In which we return from a break.

A few notes from our 3-year delayed honeymoon in New Zealand:

1. Some generic honeymoon stuff: It was great! Michelle said it best about NZ: it’s like if you took all of the natural wonder of the US and then compressed it into one state. It’s insanely beautiful. Writing about natural beauty strikes me as kind of silly, so I’ll mostly avoid it here, but the geothermal geysers were other-worldly.
2. We also ate well. Decadently, even, so much so that my body was definitely ready to be back eating salad again. The food was tremendous, Wellington’s prowess in that department not undersold.
3. We have figured out a few things about how to travel: how much to do each day, how much to do in each place, and how much alone time to give each other.
4. We took on as a challenge, and it worked, to treat the whole trip as the honeymoon. Not just the “fun” parts in New Zealand, but all of the travel as well. Even the interminable delays! And it worked. This mindset affected how I packed, which included more books than usual.

Speaking of which, I finished 4 books on the trip/in the last day or so.

I think my favorite was Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (now a show on Amazon Prime). It’s a fictional oral history of a 70s band loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. I’m an easy mark for this, but I still think it’s excellent for two reasons. First, the fictional oral history fixes beautifully the problem with most oral histories: you’re either missing accounts you really need or the narrative just doesn’t fit together. Reid is able to make the beautiful, seamless transitions that represent the best parts of oral histories, but do it over and over again. Second, she crafts believable songs and musical narratives in the band. Creating something like this, you have to get this part right, and she does.

Sitting in various parts of airports and coffee shops in Auckland I finished Zonal Marking by Michael Cox, a nonfiction book about soccer where Cox examines the shift in tactics over the last 30 years with an eye on how it has developed in each country. Enjoyed this as well. The most interesting part to me was: it’s not just about who has the best ideas as a coach, though that often wins for a 2-3 year period. But after that whatever they were doing gets copied and perfected by someone else, or competitors develop a solution to neutralize it, or both. Instead, lasting figures (most notably here, Pep Guardiola) learn from each other, adapt appropriately and consistently, and are in states of constant reinvention.

This morning I finished Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It asks a lot from the reader (plenty of references to ancient Greek texts, multiple intersecting narratives across large time periods) but is ultimately so rewarding that it’s more than worth it. I think Marcel Theroux’s review summarizes this well: “It’s a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences. “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading. Manuscripts do burn, but the fact we have held onto so many and still find continued value in reading them is an aspect of our humanity that this novel justly celebrates.”

(I also read A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, liked it fine, but don’t have much to say about it)

Watching: We finished the first season of The Last of Us last night, and the penultimate episode was excellent.

Listening to: Meet Me @ The Altar’s Past // Present // Future, Milk for Flowers by H. Hawkline, and 10,000 Gecs by 100 Gecs.

Playing: Back on my bullshit….replaying Elden Ring.