At the end of last December, blogger Kevin Drum posted a list of of his 20 favorite books of all time (ordered by date published). He gave no indication about why he did so, but I felt it was an interesting experiment.

Thought I’d give it a shot.

Sorry, for me this is not possible. I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, and my biggest complaint about college (as an English major!) was that there just wasn’t enough time to read, reading for fun.

I started to put together a list off the top of my head and it quickly ballooned, and I’m certain I’ve missed many titles that just slipped my mind at the time. I just sat back and typed. These are a mix of fiction and nonfiction in no particular order.

• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• The Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
• The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
• To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Moments of Being – Virginia Woolf (yeah, cheating – multiple books, fiction and nonfiction)
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes
• The Song of the Dodo – David Quammen
• Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
• The Discoverers – Daniel Boorstein
• The Adventures of Augie March -Saul Bellow
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabrial Garcia Maquex
• Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
• A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway (yep, a dupe author)
• The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
• Lab Girl – Hope Jahren
• The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
• A River Runs Through It – Norman MacLean (novella, really)
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent – Isabel Wilkerson
• Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• Youngblood Hawke – Herman Wouk (on Drum’s list, too)
• The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
• Wind, Sand and Stars – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• Centennial – James Mitchner
• Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
• A Map of the World – Jane Hamilton
• Remembering Denny – Calvin Trillin
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America – Barbara Ehrenreich
• Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• Broadsides from the Other Orders – A Book of Bugs – Sue Hubbell
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – James Agee (photos and brilliant intro by Walker Evans)
• How We Die – Sherwin B. Nuland
• Our Towns – James and Deborah Fallows
• The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand

And this doesn’t even include the number of short story collections – by various writers or an individual author – that I have shelved at home. I hit these for re-reads as often as novels or works of nonfiction.

Or photography books (The Americans by Rober Frank,
Yosemite and the Range of Light by Ansel Adams, Certain Places, by William Clift ….).

Or essay collections – any random volume by Oliver Sacks, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Sontag or John McPhee , as well The Collected Essays of EB White and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Just a starter collection of essayists.

And what really is a “favorite book”? To me, it’s one that I greatly enjoyed reading at the time or one that I return to either as a re-read or one that is burned into my brain. A “Great Book” – a part of the fiction or nonfiction canon – is not necessarily a “favorite book.” Tastes/interests differ.

For example, I did not list Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace nor Anna Karenina – I went with my first (and favorite) door-stopper of a Russian novel, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I also had initially listed Joyce’s Ulysses, but that book was work – I got a lot from it and am glad to have read it but it was a slough at points. So I de-listed it. Great work of literature, but not a “favorite” book.

Over the past few months, I revisited some movies that I thought very highly of at the time. One was (as I remembered it) a fun, clever heist movie; the other two are pretty much modern-day classics.

Yet revisiting is often a mistake.

Take the Top Gun (1986) debacle: I first watched this – on a top-load VHS player hooked up to a smallish 4:3 tube TV – shortly after its release, and I enjoyed it. Was a different type of movie, and the flight scenes were impressive even on that tiny, cropped screen. Hey, at least it was a color teevee.

Fast forward to a decade or so ago, I re-watched the flick on a 16:9 significantly larger flat-screen TV, and, well, I hated it. Cheesy. Silly. The volleyball games….

Maybe it was one of those “just not in the mood for it” times, but the memory of Cruise’s big hit has been forever damaged. I did like 2022’s sequel of sorts, Maverick, so who really knows?

Long and short: All three of the warmly-remembered films I recently re-watched held up.

The Matrix, 1999

This could have been a disaster, as this film is part of the zeitgeist. Blue pill/red pill, black trench coats and dark shades, the whole post-apocalyptic vibe.

It was still edgy and thought-provoking, and the special effects are just that – special, especially for the time. Well done!

The Italian Job, 2003

This is the Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron version, not the original that I think starred Michael Caine (I’ve never seen it). A caper movie about stealing a shit-load of gold from a Venice business (hence “Italian”), this movie distinguishes itself via clever twists combined with the old chestnut of no honor among thieves.

There was less of the latter than I remembered, but more of the former, which makes for a fun, mostly mindless watch. And it has a boat chase through Venice! That alone is worth the price of admission!

The Usual Suspect, 1995

Yes, it does have Kevin Spacey who is a bit of an untouchable right now, but his Oscar-winning performance really makes the movie the icon it is, even with all the other star-power talent.

And the movie has a huge twist, which is often ineffective/diluted on subsequent views, but it was so well done that it didn’t matter. Watching Spacey setting up what (previous viewers know) are misdirects or – usually – flagrant lies might be even more fun than the first watch where you were trying to piece together all the spaghetti Spacey’s character is tossing at the wall.

Even though the entire movie is a lie, it’s an extremely believable tale.

Bottom Line::Hey, take the risk and watch an old favorites. For every Top Gun, there’s a The Matrix or The Usual Suspects.

Yeah, welcome to the 20th century, in the 21st century.

Yeah, should have cancelled a looooong time ago.

And no, it was not a rotary phone, but I think we still have one that was hooked up in the laundry room,

Well, the pollsters were right – virtually all of the swing states were very tight margins.

And Trump got just about all of them.

Now it gets interesting…

Update 11/7/2024:

Skimming over the election stories, one thing becomes clear: This was a huge, decisive win for Trump and the Republicans. Trump won handily, taking all the swing states. He won the popular vote (!). Republicans will now control a previously tied Senate (with VP Harris as the tie-breaking vote). The House is still up for grabs, but it looks better for Republicans than Democrats.

Harris ran a very good campaign – there will be a lot of finger pointing, but that’s always the case on the losing side. This was not a case of Harris fumbles tossing the election; no, Trump won.

Trump is, for some unfathomable reason, the candidate the American people wanted in this election. A little terrifying (mass deportations, abolishing government bureaus…), but it is what it is.

In this election, Trump chipped away at a vast number of Democrats’ voter blocs – he made gains with young men, with Latino men and Black men.

And here is the stat that I can’t wrap my head around: In the first presidential election since the Dobbs decision (that struck down Roe v Wade – a 50-yeard old precedent that protected abortion), the man who takes credit for this – Trump – received 51% of the white women vote. Wow.

At the end of his brilliant short story A River Runs Through It Norman MacLean muses about various metaphors and realities he had touched on in the story, and ten ends with a simple declarative statement:

I am haunted by waters

.As the two pictures in this entry can attest, I am haunted – and fascinated – by lights and its cousin, shadows.

Both pictures taken this week with a trusty iPhone, capturing those shades and lights many seem to miss.

How the upper photo happened:

• Early morning, sun reflects off some vehicle part in office park parking lot.
• Reflects through an skewed vertical blind in one of our group of offices.
• Composite of negative light (shadows) from outside bush and inside blinds projected high up on kitchenette wall.

It’s not a window – it’s a shadow window.

Crater Lake

After a decade of hiccups – family, pets, the anti-tourism tsunami of COVID – we finally took a vacation this year. (View constantly updated gallery)

It was our usual type of vacation – we usually pick a destination to be the jumping-off point for day trips; only one work week, and after Labor Day (so the kids are back in school and things are less congested).

Our “home base” this trip? Medford, OR, in south central/western Oregon. Known mainly as the headquarters of Harry & David and the eponymous apple, it really is a weird town. One-runway airport (six gates total), a slice of downtown that they are trying to preserve and gussy up, and long stretches of basically abandoned old warehoused, manufacturing plants.and such.

Why Medford? I really can’t recall, but it isnear Crater Lake, and had at least some other locations around it for day trips. We did not select Medford because we wanted to say we’ve been to Medford.

That said, some thoughts on the places we saw. We had six days (Sun-Fri), but first & last days were primarily travel days – long days with connections in Seatac (outgoing) and Salt Lake City (coming home).

Going to take me some time (as always) to process photos and say what I want about everywhere we visited.

Medford

As mentioned above, Medford is a strange little town. They are building up the NW and NE areas around the downtown aren, so why is our hotel – the most eclectic one around – in the dumpy south of downtown area? Land was cheap and they know something we don’t?

It’s a mystery.

Klamath Falls

First of all, no easy way to get there. We took a twisty blue highway north-to-go-south and east one way, and a big dip south-to-go-north on the way back (an Interstate.). Long drive both ways

Nothingburger town. A nice Art Deco church (built 1929) and movie theater, but those were the highlights.

Klamath Falls? No longer any falls. A series of dams built I’d guess in the 1930s erased them. (NOTE: They are removing the dams and the salmon are starting to return up the rivers as in the past. Progress!)

Crater Lake

Again, quite the twisty drive to get there, but the lake is remarkable. And we had a beautiful sunny day (morning) to hit it. The story behind the lake was more complicated than I’d thought, but interesting. Mountain peaks in the distance, varied geological formations around the lake and that blue, blue water.

We did about two-thirds of the rim drive (part was closed for maintenance). After a few stops, it’s just another, slightly different view of the bowl of water and Wizard Island. Glad we went there, however.

Grants Pass

[Editor’s note: It’s “Grants,” not possessive “Grant’s.” Why? I dunno.]

A weird little town with more character than, say, Klamath Falls. Many odd little businesses – lots of vinyl, antiques and such. Like most of the towns we visited, Grants Pass seems to have had a purpose and some point, but now all these tiny towns seem like islands mired in the past.

Many of these towns seemed to pop up after gold was discovered in California (1848), so possibly conduits to California from towns like Portland and Seattle? Grants Pass was making an effort to keep the town updated and all, but it’s still a dot in the midst of a lot of nothing. Yeah, I sound like a Big City bigot, yeah?

Wine Country

This is – south of Medford – wine country. So we kinda just picked a random winery off a guide and headed there to see what we could find. (South of Portland, OR, is also wine country, but we knew a couple of places we wanted to hit on our trip there years ago.)

As seems to be the case in south Oregon, getting there – on old back roads – was a chore and a half.

Nothing spectacular, but did a wine flight and bought a couple of bottles (white).

One ancillary benefit of that winery (Valley View Winery, Jacksonville, OR) was that the host was from Medford. So we asked her about a seafood place in the town. She had a second-hand recommendation and that’s where we later ate. And it was good. And we would never have known of it – it’s almost a neighborhood looking place.

She also told us of a quicker way home (less twisty!) and it took us through the quirky little town of Jacksonville. Wandered around there, had a beer. We would have never ventured there without her recommendation, either.

Ashland

This is a small town south of our hotel that we had gone through on the way to Klamath Falls and our wine adventure. It’s more of an artsy town (there is a university there).

Unfortunately, we got there early (as we are wont to do) and even after a (great) breakfast, nothing was open, We noodled around and looked at the shops and architecture, and then hit a very nice in-town park, Lithia. But nothing really compelling for an out-of-towner. Great for the town, meh for the traveler.

Some random notes

• This was our first trip in some time. Let’s make this yearly again.
• My photog skills have atrophied. For example, there was a nice Art Deco church in Klamath Falls, but I didn’t even try to see if I could get in and see what the interior was like. What is wrong with me?
• Lots of twisty roads through towering forests. Smartphone + Google Maps saved our ass time and time again. Did we get lost? Sure – but were able to quickly discover and fix. Just follow that dot on the map….really.
• would we go back here again? No – but at least I would return to northern Oregon (Portland, Astoria, Columbia River).

We both like movies, and I worked for years at Family Video (RIP – domain doesn’t even go anywhere today) with exposure to movies and such.

So we have a fairly robust movie collection (DVDs).

Yet we have, for the past 25 or so years, always picked up stuff from our local library, the Mount Prospect Public Library (MPPL). They always had a nice selection (somewhat decimated in the summer/holidays when the kids are out of school) and stuff we would not necessarily want to buy. Maybe rent and then decide to buy, but get a free taste first,

I rented a movie recently, Crazy Rich Asians and when I (self) checked out, couldn’t find the slot to unlock the DVD case.

Turns out they’ve gotten rid of that.

That tells me rentals are down and streaming is up. – DVDs (and CDs) no longer worth theft protection.

Interesting.

President Biden will serve the remainder of hsi (first) presidential) term, but will not run for a second term.

Unprecedented.

(NOTE: This was announced yesterday, Sunday July 21, 2024.)

I’m not certain of the context of this Catch-22 (1961) quotation, but I stumbled across this on the internet the other day, and, boy, does it capture the shabbiness of some of our current politics.

Doing a little digging, it appears that 1) The quotation is real, and 2) It’s not a Yossarian (the novel’s protagonist) quotation.- it appears to be an unspoken conclusion reached by an Army chaplain, but I’m not certain.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

I ran across the book on an Atlantic article about “Summer Reads,” I believe. Subtitled “The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” it sounded like a book I’d enjoy.

Our library had it, so I checked it out and pounded through it pretty quickly – it is a summer book, after all.

Published in 2021 after what I can glean years of investigation, the book is a testament to the American grocery store, from General Stores through the first supermarkets to the brave new world of both big box grocers (think Walmart and Costco) and online grocers (think Amazon and – again – Walmart).

The thread that runs through the entire book is two-fold:

• How margins on groceries are incredibly thin. The figure repeated was ~1.5%.
• How the abundance of product – accompanying lower costs – has been a staple for the arc of American grocery stores.

The book is divided into eight sections: Prologue, six main Parts, and an afterword.

Each of the Parts primarily focus on an individual/store – a humanizing element that helps tell about the bigger picture. For example, the Part on logistics (dry!) is about the author’s month-long ride-along with a long-haul trucker and what her (the driver’s) life was like, and how we depend on truckers for everything, not just groceries.

Chock full of insights and anecdotes, the first tour Parts move along quickly.

The last two Parts, however, are more of a slough, simply because of the subject matter:: sourcing ethics and how human slavery is endemic in a lot of food industries (coffee, coco, shrimp), even if only at the edges. One should not overlook “just a little” slavery.

The Part on ethics – organic food, free-range chickens, ethically sourced [whatever] – was interesting. The author concludes that, at the end of the day, grocery stores try to emphasize these often empty platitudes not to increase sales or – god forbid – do the right thing, but to make us, the consumer, feel a little bit better about ourselves. Cynical, but it feels accurate.

All in all, a fun read with a lot of obtuse (but fun) detail. It’s a relatively short book – approximately 280 pages – and there are some glaring omissions: Delivery and or order online/pickup in store are not mentioned that I recall. No mention of Peapod, which is odd (it does mention online grocers, specifically Amazon).

No mention of the trend toward self-checkout in stores, nothing about loyalty cards/programs or online apps. Not a peep about how liquor has changed grocers (has it? I know my local chain is putting in fancy, dedicated wine rooms. Why?).

But supermarkets have a huge story to tell; one book simply can’t fit everything in. I get that.

I’ll leave the reader with the centerpiece of Part III, about how to get a product into a store (legally, with bribes, pay for display…), cost of shelf space, how a buyer decides what to buy etc.

One word: Slawsa.

Google it. It’s a thing.