Notes from the Couch: Goodreads, Travel, Food and Gen X references...and Sort of Review on In The Weeds...

  This year I set a high reading bar for myself on Goodreads—I decided I would read 100 books. With 52 weeks in the year, 100 books breaks down to almost two full books a week. But with the pandemic continuing on to year two?  Let’s be honest here—the chance of me doing anything beyond going to work Monday through Friday didn’t seem all that likely, so 100 books didn’t seem like such a high wall to climb. At least there were several footholds on the wall that would make scaling it possible. Still, it is climbing without a harness and ropes, and I’m not Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible 2. (Note Gen X reference. And yes, I am still working on not spacing twice after sentences. Deal.)

I’ve been on Goodreads for years, and I think I only reached my goal once. Nope, I just checked and according to Goodreads, since I joined the annual Reading Challenge in 2014, I have actually reached my goal twice—in 2015 I read 43 book and projected for 25. I apparently then saw 25 as a very low number I easily reached when I put my mind to it, I set my 2016 goal for 60 books, which I met, reading 61 books that year. But after that I started falling short of my goals for 65, then 72, then 75 books. Even as I wasn’t able to make those I kept driving up my goal, and both 2020 and 2021 I made my goal for each year 100 books. My Reading Challenge goal logic seems to resemble our Corporate America Business Model. Go Capitalism.

It should be noted that my inability to reach my own reading goals—biting off more than I can chew—even includes the short cuts I take to inflate my numbers. In other words, the “quick hits”.  I don’t know what else to call checking page number before choosing a book to read.  “Oh, I can whip this one out in a day and that will help me get ahead of the game.” Books of poetry, plays, novellas, graphic novels, they all count as one read unit. If I had a problem with books over 400 pages before—and I did, it got really bad when I started actually getting competitive with myself over how much I was reading. If you can spit out thrillers in a day or two, like I have this year, you look like you’ve read a lot, but the person who chose to re-read the entire Game of Thrones series thus far, or decided to tackle the Stephen King tomes of It, The Stand and The Shining have far fewer books in the read list. Even though their page count read is far higher. I feel like maybe any book over 400 pages should count as two, a book over 800 should count as four, to create some level of fairness. This might decrease our page anxiety a bit. Maybe it would stop us from looking at the page count before deciding what to read next—“Oh this isn’t that long and the chapters are brief making for a quick, flowing read!  I can whip this out I a few hours!” Oh, it’s just me? Sure, fine, whatever. (Yes, another reference)

Not to say that I haven’t read some very interesting shorter pieces that kind of came out of nowhere for me. I have. Like I did this week when I chose one of Book of the Month’s “memorable memoirs”, In The Weeds, as one of the books in my December box. At 286 pages (and let me just take a second to complain that I feel like the inserted pages of photos SHOULD BE PAGINATED), this is not a long read and something I was able to bang out in one day.  I was intrigued by this book, even though the rock I’ve been living under did not include any of Anthony Bourdain’s books or travel/food shows.  In fact, I have no memory of Bourdain prior to his 2017 tweet about Baby Driver getting quite a bit of attention. The world was all abuzz about Baby Driver—this was before Kevin Spacey’s “cancellation” and I admit it was a lot of fun…Baby Driver, not Kevin Spacey’s bad behavior.  Even though you could see the cameras reflection in so many scenes…but Anthony Bourdain said three little words and social media came to a standstill to give him side eye before continuing.  It is just one of those things that stood out for me. Seriously guys, it’s still there. 10,000 likes. Tweeted July 4, 2017.  “Fuck BABY DRIVER”. Anyway, “Fuck BABY DRIVER” showed up in my timeline because apparently someone I followed was one of the over 3,000 people to retweet it in some way. So there I was all “who’s this fuckin’ guy?”

Now don’t get me wrong, I love food. And considering my Italian American heritage and growing up with one very Italian side of the family, loving to cook and having lots and lots of food at family dinners is a big part of my life experience. As a child and teenager, my friends would come over to to eat at my house and my friends would say, “Just a little bit, Mrs. Murray” and mom would give them a helping that looked to ME like a little bit, but to them looked like a mountain of food…

…I could write for days on my relationship with food and my Battle for Skinny Bitch status, but that is a story for another time. It was brought up here in a short way to indicate that food and I have a complicated relationship and so I don’t tend to watch shows that revolve around food. And about a year or so after the afore mentioned tweet I did have this week long fascination with the Great British Bake Off where I may have marathoned a few seasons…but I’m pretty sure that was after the next mention of Anthony Bourdain I remember from social media—and that was when I found out about his death.

In The Weeds was written by Tom Vitale, who was one of the guys who saw Anthony Bourdain’s show through many iterations—and apparently many networks. Although starting really at the bottom, Vitale would wind up working with Bourdain through 100 episodes and was eventually director. They traveled around the world doing these shows, some in very dangerous parts of the world, with varying levels of comprehension regarding their impact on and in these dangerous areas. It reads like Vitale is one of those guys with a lot of great experiences and a knack for telling them. But then when you start to listen to everything at once—say in a book, for example—you realize that the participants kinda sound like a bunch of alcoholic fraternity boys going around the world partying and winding up in some serious shit by accident, causing problems and not generally staying around to see what damage they caused.  And I do feel like that is a bit harsh, because I’m also talking about a bunch of non journalists doing a travel/food show. At the very least they were shining a light into places and situations that society tends to conveniently forget exist. But the book is also written by a man who knew someone for 20 years, his good and his bad qualities, how he took things, who he was, and wanted to do justice to that person all the while trying to come to terms with that person’s death, and make sense of their suicide.

When I was in seventh grade one of the eighth graders committed suicide.  I knew who he was and I have a vague memory of him doing something band wise for a a very brief period, but other than that, learning of his death, the feelings surrounding that death, were abstract. That loss you feel over something happening far too close to home but still very distant from you.  As if it is, and it isn’t, happening to you. 

Kurt Cobain killed himself when I was a senior in high school, and I have to admit I wasn’t really surprised—have you listened to the lyrics to some of the songs on In Utero?  Maybe you haven’t.  This is, after all, another Gen X reference.  But I digress… What did surprise me years later was reading where his fellow Nirvana band members said they had no idea it was coming. Maybe that is one of those examples of protection for people close to a situation. If you see something, you feel you have to do something about it so we subconsciously rationalize things or blind ourselves entirely sometimes to protect ourselves. And that is where the wrestling comes in. Vitale admits that looking back you see signs—and the need to blame it on someone, like say Bourdain’s significantly younger on again off again girlfriend…

But all this comes down to not only asking about signs, because we see what we want to see…or see what we need to see. Maybe we notice a friend start to get too thin and we don’t know how to approach them about a potential eating disorder so we say nothing. Maybe we notice that a friend or a family member has been drinking more than usual but we don’t know how to bring alcoholism into the conversation. Maybe that lovely old standby toxic masculinity rears its ugly head and you want to be the fun friend who is keeping the party going instead of bringing in uncool conversations.  

But often times, it’s something else too. What will be my last Gen X reference for today, I have to bring in Buffy Summers, who once said:  

Every single person down there is ignoring your pain 

because they’re too busy with their own. The beautiful 

ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. 

Everyone. If you could hear what they are feeling. The 

loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. 

It’s not. It’s deafening.

That particular episode of Buffy, which in my humble opinion is one of the best, aired months after it was supposed to because that discussion happened between Buffy and Jonathan while he was holding a gun and Buffy believed he was going to start shooting students in school. The episode, entitled Earshot, was originally going to air on April 21, 1999, but didn’t actually air until September 21, 1999. This meant that a lot of stuff had already happened and the episode no longer worked in the story as it was going, but the episode was pulled because on April 20, 1999, a mass shooting occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.  

And now this piece has gone from Goodreads goals, to Tony Bourdain, to school shootings, but it actually all does come together. Because to bring in something that has become literal as well as figurative over the last couple years, this is all about the masks we wear, the facade we put up to protect ourselves, our image, our pain. Our desperate need to create our own narrative and control how it is perceived. However we struggle to do that for ourselves, we still tend to feel that everyone else is presenting an unburdened, uncomplicated self. That we are the only ones that have issues with impostor syndrome and inferiority complexes, when generally the ones that seem the most together are probably the least. 

Truly though discussions on school shootings and society over the last 22 years since Columbine need their own discussion, so I will leave that for another day.  For today, what I wanted to bring in is that I’m all about finding your own narrative, captaining the perception, if you will. And I believe authenticity can still be found in that environment. But how do we do a better job as people with helping all realize that human beings are social animals. We are individuals, but as a society we are one. I see a lot on social media about self care and taking time for yourself, and I truly believe that is important, but equally important is reaching out to the people around us. Our pain is unique to ourselves but also universal.  

To go back to the book, I loved finding out more about how a travel/food show works behind the scenes. As an artist, I have seen first hand how much work goes into things, and I always love finding out more. What also had a great impression on me was how Vitale spoke of Bourdain’s genius with creating the narrative, and how he fought the networks to show the places he wanted to show in the light he wanted to show them in. And maybe that is what this essay has really come to be about—how we get through the day to day, how we deal. How do we square with the world as it is and still be the hero of our own story? How do we work our own narrative?  

But for now I’m calling a wrap on book number 91 of the year.