Peter Murmann

Ticket to Paradise

No Comments 19 July 2025

The best thing about this rather uninspired romantic comedy is the destination: I wanted to buy a ticket to Bali as I was watching “Ticket to Paradise.” The second best thing is the chemistry between Julia Roberts and George Clooney. You can sense that the two genuinely like each other. As they tell the story, Clooney would only do the film if Roberts was playing the female part they are having fun. Instead of watching the film, travel to Bali. It just moved on my bucket list.

When Novels Mattered

No Comments 11 July 2025

Important article by David Brooks in NY Times.

He writes: I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.
It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher’s Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.

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