I agree with your comments in that I missed a major theme which is the sub culture of people who read books, the vast middle class plain old Joe 6 pack American

I agree with your comments in that I missed a major theme which is the sub culture of people who read books, the vast middle class plain old Joe 6 pack American, HN readers which are a very peculiar subgroup of the population but mistakenly think they typical, and finally the population of people still wealthy enough to travel don't seem to have much overlap anymore. At one point lots of joe 6 packs read books and a nice book about visiting the home land of Ireland sounds like a nice amount of adventure and was semi-realistic enough to consider, not so much anymore.