I am still in search of a great book set in Portugal. For now, I am substituting Journey to Portugal by Jose Saramago as a stand-in. It is a personal travelogue written by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature that goes into a significant level of detail about every last little village and bend in a road and gurgling creek under a country bridge across the country. Saramago incorporates historical background, entertaining personal anecdotes, sometimes strange, sometimes enlightening encounters with locals, as he explores Portugal from north to south. I admit, I didn’t have the time or patience for this level of detail for every Portuguese hamlet, so…

Book review to come.

What a journey of a book! The story of womanhood and motherhood that carries across two centuries and two life stories of female poets in Ireland. It is raw and obsessive, literary and personal, and most of all is an intimate look at a much celebrated and much misunderstood event in Gaelic literature, the 18th-century Irish poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a woman mourning her husband and raging at his murder. A Ghost in the Throat examines the author’s first-person visceral experience of this work, the process of the poem’s new translation, and many vivid pictures of life in Ireland both now and then.…

It started, as always, with a book read ahead of travel. It ended with a fascinating experience, involving a real Cinderella’s glass slipper and a glimpse into the life of one of Venice’s and the world’s most celebrated glass artists of the 20th century. John Berendt’s City of Falling Angels is a non-fiction account of the author’s investigation of the infamous 1996 fire of La Fenice, Venice’s storied opera house. Berendt happened to be on the ground, or, rather, on the water, in Venice in the immediate aftermath of the fire, and his book is an amazing portrait of the city, its politics, inhabitants, benefactors and detractors. The book reads…