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Portugal, Summer 2023 ~ Read
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…
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Nice, Spring 2022 ~ Read
Book review to come.
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Ireland, Spring 2022 ~ Read
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.…
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Dublin, Spring 2022 ~ Read
I mean, could this blog even be considered legitimate if I traveled to Dublin and did not read James Joyce for my prep? While I didn’t have spare time to conquer Ulysses (but probably will try now that I have visited Dublin), the fifteen short stories in this book present a fascinating cast of characters from a hundred years ago who the reader-traveler would get to consider against the backdrop of this moody city. Many of the stories provide wonderful environmental settings throughout Dublin, street names and buildings are named explicitly, and as one visits some of the historical landmarks like the port, cathedrals, River Liffey embankments, the characters’ faces…
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Venice, Summer 2021 ~ Read
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…
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St. Petersburg, Fall 2019 ~ Read
This novel by Feodor Dostoevsky is often cited as one of the “supreme achievements in the world literature” for its intricate portrayal of the mental state of its protagonist before and after he commits a grisly and unnecessary murder. St. Petersburg emerges in this story as intricately connected to the main character’s troubles and anguish, depicting poverty, crowded squares and streets, noise and smells, against the backdrop of a hot summer day in a city carved from granite and washed by the Baltic Sea. This is not a love letter to Saint Petersburg, but you will still want to visit the narrow streets and busy corners near Sennaya Square, look…
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Tuscany, Fall 2018 ~ Read
The Italian Party by Christina Lynch is a great easy read ahead of traveling to Sienna. It describes both the city and its environment beautifully, details the famous Palio, Sienna’s horse race in late August, pokes fun at the CIA, and satisfies your run-of-the-mill craving for a textbook romance in Italian coutnryside. Wink, wink. I would say this book accomplishes quite well the task of giving its reader a sense of place. From the book jacket: Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany’s famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of Italy, America,…
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Florence, Fall 2018 ~ Read
I highly recommend reading Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King before arriving in Florence. This national bestseller about the design and construction of Florence’s main jewel, cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, immerses the reader in 14th-15th century life in the city, its citizens, customs, and its brilliant, courageous, irreverent artists, architects and statesmen. My favorite passages in the book included a scene where cathedral construction workers sat high atop the scaffolding in the summer winds drinking wine for lunch; descriptions of the processes involved with casting of the bronze doors of the Baptistry; and scenes of daily life of the citizens of the Florentine Republic.
