Marvelous May

Road Trips, Bookish Travel Observations, and Recent Reads

I am a bit late in sending this month’s newsletter. I try to get it out by the middle of the month but this has been a busy season. I pushed send on April’s newsletter in the airport on my way to Italy, and as I sit down to write, I have just arrived home from another trip. For me, air travel means reading. I rarely watch anything on planes and mostly just rely on my Kindle. I have spent over 40 hours on planes in the last month and that has made for some serious page counts. In my Recent Reads section, I highlight four books I read while traveling in the last four weeks.

Take a Road Trip

It is now officially “summer reading season.” The book world a lot of effort goes into creating summer reading lists and pushing lighter books. My reading life doesn’t change alot over the summer though I love seeing all the lists. I especially enjoyed this list dedicated to road trip books. Some of my favorite road trip reads are:

• West With The Giraffes - A fun and adventurous ride coast to coast across the U.S.

• Lincoln Highway - A wild chase with some zany though likable characters and a controversial ending.

• Take Me With You - A summer RV trip with lasting consequences; themes of found family and grief.

• This Tender Land - A river trip with friends becoming family.

These backlist titles are all easily available from the library or in paperback. For a fun road trip movie, I recommend The Guilt Trip.

• How glorious is this bookstore? The Albertine Bookstore is located inside the French Consulate in NYC. Though most books are in French, they carry many English translations. I am currently keeping a list of things to do and see next time I visit NYC and this is definitely on my list.

• Do you relish stone homes, views of the sea, and built-in bookcases with charm and character? Feast your eyes on this gorgeous Greek home of iconic travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

• Here is an entertaining longform article about Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen. The behind-the-scenes details in this piece are fascinating. Fun fact: it took 23 years to bring the Crunchwrap Supreme to market! Not gonna lie, I love a crunchy taco with fire sauce.

Bookish Travel Notes:

We came across so many delightful bookstores in the Italian cities we visited - Siena, Florence, Bologna. Most had sections for English books though I like browsing the large selections of art, photography, and graphic novels where no translation is needed. I packed light and only purchased a thin novel, Mr. Palomar by Italian author Italo Calvino. Travel is, at its roots, an immersive practice of noticing, and this book is about an eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things.

Italy compared to US Blind Date with Books

Also, leave it to the Italians to have a beautifully wrapped display of “Blind Date with A Book.” No plain brown paper for them. The display on the left is from La Feltrinelli in the Florence train station for goodness sake!

Recent Reads

The Man Who Died is one of my favorite reads of the year. I have no idea what put this on my radar; I opened it on the plane and couldn’t put it down. Finnish mushroom entrepreneur Jaakko is living a happy life with a wife he loves and a successful business, but things are not as they seem. When the book opens, he has just been told that he is being slowly poisoned and is going to die. Besides being stunned, this prognosis startles Jaakko into action. Freed from his typical constraints, Jaakko decides to find his murderer, sort out his personal life and save his mushroom business. This book is cleverly plotted with a funny and irreverent tone. I immediately talked my husband into reading this on our trip and he wholeheartedly enjoyed it. We had so many discussions about the book, foremost being that it should be a movie. I am thinking Quentin Tarantino as the director and possibly Paul Rudd as our lead. Sadly when we came home and before I could start writing the screenplay, we discovered that this book has already been turned into a TV series, but the truly bad news is that it is only available in Finland. [Published: 2017, Pages: 289]

All That Is Mine I Carry With Me is the long awaited new novel from the author of Defending Jacob. (The spectacularly vague title of this new release makes me crazy.) Here Landy has moved closer to literary crime fiction, spending a lot of time on the setting and characters. This is not a legal novel, though lawyers play center stage. It’s more a “what if” novel. What if your mom disappeared? You came home from school one day and she was gone, and you have to go on living. What if the only suspect was your dad, but there was no evidence? How would that impact the rest of your life? Through different voices, Landry examines what this would be like for the three siblings in the Lark family. File this under slow burn. Even though it is not a typical thriller or mystery, I found it hard to put down. Landy does an excellent job setting the scene for life in the 1970s. The characters feel real and in the end, the author does a good job of resolving the story. [Published: 3/23, Pages: 319]

It has been a while since I pondered a memoir as much as this one. In You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith goes deep into the personal cost of her divorce. As I listened, I realized that I have read many memoirs dealing with grief, illness, and addiction, but I don’t think I have ever read one centering around divorce. It is a hard subject that many people have complicated feelings about, including shame and guilt. People can gloss over the disruption and devastation that divorce causes in families. This is a beautiful book written by a poet who knows exactly how to phrase things. I loved hearing Smith read the audio version. She states that this is not a tell-all because none of us know “the all," it is a tell-some. Her life unravels with a pinecone and a postcard. And yet, as she states later, she is still here, with her children, in her home, down the street from her family. Only one thing has changed, and yet everything has changed. As a child of an unexpected divorce, I appreciate the honesty and nuance that Smith writes with, as well as the many things she still manages to keep private. This is a beautifully written memoir by a gifted poet. Here is a link to her poem “Good Bones” that went viral in 2016, and where the title of her book is from. [Published: 3/23, Pages: 316]

Did I get back from Tuscany and immediately begin reading Under the Tuscan Sun? Yes I did. I missed this book when it was such a huge success in 2003. Perhaps it was the cross country move, my third pregnancy, or just a general lack of interest in someone redoing a home in a distant land. Having read it now, I can easily understand why it was so popular. Mayes writes about buying an old stone home, their multiple renovation projects, and of the long history of the region. Her descriptions feel as accurate now as they were two decades ago. Life in Tuscany is slow, beautiful, and delicious. I love the Eutruscan and Roman history, the personal anecdotes she weaves throughout, and the cozy descriptions of family gatherings. If you have never read this book, I highly recommend considering it for a summer read since much of the book takes place during the summer season and it transports you directly to Tuscany. [Published: 2003, Pages: 304]

Thanks for joining me this month and sharing all my bookish joy!