Food, travel, books, movies, television shows, and on…and on…

A family member of mine doesn’t like avocado. Won’t dip his chip into guacamole. YUM. A friend I dine with loves escargot. YUK! Slimmy crawl ya’all.

I recently watched—what I thought would be—a simple detective series, but when in episode 7 it was revealed the detective was an alien, and belonged to an alien species that was living amongst us to observe etc., I went URGH! It ruined it for me, but I had to finish as there was only one more episode. It was an unexpected twist, but not for me.

Many years ago before I retired to Hawaii, while getting ready for my trip to Oahu and to tour Pearl Harbor, someone said to me, “Oh, you can see Pearl Harbor in about an hour and hit the beach soon thereafter.” I don’t HIT the beach (I lived near Venice Beach in LA for over 32 years), but love history/culture and when I travel that is what I want to be absorbed in. Others would say “boring.” I spent four hours seeing the exhibits at Pearl, going out to the Arizona Memorial, touring the USS Missouri and the USS Bowfin.

Now on to reading:

I picked up a huge, best-selling book (two million copies sold) at the airport to read on my way home recently from a trip. I had seen this book posted in many forums as “THE” book to read and the accolades from all the usual sources (newspapers, critique forums etc.) raved and raved and raved. It was a fast read (about 300 pages), the writing simple (not really much of any unique voice), but when it got to the point of gangsters behind everything, I said, “Oh, come on, nothing new here.” In any event, it was a commercial success and spun off a limited TV series.

Back home I was looking for comparative titles for my manuscript and found a recently published book that takes place in the same time period and has some similarities. It’s published by a MAJOR imprint from one of the BIG FIVE. After 20% (I tried and tried to keep going) I quit. Because, it is slow, boring and not much happens. It seemed to me that even at 20% in it was still setting up the story, rather than getting me into the action that I had expected from the blurb; perhaps around 30% in it will live up to what I had expected so maybe I’ll go back and slog through it. Was it emotional? I guess, but YAWN, not a page-turner. Oh, and it had a historical prologue that went on for 7 pages. (I tried that in my manuscript and eveyone said CUT!).

So I guess, I like this and you like that.