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 story—a contemporary effort to recreate Hiram Bingham’s path toward Machu Picchu—and the romance of…
Category: Books
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 that I’ll move more toward this type of travel and, truth-be-told, I have over the…
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 a rugged outdoorsy type, Choquette covered the 500-plus mile long Camino de Santiago in Spain….
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 along a work that will get you on the plane, get you to the Via…
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 I picked up a copy of Edmund White’s The Flâneur, but it’s the perfect little…
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 Paris and I would swear I see her in a little park in Mallory Square…
A Little Belize, A Little Mexico, A Little Midlife Crisis?
In my on-again, off-again love affair with my Kindle (love the convenience, miss the smell of paper), I splurge and buy a digital copy of The Last Full Service Crocodile Ranch in Quintana Roo (2012) by Richard Hofheimer. It’s an engrossing story about a cancer survivor, on her second marriage, on her second honeymoon, on…
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 have time to browse through the old postcards, another whimsical hobby of mine (such good…
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 pages or so really annoy so that I wonder whether I should stick with it,…
Armchair Traveling: Next Destination—Asia
As a firm believer in writing it down to make it happen, reading about it to make it happen also is an avid pursuit of mine. I don’t just set my travel goals, I then read about the places I want to see. I read history, of course, but also memoirs and fiction. Well-told stories,…