A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Travel Reading
Certain reads drip with comfort and charm; they transport readers in time and place to a setting that delights the senses. One such read is R. C. Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September (1931). This quintessentially British story of one family’s annual holiday (yes, in September) to the seaside town of Bognor Regis.
After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
As historical fiction, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) transports its reader to late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Italy as it follows the creative and personal life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
While my husband scours the Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks for the islands and my first grade daughter eagerly listens to geographical and historical information set out in the Hawaii: The Aloha State book (one of a set of the fifty states) she found in the children’s section of our library, I opt for more literary preparation: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, The Story of Hawaii by Hawaii’s Queen, Jack London’s Hawaii stories and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
