Feldman's Faves: March 16, 2026

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

First, a huge congratulations to Hari and Angelika on the birth of their son, Rafi. Very exciting news.

This is one of those weeks where it is a great time to be alive if you are a sports fan. March Madness is underway, the WBC is in “full swing”, crazy trades and epic reverses in the NFL and of course BAM’s 83 point performance last week. LOVE IT.

Also, I was very happy to see One Battle After Another win best picture last night. It’s a really great movie.

In other news, there is a lot of buzz around the return of Hanna Montana (I know you are excited). Mark your calendars – March 24!

Finally, this Articling year is flying by - this Friday is the last day of the Third Rotation. Please join me in thanking Josephine and Serayah for all of their great work..

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

THE SEA By: John Banville – I have now gone down a John Banville rabbit hole and discovered his most famous novel, The Sea, which is also excellent and worthy of the Booker Prize he won back in 2005. His mode of story telling going that is both non-linear and an organized stream of consciousness is really unique and gripping for the reader. It also required (at least, for me) keeping a dictionary handy when using words such, “perspicacity”, “etiolated” and “prelapsarian”, but in a very non-pretentious way. The story is really interesting but the way he tells it is where the magic is in Banville’s writing. As one reviewer notes, “John Banville was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2005 with his lyrical novel The Sea. Literary pundits had put their money on Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George walking away with the prize or a repeat Booker success for Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go. No-one was more surprised than the Banville at his success, particularly because he felt that two of his earlier books were more like the “middle-ground, middlebrow work” that he felt judges tended to choose. By contrast he considered The Sea to be more of an “art novel”. It was a comment which ruffled more than a few feathers among the literary elite. Banville’s description of The Sea as an ‘art’ novel could be considered a strange term for a novel that relies on the well-used device of a character returning to a place that played a significant part in his earlier years. But that simplified version of the plot doesn’t to justice to a novel that is a richly textured and patterned meditation on the nature of memory and loss and of the bitter-sweet nature of first love. In The Sea, the widowed art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where as a young boy on the verge of adolescence, he once spent a family holiday. It’s a trip that is at once an escape from the traumatic loss of his wife but at the same time an opportunity to confront a dramatic event that occurred during that summer seaside sojourn. The nature of that event is held back from the reader until the closing pages of the novel, not because Banville is planning a big dramatic reveal but because his real interest is the process of recollection. Morden’s odyssey into his past takes place through a series of vignettes which reveal his relationships with his father, his wife and his daughter. He recalls also the Grace family who also holidayed in the same resort and whose allure he found impossible to resist. This is a tale that sucks you in; that takes you along meandering lanes of memory only to suddenly detour to a different time and place and then unexpectedly switch direction yet again to bring us back to the here and now. Banville has been compared to Beckett though at the 2013 Hay Festival he told the audience his favourite authors are Henry James and Georges Simenon (though not the Maigret novels he was at pains to emphasize). Reading The Sea is a hypnotic, mesmerizing experience largely due to Banville’s mastery of the atmosphere-laden sentence. The opening of the book is tantalizingly enigmatic:

‘They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again. Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.’

With an opening like that, I was hooked. And I hope you will be too. This was the first Banville book I had read. I know it will not be the last.” I really enjoyed this one will continue to work on his books. Here’s a good review from he Guardian– https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/06/fiction.johnbanville

ACQUIRED - Formula 1 – F1 Racing is the most popular sport in the world and as a die-hard sports fan I know next to nothing about it. I don’t understand it, it’s hard to watch on TV and am perplexed by those who watch it in person. I am obviously missing something here. The recent Netflix Series, Brad Pitt’s movie and Kim Kardashian’s latest love interest are just some of the many examples as to how this sport is slowly taking over the world. What cannot be denied is the business of F1 where the floor for buying into a team today is $1.5Bm, the average team costs over $3B and the big guns (Ferrari and Mercedes) are worth over $6B . As per usual, the boys from Acquired take a very deep dive here explaining both the history and the business of F1. It is a really interesting story and is making me reconsider my attitude. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it. Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?i=1000752750417

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon