Back To School

The end of our summer was a little nuts. We sailed past Lady Liberty on our way out of New York Harbor on a cruise to Nova Scotia. It was a lovely trip, but...

...the last night of our cruise was a race with a hurricane into port. With the airports closed by the storm and Mayor Bloomberg, we were unable to return home to California on schedule. Stuck at my father-in-law's house, which is a lovely place to be, was still stuck.

Evacuated to a hotel because of the hurricane, but never in any danger, we returned to find a very large tree had fallen onto my father-in-law's garage roof.

We were on generator power for about a day while power was restored in the neighborhood, but other neighborhoods nearby lacked power for days, and others had flooded.

Four days later, we finally left for the west coast. By then the boys had missed almost the whole first week of school.

But now we're back in the swing of things, the rhythm of the school year reestablished.

I found I didn't read as much as I would have liked while cruising. But to be honest, I didn't really expect to finish all the books I downloaded onto the Kindle.

There was just too much to eat.

Now I'm back to reading. I've gotten about 100 pages into Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, and I'm enjoying the voice. I love me a historical novel, and I'm liking the new angle on what I already know about Henry VIII and his cronies.

Just picked up Tom Perrotta's new one, The Leftovers, on the recommendation of a well-read cousin. It's about suburbia after the rapture, and what happens to those who are left behind. Sounds quirky and entertaining--I'll let you know.

Vacation Travel Reading: The East Coast

Well, I'm finally back to blogging after a summer off. It was unplanned, but it turned out that my kids were so busy this summer, I spent my time driving them around Los Angeles (even during "Carmageddon"!) instead of blogging.

My summer reading this summer has suffered from a general lack of time to laze at the beach or by the pool, but next week my family is taking it's first-ever cruise, and I'm loading up the suitcase with books! We are sailing out of Brooklyn, New York (who knew?) up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then down the east coast, stopping in St. John, Bar Harbor, Portland, Boston, and Newport before heading back to New York. When I travel, I like to immerse myself in the literature of the place, so I have found some New England literature to read while sailing down its coast.

On my very first visit to Maine, I'm planning to read Sarah Orne Jewett’s classic novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, first published in 1896, for a look at what life in coastal Maine was like at the turn of the twentieth century. People praise Jewett as one of the great American writers that nobody reads any more, and I'm eager to take in her characters and the atmosphere of the rocky coast of Maine.

One of my favorite books in recent years, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, is also set in Maine, but the Maine of the present, not the past. A set of interconnected stories that make up a novel, it's about ornery Maine woman Olive who looks back on her life and relationships in her small town, and it has an amazing sense of place.

There's so much good writing set in Boston that it's hard to choose one book. For non-fiction, I'd like to read David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride, which I've heard is an amazing piece of narrative history, and a compelling read.

I've also had a Boston novel, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, which won the author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1938, on my to-read list for a long time. It is supposed to be another hidden gem by an author who fell out of favor in the 1960s, which satirizes the life and manners of the "Boston Brahmins" in pre-World War II Beacon Hill.

But when we round Cape Cod, I'm going to get out my old copy of Henry David Thoreau's book Cape Cod, an account of his meditative, beach-combing walking trips to Cape Cod in the 1850s, told with his trademark reverence for nature. The Cape is a wondrous place, and Thoreau's travelogue is satisfying a mixture of its folklore and natural history.

Another of my favorite books of all time is set on Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's The Maytrees. It is the chronicle of the ups and downs of a marriage over many years, set in the parabolic dunes of the very tip of the Cape, at Provincetown. I read it while sitting on a Cape beach one summer, and was captivated by Dillard's lyrical language and quirky characters.

We won't be visiting Providence, Rhode Island, this year, but it's a great city, and I was intrigued when I heard that its former mayor wrote a book about his exploits there. Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale is a memoir by former Providence mayor Vincent “Buddy’’ Cianci, and I hear it's as colorful and controversial as the man himself.

When we hit the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, I plan to pick up Thornton Wilder’s fictionalized memoir, Theophilus North. It tells the tale of a young man who spends the summer of 1926 in Newport, teaching tennis to the rich, and getting caught up in their travails, narrated by the elderly North from a distance of 50 years.

I've heard good things about John Casey’s book Spartina, winner of the National Book Award in 1989. It's about Rhode Island fisherman and boat-builder Dick Pierce, his difficult family problems, and his life among the salt marshes and crab fishermen of South County, RI.

What vacation reading have you done this summer? Has any of it reflected the places you visited? What was your favorite summer read?

Sunday Salon--Halloween season

We are pumpkin-y and leafy around here, and the kids insisted that we decorate for Halloween early. We get so many trick-or-treaters, it's insane. We live one street away from a street where everyone decorates the heck out of their houses at Halloween, and trick-or-treaters come from all over. We only get the spillover from that street, and I have to buy 1200 pieces of candy. Isn't that crazy?

But we actually love it. The kids enjoy giving out candy more than they care about trick-or-treating themselves.

My husband and I are getting ready for our trip to Paris, sans children. I cannot wait! I pulled out my copy of A Moveable Feast, to re-read Hemingway's memories of his time in Paris in the 1920s. Apparently he lived there on 5$ a day...ha! Wouldn't that be nice? I often forget how good a writer Hemingway actually was...this book is reminding me of that.

When I threw it out there that I'm looking for something to read while I'm in Paris, a commenter recommended Mavis Gallant stories. I've been meaning to read Gallant for years. So of course I bought a copy of her Paris Stories (published by one of my favorites, New York Review of Books Classics), so I'll have that to bring along.

And I'm still making my own slow way through Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, though I'm almost finished now. I swing wildly between identifying with the characters and being disgusted with them. I can't wait to hear what my fellow book-groupers think next week.

What are you reading on this lovely fall weekend? And do you have any good recommendations for things to do, eat, read in Paris? I'm loving everyone's advice!

Lazy blogger

I've been such a lazy blogger lately, it's pathetic. But at least I haven't been a lazy reader. I've been working my way through Jonathan Franzen's Freedom: A Novel for my book group, which meets in early November. I'm hooked. It's as I remember from The Corrections: A Novel--the man can write.

I ran across an interview with Emma Donoghue, whose novel Room: A Novel s nominated for the Booker Prize. I generally avoid books in which children are in serious peril, but this book sounds fascinating. It's written from the point of view of a five-year-old, which must have been pretty tough to pull off. It's been getting good reviews, so onto my list it goes.

The real reason I've been distracted from blogging is that I'm planning a trip to Paris. My husband and I are going on a sort of second honeymoon to the city of light, a place I've yearned to explore.

I've been obsessed with figuring out where to eat and what to do and where to walk. Of course, we're going in early November, so there is the distinct possibility of rain and rather colder temperatures than I'm used to here in L.A., so I may not be able to do all the things I'd like to do while I'm there. But I'm going to cram a lot in, I promise!

Of course I'm going to make a pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Co., but I'm not sure about other bookish things. I'm going to try to take a chocolate tour of Paris, though. And there's always the question of how many books to bring, and which ones!

So all you fab folks out there who have been to Paris, please leave me some recommendations! What should I see, do, eat, read?

Travel plans

This weekend my family is doing what everyone in their right mind has been avoiding lately, considering the price of gas--getting in the car and driving to our vacation destination. We're going to Yosemite to celebrate my dad's birthday.

Yosemite has been one of my favorite places since I was a child. I remember stopping at a store on the way to Yosemite when I was a kid, and buying two books from a bargain table--Silas Marner, by George Eliot, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--both of which I devoured on that trip. I remember loving Silas Marner, but I don't remember much about The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maybe I'll read it again some day.

In Silas Marner, I remember reading about Silas trying to punish baby Eppie by putting her in the coal hole, and having the punishment backfire on him when she took to going into the coal-hole for fun. When Silas finds her in the coal-hole, dirty with coal dust, she smiles and says, "Eppie in de toal-hole!" I remember finding that bit very funny, and sharing it with my family, and having Eppie's phrase stick with us and become a family joke. Now, with a three-year-old who loves nothing more than making a mess, I relate to the anecdote even more.

For this trip I'm not relying on finding a bargain book table; I'm bringing Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, which I've been saving for the trip, but which I need to finish before my book group meets next week. I loved The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies, so I'm really looking forward to this book. Can't wait to discuss it with my book group.

Do you ever associate books with the places you read them?

And anyone who has read Unaccustomed Earth, what do you think?

I Need a Vacation After That Vacation...

We're back from our marathon trip back east. I took this picture early in the morning of our last day. We went for my husband's college reunion, and also fit in a visit to my father-in-law, so the trip was action-packed, to say the least. A good time was had by all, but traveling with three kids really takes it out of me. And--no surprise--I got next to no reading done. What was a surprise was that for some unknown reason (and I really shouldn't mention it at all, in order not to jinx it for the future) I was fairly calm on both cross-country flights.

I'm almost done with The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 8) by Alexander McCall Smith. I'm enjoying the language and the details about life in Botswana. I even tried to follow advice from the book, as I was jostled by a curmudgeonly old man in the airport who muttered darkly at me. He said something like, "You sure picked a nice place to stop," because he had to wheel his suitcase around me and my daughter, who had chosen that moment to squat in the middle of a crowded corridor, for no apparent reason. I wanted to shout after him, "You try flying with a toddler some time!" But instead I took a breath and tried to smile.

I was thinking of lady detective Precious Ramotswe, who inspired her colleague Grace Makutsi to behave with politeness to a rude receptionist:

Mma Ramotswe would be proud of me, she thought; Mma Ramotswe had always said that the repaying of rudeness with rudeness was the wrong thing to do as it taught the other person no lesson. And she was right about that, as she was right about so many other things. Mma Ramotswe...Mma Makutsi saw the face of her friend and heard her voice, as if she was right there, beside her. She would have laughed at Violet. She would have said of her insults, Little words, Mma, from an unhappy woman. Nothing to think twice about. Nothing.

I have to admit, I had avoided this series of books initially because I don't typically read mysteries or series or big bestsellers. But I found this book to be a charming traveling companion.