brainsplotch

When I first heard and totally enjoyed "People are People" by Depeche Mode in the summer of 1985, and subsequently abandoned the band for decades as being "uncool" (or whatever my rationale), I never would have imagined that in 2023 I'd be led back to them.  It was a confluence of events that made this happen. The enthusiastic recommendations of a few friends, the appearance of "Never Let Me Down Again" in the HBO series The Last of Us, and the release of a terrific new album, Memento Mori . I backtracked and picked up Some Great Reward , Music for the Masses , and Violator . I'm realizing the error of my ways all those years ago. In my late teens and twenties (and maybe even to a lesser extent thirties and forties) I had a bifurcated view of music: it was either cool or not cool. What determined "coolness" was fairly arbitrary. It could be the way the musician(s) looked or dressed, the degree of "profundity" or "relevance...

I finished reading Then Again, Maybe I Won't and maybe now I have the Judy Blume YA out of my system and am ready to return to "grown-up books." I enjoyed Then Again... and it's yet another book I wish I'd read as a kid and not waited until adulthood to get to. Though I didn't like it quite as much as Are You There God, It's Me Margaret , it is still a more than worthy follow-up to that classic novel. I appreciate Judy Blume's willingness to write about slightly screwed-up characters who don't always do the right thing. Tony Miglione, our 13-year-old protagonist, is a decent kid but far from perfect. He notices that Lisa, the attractive 15-year-old neighbor girl (whose bedroom window just happens to be directly across from Tony's) changes her clothes without closing the blinds. Tony becomes a voyeur, though he seems to have some guilt surrounding it, but not enough to quit. In fact, when his parents ask him what he wants for Christmas, he only ...

My dip into the world of Judy Blume continues. Upon finishing Forever... , I am now reading another book I missed back in my youth, Then Again, Maybe I Won't . Back to Forever... I enjoyed it--not to the level of Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret-- but not too far off. As I mentioned in my previous post, the book deals frankly with teen sex, but in a realistic manner. Not sensationalistic, not glamorizing. That said, I can see why adults had a fit about it when it was published in 1975 and continue to have a fit about it in 2023.  So now it's on to Then Again, Maybe I Won't, which was published in 1971. This book is essentially the boys' version of Are You There God?.. .. This time, the main character--Tony--is a 12-year-old boy from a middle class Italian-American family in Jersey City. His father sells some sort of electronic invention (identified as an "electronic cartridge"--whatever that is) and gets a lucrative new job. The family moves to what s...