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What are you watching and/or reading to escape paying attention to the fall of democracy?
My husband and I just started season 5 of “Poldark”—the period drama from Masterpiece. We were watching it in Passport (the PBS app), but Netflix just acquired it, so you can watch it there. Highly recommend (if you like period dramas). I’m a longtime Masterpiece lover, but somehow I missed Poldark when it originally aired. It takes place in the late 1700s, with the main character (Ross Poldark) having returned to Cornwall from Virginia, where he was fighting for the British in “the American War.”
Also, we recently read “A Visit from the Goon Squad” (copyright 2010) by Jennifer Egan in my book group. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011, but I had never read it. This genre-blurring book traces the lives of a GenX record-executive and his young assistant across decades of cultural change, interlocking thirteen short stories into a vivid mosaic of time, music, ambition and memory. I liked it so much, I read “the sequel” The Candy House, which came out in 2022. I can’t really explain it, but the term “sequel” is not particularly apt in this case. It’s more of a prequel & futuristic running out of the stories from Goon Squad. Highly recommend if you’re between 50 and 70 years old and find the zeitgeist interesting. Even if you simply enjoy saying the word zeitgeist, I think you will like these books.
Knowing me as you do (😉), please let me know if you have any other recommendations.
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