Oh, it’s on now
Despite my fruitless efforts to slow down time, Christmas is basically here now. On Friday, daughter Hannah and I went tree-hunting in the parking lot of Ganahl Lumber in Los Alamitos, where we’ve gone for the last five or six years. They always have such a great selection that we usually pick our ideal tree up after just looking at a couple.
And our son Ray came over once again to do laundry and enjoy a family meal that my wife made, and more importantly put up the Christmas lights, a chore that includes scaling a ladder to great heights. It’s great having a son who will risk his life because I don’t want to risk mine; I have my whole life ahead of me.
To my credit, however, I took on the equally important job of holding the ladder while staying prepared to leap to safety in the unlikely event of Ray falling down and injuring me.
Shopping never seems to end during December. Did I buy enough stuff for everyone? The answer seems be “no” each year, so I grabbed Hannah again for some last-minute junk at Target and Crate & Barrel to supplement some big-ticket items that have left our bank account feeling bereft and lonely for the holidays.
And, as hard as it might be to believe, all this activity didn’t stop me from devoting a measurable chunk of my golden years to reading and watching streaming offerings.
What I’m reading now
Going back to plug in some holes of books I should’ve read by now, I bought “Never Let Me Go,” by Nobel and Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a daunting and heartbreaking story set in near-future England. The story follows three children into an ever-tense adulthood. The kids, as we soon find, are clones being raised by carers in a series of institutions isolated from the outside world where they are trained for a life in which they will become organ donors. The children, three of them in particular, share joy and companionship, with the usual squabbles and alliances as they reach “completion,” that is death as a result of numerous donations. If it sounds like a bit of a downer, it’s because it is, though one filled with love and devotion.
The 2005 novel was made into a movie in 2010. As much as I liked the book, I’m not sure if I need to see the film.
Getting over “Never Let Me Go”
I needed this one: “Good Material,” by Dolly Alderton, a funny and breezy romp from the point of view of a fourth-rate comedian trying really hard to get over a long-term relationship, with several doomed attempts to create a new one while struggling and getting critically bombed for his work in comedy. I’m not sure how it turns out because I’m only a bit more than halfway through. The book was recommended by Lindsey Dobruck, who by some wild coincidence is the spouse of Jeremiah, one of my bosses at the Post. I ignore either of them at my peril.
What you should watch now!
I could’ve finished “Good Material” a lot quicker if Netflix hadn’t surprised me with the release of its first eight-episode series of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “100 Years of Solitude.”
The power of the 1967 novel is immense and the book is considered to be among the most important works in history. Literary critic Harold Bloom raved that “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb… you must notice everything at the moment you read it.”
Remarkably, the Netflix series meets all the challenges of jumping from the page to film in the making of a movie that has long been thought to be impossible to translate to the screen.
It follows seven generations of the family headed by Jose and Úrsula Buenda in the Colombian town they founded. The story is full of mysticism, prophecies, premonitions and magic with a family tree muddled by incest, inbreeding and orphans and it covers way too much to allow for a terse answer to “What’s the book about?”
In Spanish with subtitles, which is no barrier for the viewer (thank God for not dubbing it with English — that’d just be stupid).
The series is truly spectacular, sweeping and beautiful even in its sadness and it’s inarguably a classic. Watch it. And wait for Season 2, which is yet to be scheduled by Netflix.