Category: Books

Machu Picchu for Tea Time

Set back by the mid-January wind chill and an ick-disease variation of the flu, I turn to Mark Adams’s Turn Right at Machu Picchu to carry me away far from the sniffles and Nyquil-charged fog. I am already enthused by…

The Wild Backstory

Although my idea of “roughing it” involves having to walk from my cabin to a clubhouse for dinner, I still enjoy books about more rugged adventures involving far more outdoorsiness than I am ever likely to pursue. I sometimes imagine…

Tempted to Walk the Path of Saint James

Until reading Sonia Choquette’s book, Walking Home: A Pilgrimage from Humbled to Healed, I had no idea that travelers deliberately seek to walk the paths of original disciples of Jesus Christ. In a little over a month, and not being…

Liquid Courage

If a timid traveler needs just one book to catapult from a shelf, hit her on the head, and thrust itself into her backpack, it’s Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books 2010). Take the travel guides, yes, but bring…

The Book to Carry while Cruising Paris

I’ll confess to having a stack of Parisian histories (and a number on my Kindle as well) that have been leafed through but not exactly read. I mean to, I want to, I just haven’t. I am not sure where…

Gertrude Three Ways

I first meet Gertrude Stein during my Pablo Picasso phase, and my Hemingway phase, and my F. Scott Fitzgerald phase and then I come across her in Bryant Park in New York and I see her resting at Père-Lachaise in…

Plantations in Rhode Island?

Curious about the official name of the 13th state, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, I stop by the Kingston Hill Store in Kingston on the way out of Newport and quickly discover a local history section so fantastic I hardly…

Reading Without Reservations

I pick up Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman (Random House, 2000) at North Salem, N.Y.’s Ruth Keeler Memorial Library book sale, so I don’t have a lot of money invested in it. The first 20…