Going Home, Going Away

Sometimes a novel is better than a map to help you find your way

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In this issue:

• Malcolm Gladwell’s reading list for his upcoming road trip made me think

• A homesick bookshelf and a few reads for your next trip to France, Buenos Aires, or Venice

• Resources for Readers: Bookmarked has a list of more than 60 books and counting as Tabatha Leggett reads her way around the world country by country

• Resources for Writers: Writing Exercises From Matt Bell has a new exercise up and ready for you

Forget the packing list: what should I read?

Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m not hunkered down at home while Covid plays itself out and that I’m headed to your neck of the woods, the place you associate with home. What should I read before I come? 

I’m not talking about a travel guide – although I very much appreciate them. I’m talking about the novels, the memoirs, the nonfiction accounts or histories that rise from your native soil. 

I’ve been thinking about an article that was shared with me this week. It was a list of the first several books of a 20-book reading list that Malcolm Gladwell put together to read before taking an extended trip through the South. When he knew he was going to take the trip, he wanted to do more than just pack, he wanted to absorb some of the essence of the places through which he’d pass, prepare his mind and senses to receive knowledge, scents, sounds, culture as he made his way along the route he’d mapped out.

I think I saw the ditch where the body was found

I thought instantly of Valentine’s weekend 1998 when my not-yet-mate wooed me with a last-minute flight from snowy New Jersey to his hometown, Los Angeles. We saw two Lakers Games and wolfed down two romantic dinners at In-N-Out Burger. But the city didn’t make a dent in my consciousness until we drove the long snaky turns of Mulholland Drive and side trips downtown that took us past landmarks from the novels of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais, novels we’d read together for fun, escape. 

View from Mulholland Drive (Photo by Ashwin Kumar0

Mulholland Drive Noir (Photo by streetlight from West Coast)

When we passed a house clinging to the side of the canyon, overlooking the freeway, I saw Connelly’s iconic character Harry Bosch inside. As we approached the place where a body had been found in a drainage tunnel off Mulholland, I had a reference that would never appear on a map. Seeing the more well-known landmarks – Parker Center, the Police Academy, and Angel’s Flight created coordinates that helped me begin to map out the city for myself. 

Angel’s Flight (Photo by Dietmar Rabich)

Until that moment, I’d thought of LA as an enormous, distant, wind-scorched, jaded but glittery city. There were the hissing summer lawns and paved parking lots of Joni Mitchell, the images of movie stars, earthquakes, fires, riots, and crime that filled the news. All of it was interesting but irrelevant to me. I was an East Coast person. End of story. Even the flight out that Valentine’s Day weekend in 1998 felt like a fun exotic trip to a place I didn’t really have to know or take seriously. I didn’t realize my husband intended for it to be my introduction to his home, history, and, it turns out, the place to which he very much wanted to return - with me. It worked, sort of. But that’s another story. 

When you grow up in a place, a book placed there pulls you in. My husband couldn’t fly back to LA every weekend of the long years he spent in New Jersey but I think now that those Michael Connelley and Robert Crais novels were places he could live for a while in the part of the world he grew up in and to this day considers home. By introducing them to me, he was offering me not just an escape route but a way into his experiences, his history. As we drove the boulevards and streets that Connelley’s Harry Bosch traveled, we found ourselves moving from Harry Bosch’s stories to my husband’s.  

Something shifted inside me. The LA I’d imagined from a distance became more real, a bit more approachable. The books I’d read simply for distraction and winter entertainment had opened me to the city and, traveling through it, I felt a sense of recognition and connection that excited me and made me want to know more. 

Since then, I’ve made it a point to seek out books to read before traveling. Unlike Gladwell, my strong preference is for fiction first, then nonfiction. I’ve never developed a list of 20 books to read before a trip – I’m lucky if I get to two or three. One invariably makes it into my suitcase and becomes a kind of map that I can refer to throughout the trip. I note the moments when I feel that shift, that spark of recognition and connection. For those few moments, I feel less like a stranger. A character’s or author’s place has become, in some small way, at least for a little while, mine too. 

My Homesick Bookshelf

What books would I recommend to you if you were traveling to Coos County, New Hampshire? Here are a few of them.

I have a single shelf that contains some of the books that make me feel closer to where I grew up. When I see the spines, I feel a deeper sense of recognition and connection that sustains me out here in San Diego. These are among the books I might suggest for someone to read if they were thinking of spending time in northern New Hampshire or Maine or Vermont. I will pause here to explain that 1) northern New Hampshire is distinct from southern New Hampshire and 2) New Hampshire as a whole cannot be lumped in with Maine or Vermont even though most people’s eyes just blur when they see these states clustered together in the northeast corner of a map of the U.S. Yet those who have grown up in small towns along the northern borders of all three states met somewhere else, say California, they would instantly understand a great deal about each other’s lives and homes. 

I’ve often struggled to find novels and memoirs that include Coos County, New Hampshire itself – Jeffery Lent’s novel Lost Nation is the only one on this shelf. But when my brother and I found the novels of Frank Howard Mosher, we read every single one of them. The Northeast Kingdom of his novels and its people, namely the Kinneson family, are not only close geographically to where we grew up but in spirit. Reading them, for me, was a comfort and helped me piece together a better understanding of the place that was home but that also often confused me and left me feeling like the stranger I’d been when I arrived at age ten. 

Here are a few more authors and books I might suggest to someone looking to get a taste of the northern New England:  Jeffery Lent (Lost Nation, In the Fall), Elizabeth Strout (Abide With Me, Amy & Isabel, Olive Kitteridge), Carolyn Chute (The Beans of Egypt, Maine). They can all be found here. And of course histories-even when the books are long out of print – are really helpful. I pilfered these from my parents’ collection and still dip in from time to time: The History of Jefferson, New Hampshire and The Story of Mount Washington. 

Now it’s your turn: what books would you tell me to read if I were heading for the place you call home? Which authors get it just right?

Books That Helped Me Travel

Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of fiction I’ve read before a few trips I’ve been lucky enough to take. Keep them in mind if you are heading to any of these locations at some point in your post-Covid future – or better yet, let me know your picks for these or any other location. 

• Venice, Italy: Any of the Commissario Guido Brunetti books by Donna Leone but why not begin with the first one: Death at La Fenice. The city is a character in and of itself in these books. You can feel the beauty, the history and the struggle to preserve both running throughout.  

• Marseille, France: Marseille Noir, a great collection of short stories in the Noir tradition - love, darkness, betrayal, grit, glitter. It’s all here and it added an unexpected dimension to the one day I was able to spend in the city. 

• Languedoc, France: In Another Life by Julie Christine Johnson. I read this novel way before a trip to the south of France but it was right there in my memory when we found ourselves spending a few hours walking through the castle of Carcassonne. Johnson wove the history of the Cathars and the region through her story so skillfully I didn’t realize how much she’d left me with until I got to see one of the places she includes in the story. 

• Buenos Aires: Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortàzar and translated by Paul Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions translated by Andrew Hurley. I bought these before I went to Buenos Aires over fifteen years ago. I’m not sure they prepared me at all for the visit to the city but they woke me to two writers I needed to spend more time with. I still do.

What books have you read before traveling to a particular place? 

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Resources for Readers and Book Clubs

Bookmarked - This newsletter is made for readers who want to absorb place along with story. Tabatha Leggett is reading one book from every country. Here’s an excerpt from her “About “ section. Here, you will also find a list of the 60+ books that she has read along with links to the profiles she wrote after finishing each. Some highlights: searing autofiction from Norway, a touching Wiradjuri story from Australia, and an astonishing cross-genre epic from Zambia,

Ann Morgan: A Year of Reading The World - Leggett was inspired by Ann Morgan who spent 2012 reading books from as many countries as she could. Here she features the entire list by country. Her blog continues to be a wonderful source of insights about books she has read since then. 

Resources for Writers and Writers Groups

• Writing Exercises From Matt Bell - Author and teacher Matt Bell, author of the New York Times notable book, Appleseed and teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. He offers a once-a-month exercise for writers in all genres and invites discussion.

• New Pages - Weekly lists of publications seeking submissions

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That’s it for this week. Please let me know how you are, what you are reading, and what you want to read. And those of you who loved Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (mentioned last week in our discussion A Scene from a Marriage), I think I want to talk to you. I just finished and I can’t quite locate my feeling about the book. More on that to come.

Check out all the books in this newsletter along with others the community has found at the Spark Recommendations Page at bookshop.org. If you buy, know that your purchase is supporting local bookstores and that any commission we earn will go to support a literacy program selected by the community.

Ciao for now!

Gratefully,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…Trees, Sky, Words at Idyllwild, CA

Robin Kardon escaped to Idyllwild to work on her novel. She says, “After 12 years here in CA, where I am blessed to have the daily choice between mountains and the ocean, I’m more frequently drawn high up.”

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!