Once in a while I will write a longer essay that doesn't fit The Book Shopper format, which is surprising because our editorial policy can be a little loosey-goosey at times. These alternative lengthier works often end up at the Tropics of Meta (ToM). Using their words, ToM "offers a fresh perspective on history, current events, popular culture, and issues in the academic world. Founded in 2010, ToM has published (online) over 1000 essays by historians, social scientists, artists, activists, and creative writers both within and outside the academy, giving voice to communities across the United States and the world."
Last month they published my long essay "The Power of the Endless Love of Automobiles" where I weighed the potential of the pandemic changing our car centric culture versus our inbred relationship (using myself as an example) with automobiles.
In addition to "The Power of Endless Love," I made a couple suggestions in ToM's end of the year summary on what they consider noteworthy in books, film and television, "What Made 2020 Slightly Bearable For the Tropics of Meta Gang, the Scariest of All Gangs". I did a shoutout to Viet Thanh Nguyen for his three-index-card-of-notes book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), which I have written about earlier in this blog, but there are other worthy book suggestions from the ToM gang.
(Coincidently, my first ToM posting in 2017 was a retrospective look at Neil Sheehan's 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. The book is a sad reminder of the carnage a government inflicts when it lies and misleads its people. Sheehan died yesterday in Washington D.C. at the age of 84.)
Television Series
On a lighter note, my selection for recommendations for television series are more escapist in nature such as Netflix's The Norsemen series billed "Game of Thrones meets Monty Python."
Also in 202o, I've become a big fan Richard Ayoade, the "reluctant" host of Travel Man: 48 Hours in, an amusing show for plagued-with-doubt adventurers such as myself who always worries on "whether they should have come" as Ayoade reminds us in each episode.
Both series rely on dry humor and verbal repartee, which somewhat justifies their cameo appearances in a book blog.
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