Hahn. Johnson is a master at weaving a tangled web and having one character (Craig’s Benoit Blanc) untangle it one step ahead of us. The elaborate plot all comes back around several times; worth a few viewings.

Unknown5. “The Last Blockbuster,” 2020 documentary directed by Taylor Morden. The title is self-explanatory: the last remaining Blockbuster video store (kids, ask your parents) stands in Bend, OR. This lighthearted film toggles between telling the story of that one store and how it has navigated a changing world and the backstory of what actually happened to put the Blockbuster corporation out of business (it wasn’t just Netflix and the rise of streaming).

Unknown6. “Look Both Ways,” 2022 romance/dramedy directed by Wanuri Kahiu, starring Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez, David Corenswet, and Aisha Dee. This “what if” story follows Natalie (Reinhart, of “Riverdale” fame), who, as she graduates from college, lives two parallel lives, one in which she gets pregnant and has to set aside her career dreams to raise her child, and one in which the pregnancy test reads negative. Very “Sliding Doors.”

Unknown7. “Long Story Short,” 2021 romantic comedy directed by Josh Lawson, starring Rafe Spall, Zahra Newman, Ronny Chieng, and Dena Kaplan. This film reminded me of another of my faves of the last few years, “About Time.” Teddy (Spall) has a spell cast on him as his wedding approaches that leads to him only living a few minutes each year for a decade, dropping in on his life and giving him a glimpse of what his future holds. My lovely wife Jen disliked it; I’d say it’s better on a second viewing, once you know where things are headed. (Hint: it’s a romantic comedy, not a black comedy.) One overarching theme in my life has been the shortness of life (Andrew Marvell wrote: “But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and that has haunted me since I read it as a teenager); this is a reminder of that.

Unknown8. “Jexi,” 2019 comedy directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, starring Adam Devine, the voice of Rose Byrne, Alexandra Shipp, Wanda Sykes, and Michael Pena. Devine has great comic timing (see my next pick as well) as Phil, a guy who is addicted to his phone. When he upgrades to a new phone with a talking virtual assistant (Byrne as Lexi), Lexi takes over his life. She stalks him through other devices, orders him healthier food, and generally follows the directive to improve his life how she sees fit. This is like a funny version of “Her,” the film where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Unknown9. “When We First Met,” 2018 romantic comedy directed by Ari Sandel, starring Adam Devine, Alexandria Daddario, Robbie Amell, King Bach, and Shelley Hennig. Bizarre that I liked yet another time-travel film because they are usually not up my alley. Noah (Devine) spends the night with the girl of his dreams (Daddario’s Avery), only to fall into the friend zone. When he accidentally travels back in time through a photo booth, he tries to change his future by altering the events of the night they spent together. Very much a “be careful what you wish for” story.

Unknown10. “Definition Please,” 2020 dramedy directed by Sujata Day, starring Sujata Day, Ritesh Rajan, Lalaine, Jake Choi, and Katrina Bowden. Day writes, directs, and stars in this story of Monica, a former national spelling bee champion whose life is a mess as she must reconnect with her estranged brother to care for her ailing mother. A touching look at mother/daughter and sister/brother bonds, and at the immigrant experience.

Movies that just missed the cut: “The Long Dumb Road,” “Spirited,” “The Lost City,” “Nobody,” “Boys State,” “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “I Want You Back.”

 

Books

Best Books 2022

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I’m such a slow reader. (And you should see me texting; my kid acted like I was torturing her when she witnessed me one-finger plucking at my phone screen.) Every year I try to read 2 books a month. (Aim high!) In 2022 I read the exact same number of books that I did in 2021: 27, or 1 every 13.5 days. Pitiful, I know, but enough to draw a top ten list from. Here are the best books I read in 2022:

3FCEF26DDF2EB122470A88FDDA23FD8DD1F588A81. The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage, Drew Magary. I actually own this book because I checked it out of the library and took it in a backpack somewhere; my lovely wife Jen finished almost all of a smoothie and stuck it in the backpack. When we got home, the whole book was purple from the smoothie leftovers. “Why would you put it in with the book?!?” I asked. She said, “I thought the lid was secure.” So I had to reimburse the library for the book, and I got to keep it. Good thing I liked it! Magary tells the harrowing story of how, one night out singing karaoke with co-workers, something happens that leaves him hospitalized; not only does he describe his recovery from a traumatic brain injury, but he also goes back to try to piece together the mystery of what happened to him. (It’s Rashomon-like; no one witnessed his fall but many people were present that night.) What might surprise you is that this is a very funny book, and Magary is able to find the humor in even the darkest moments of his life.

9781911231424-us2. Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson. “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Frankie Budge, settled into her adult life, receives a call from a reporter asking if those words mean anything to her. For years, Budge has hidden the truth behind her role in causing a mass panic in her small hometown of Coalfield, Tennessee, that spread around the world. This funny and introspective novel toggles between present-day Frankie and her 1996 self, an awkward teen who makes a connection with a new boy in her town one summer, and how what they created sent them down different paths.

9780593542163-us3. This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub. I’m not a fan of time-travel stories. And yet here I am, recommending Straub’s “what if we can go back” novel. About to celebrate her 40th birthday, Alice wakes up in her childhood home, on her 16th birthday, in 1996. Startled by how different her life has turned out from what she imagined when she was young, Alice seeks to “fix” things in hopes of ending up in a different place at age 40. It asks the question, “What would you change if you could go back?” It’s also an examination of the father-daughter bond, and a heartbreaker in exploring how far we would go to get our parents back to who we need them to be for us.

9780063215689-us4. Mika in Real Life, Emiko Jean. There’s a theme in these last three books: grown-up characters confronting their teenage years and asking if they are who they thought they could become when they were young. In this romantic novel, thirtysomething Mika, her life a shambles, receives an out-of-the-blue call from Penny, the girl she gave up for adoption while in college. Attempting to impress Penny, Mika embellishes her work and relationship situations. When Penny decides to visit with her adoptive father, Thomas, Mika has to choose which part of her to expose to them. This novel explores cultural challenges with adoption, dreams gone haywire, and what it means to truly face our own inadequacies.

51SGTsvGrUL._AC_SY400_5. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham. Reading Joyce’s Ulysses was a rite of passage and a long, hard slog for college English majors like me. Some passages are pure poetry; some are like deciphering hieroglyphics; and the most controversial parts, the ones addressed in this book, are, let’s face it, raunchy. Joyce and his publishers spent decades trying to get his book published in various countries, it was banned in the UK, the United States, and most of Europe for obscenity. This book opens up the legal proceedings, the unlikely patrons on both sides of the Atlantic to supported Joyce financially (and illegally printed and distributed his book), and the ramifications of the landmark 1933 federal obscenity trial. Ultimately, Joyce’s backers argued, if we censor a book because someone, somewhere, of some young age, might be offended by it, then the only things that would ever get published would be G-rated. Also enlightening were the letters between Joyce and his wife/muse, Nora Barnacle, although they were even raunchier than what got his book banned!

9780802159236-us6. Architects of An American Landscape, Hugh Howard. The subtitle of this dual biography is “Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.” Whew! Was Howard paid by the word for that title? This book delves into the friendship and collaboration between Olmsted, regarded as the world’s first and foremost landscape designer (New York’s Central Park, the Biltmore Estate, many other naturescapes throughout the world) and Richardson, the most influential architect of his time who has largely been forgotten, even though his influence endures. They could not have been more different: Olmstead was thin, reserved, and lived to be 81, while Richardson was obese, had a lust for life and celebrating it, and died at age 47. Howard proposes that, in a way, the greatness of Olmsted can only be viewed as an outcome of his working with Richardson.

9781529399349-us7. Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, Bob Odenkirk. You might know Odenkirk for his role as Saul Goodman from “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” It surprises many to know that his long career before those dark dramas was all comedic. Hence the book’s title, which is one of my youngest child’s favorites; if she hears the word “comedy,” she yells out, “comedy comedy comedy drama!” Odenkirk writes of his tough upbringing in the Chicago area and his difficult relationship with his dad, his friendship with the legendary Second City founder Del Close, and his baffled bemusement at becoming better known for serious roles than for his turns as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and writing and acting on “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Mr. Show with Bob and David.”

9780063065246-us8. The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family, Ron and Clint Howard. The Howard brothers alternate chapters in this story of their childhoods and diverging paths into adulthood, Ron as the award-winning director and Clint as a character actor (who appears in all of Ron’s films). “The boys” in the title refers to what their mother called not just the brothers but also their father Rance, himself an actor of varying success. Ron and Clint aren’t afraid to address their own shortcomings (including Clint’s struggles with drugs and alcohol and living in his more successful brother’s shadow). On the heels of their father passing away, Ron and Clint wrote what amounts to a love letter to their parents and a way to tell them that all of their sacrifices for their children were worthwhile.

9781641292979-us9. Slow Horses, Mick Herron. Herron’s Slough House novels are now a TV series on Apple TV+, taking its title from this first book in the series. “Slow horses” are what disgraced MI5 spies are referred to, as they are sent to work out of Slough House and attempt to rehabilitate their careers under the command of Jackson Lamb. River Cartwright, whose career got derailed before it even began by a botched training session, sees an opportunity to change his image when a terrorist cell threatens to air a kidnapped man’s beheading on live television. But all is not what it seems, and Slough House might be hiding secrets of its own. A true page turner and also full of humor.

9780345476395-us10. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, Mark Kurlansky. I came across this history book when someone on a podcast mentioned it in discussing the famed New York-New Jersey Harbor estuary, and that when Europeans first arrived in America, the waters of the rivers surrounding Manhattan were so thick with sea life that you could reach your hand in the water and pull out fish after fish. I had to read this book. The oysters alone drove commerce in New York; from the seventeenth century until well into the twentieth, New York’s oysters fed the world and drove the development of both the riverside slums and the Gilded Age mansions of Manhattan. The oysters’ filtration system kept the water in the harbor clean until the oyster beds’ eventual, inevitable overfishing and collapse. A cautionary tale for sure.

Books that just missed the top ten: Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, Nick Offerman; Into the Rip, Damien Cave; Mean Baby, Selma Blair; You Can’t Be Serious, Kal Penn.

Travel, Vacation, Vashon

Vashon Island Stories: The Ferry

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Faithful blog readers: If you tell an embarrassing story a thousand times, it becomes less embarrassing, right? That’s the theory I operate on. Which is why I’m  going to tell you about a recent trip that my lovely wife Jen and I took to visit a relative on Vashon Island in Washington state.

There’s a ferry to get to Vashon from the south, in Tacoma. You get on at Point Defiance and cross to Tahlequah. I’m the type of person who hates surprises and needs to know the lay of the land whenever I go anywhere. (I’m a real thrill to travel with. Just ask Jen. Actually, take my word for it.) So I asked our relative where to meet the ferry, what it’s like, etc. He said, “It’s easy: you go through a traffic roundabout, take the second right, pay at the booth on top of the hill, then get in the line of cars that leads down the hill to the ferry. It’s a two-story car ferry.” I was thinking, Jeez, buddy. Hills, roundabouts, booths, lines of cars; which part of that is the easy part? But fine, whatever.

I hesitate to share the whole story with you here, but it starts 7 hours south of Tacoma in a coastal Oregon town where we had been staying the previous several days. Our teen was with us, and she woke up with food poisoning (Just a wild guess, but it was probably the dive-bar calamari from the night before). She was vomiting from 6 to 11 a.m., when we had to check out of our rental home. (That was an awkward conversation: “I know you’re feeling horrible, but do you think you can stop with the vomiting by 11 a.m.? We really need to turn these house keys in at the drop box by then.”) We skipped the scenic coastal route and took the more direct inland route to get to the ferry faster. (Amazingly, she stopped throwing up the minute we got in the rental car and made it to Vashon with no issues.)

So that’s the backstory: seven hours of highway driving, with a teenager holding a paper bag to her face most of the way; we were a little frazzled by the time we reached Tacoma. I wear hearing aids, and they have Bluetooth, so my phone is connected to them. Google Maps was talking in my ears, plus Jen was reading all of the route info from my phone aloud to me. When we got to the roundabout, we missed the second right. (And by “we,” I mean “I.”) So “we” (okay, “I”) took the third right, which led us down the hill into the Point Defiance Zoo (instead of to the ferry booth at the top of the hill).

So now I’m driving around a zoo, Google Maps is telling me alternate routes (“In 500 feet, turn right at the Monkey Pavilion”), Jen is reading Google Maps aloud (“It says that in 500 feet, you should turn right at the Monkey Pavilion”), and I’m weaving around thinking that I have to work my way back up the hill somehow. (EDITOR NOTE: He made up the part about the Monkey Pavilion; there probably aren’t monkeys at the Point Defiance Zoo, but he’s too lazy to look up the fact that Google Maps redirected him around the Wild Wonders Outdoor Theater and not the Monkey Pavilion.)

We came out at the bottom of the hill through this restaurant parking lot, and I can see that if I turn right, I will go back up the hill, which now has a long line of cars waiting to board the ferry. But Google Maps and Jen are both telling me, “Turn left now to get on the ferry!” I said to Jen, “Left here?” She was like, “Yes! yes! Turn left!” (You can see how I’m setting her up to take the rap for what’s about to happen.)

So I turn left, placing us on the pier where, 50 yards down, there is a security booth, guards, and ferry workers, but no ferry because it hasn’t returned from Tahlequah yet. Which means that no one is supposed to actually drive on the pier yet. The guards start yelling at me and waving their arms (I’m imagining klaxons blaring, security breach protocol kicking into action, frantic calls to Homeland Security), but they are too far away from me to hear what they are saying, so I do the only reasonable thing that pops into my tiny squirrel brain: I drive forward toward them, roll down my car window, and yell, “I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!!!”

This one guard looked at me and said, “That’s obvious.” Then she told me, “Put the car in reverse, do a U turn at the pier entrance, drive up the hill, and buy your ticket at the booth. Then get in line with all the other cars.”

FA4EF24A-2A5B-4A05-91AE-90C93C803B60
Postcard mural at Vashon Adventures in Vashon Town. I think they should add a tiny rental car, with a tiny me in the driver’s seat, yelling in my tiny voice, “I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!!!”

At this point, I should mention that if there was room under the passenger seat for our daughter to have crawled underneath, she would have. And you should have seen the looks I got from the cars in line as I drove past them up the hill. I shrugged at each of them with a face that I’m sure said, “Hello, I’m a Midwestern tourist obliviously driving a rental car in unauthorized areas out here. It’s part of my rascally charm.”

Long story short (too late, I know), we made it onto Vashon safely. And our relatives loved the story. It became a running theme for the trip: When they took us to Seattle to visit the art museum, they were trying to figure out the parking garage payment system. I told them, “Just roll down your window at the exit and yell, ‘I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!’ That usually seems to work for me.”

After our vacation, I was reading an article about avoiding post-trip hangovers and letdowns. One of the suggestions in the article was to bring some aspect of the vacation home with you and incorporate it into your everyday life. So I’m taking that suggestion. You might see me in town at the grocery store’s new self-checkout lane. I’m the one not wasting my time reading the instructions on the kiosk. I’m just standing there, gripping my cart, yelling, “I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!!!” You’d be amazed at how quickly you get service that way.