Travel Reads

Current Read: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Current Listen: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Hey there. If you didn't know, I just got back from the magical land that is Peru. Learned a lot, grew spiritually as a person, hiked 27 miles through the Andes, etc. And then I had a birthday! I'm now 26. Closer to 30 than 20. Crazy. BUT. Now that I'm home and recovered (and avoiding a deep clean of my apartment that desperately needs to happen), I thought I'd share with you what I read when I was traveling!

First, my travel philosophy is this: With long trips especially, the idea of running out of things to read just HORRIFIES me. Like nightmares forever. And even though the rational part of me knows that I could, you know, BUY another book if I ran out of things to read, this doesn't generally compute while I'm packing. So for this 17 day trip I brought...8 books. Which is too many. I only bring paperbacks, and obviously only things that I own. And even with virtually no reading happening during the four day hike, I still got all the way through four books and halfway through a fifth. Also, unless I really, really love a book, I leave it in whatever hostel we happen to be staying in. So I did come back a few books lighter. Here's the rundown:

1) The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. This one had been on the shelf for a long time, since I didn't want to read it until I finished all the Austens (all the COMPLETE Austens, anyway). This is the story of a group of women (and one man) at various points in their lives who participate in a book club that is exclusively for Jane Austen novels. The story follows their lives as they read, and I think one is supposed to see the parallels between their lives and those of Jane Austen's heroines. This book was kind of a letdown, to be honest. The characters were compelling, and I thought some of the language she used was really clever and very Austen-y, but it didn't keep my attention as much as I thought it could have. I did like that it is full of dynamic, mostly female characters, most of whom are not driven SOLELY to fulfill a romantic story line. And their discussions of the books did make me want to go back and read all of the Austens again. Gave it 3/5 stars. Left it in Cusco.

2) Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. THIS BOOK. I did not leave this one in South America. About 20 pages in I started writing notes in the margins. My travel companion was probably tired of hearing excerpts by the time I finished it. I grabbed it off my shelf because I have owned it for YEARS, but it was accidentally the perfect book for the trip. The book begins at a birthday party being held in a third world South American country. The party is for a Japanese CEO who might invest in the struggling country, and his favorite opera singer has been brought in to sing at the party. After her last aria, the party is hijacked by a group of terrorists who are searching for the president of said country. The book, though, is not a traditional thriller. It is a beautiful, beautiful character study of both the hostages AND the terrorists. The prose is just magnificent, especially when Patchett writes about music. Long example, but I couldn't stand to cut it down:

"They each had a task, extremely specific instructions. The lights were to be cut off after the sixth song, no one ever having explained in their lives the concept of an encore. No one having explained opera, or what it was to sing other than the singing that was done in a careless way, under one's breath, while carrying wood into the house...When a girl in their village had a pretty voice, one of the old women would say she had swallowed a bird, and this was what they tried to say to themselves as they looked at the pile of hairpins resting on the pistachio chiffon of her gown...But they knew this wasn't true. In all their ignorance, in all their unworldliness, they knew there had never been such a bird."

MAGIC. Also, the further along in the book I got, the more convinced I became that it is meant to take place in Peru. References to Lima, to Quechua, to pisco...it just made it that much more magical to me. As you can imagine, this sort of scenario can't end happily. So brace yourself. But READ IT. 5/5 stars.

3) Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. I may be the only person in the universe who had not read this book. So I figured it was about time. I read it all the way through during our massive travel day, when we had to go from Puno, at the southern tip of Peru, to Lima, then Lima to Tarapoto, then Tarapoto to Iquitos, way up north at the Amazon River Basin. I did stay up to finish it despite the tiring, stressful nature of that day, so that says something. This very, very famous book is an imagining of the circumstances behind the creation of one of the most famous paintings in western art history, Girl With a Pearl Earring. The novel does a great job of imagining not only Vermeer's life, but the lives of his family and the other citizens in the town of Delft. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but a very entertaining, compelling read. Hopefully someone else in Lima gets to enjoy it. 3/5 stars.

4) Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. BECAUSE IT WAS TIME. Though I think that I have sadly missed my opportunity to see the movie in theaters. This was much more than just chick lit. I love how this book takes the boy meets girl story and has it star the quirky best friend character and a douche bag quadriplegic. Will Traynor has lost his will to live after an accident leaves him unable to continue his daredevil lifestyle, and Louisa is hired to be his companion and wants to show him that life is still worth living. OH MAN. The crying. All the crying. The sequel is hopefully coming from the library soon. 4/5 stars.

5) The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean. You guys already know how I love me some World War II historical fiction. Marina is an elderly woman struggling with Alzheimer's disease, and though she has trouble remembering her children, she is increasingly recalling what she has tried so long to forget: her time as a tour guide at the Hermitage museum during the siege of Leningrad. The most powerful aspect of this novel is how young Marina must use her memory of the museum as it was before the war to cope with her present circumstances, which is then contrasted with her frustration with Alzheimer's. I enjoyed the flashback sections of this much more than the present day material, but I am generally just not a fan of Alzheimer's/dementia related plot lines. I have to stay disengaged or I will just become a complete emotional wreck. I saw the movie Still Alice by myself for a reason. Though it wasn't a perfect book, it was very enjoyable and moved Russia much higher up on my list of places to travel. 3/5 stars.

And now here we are. I'm home and back to reading more library books than books I already own. But I guess that's better than reading books that I own because I bought a bunch of new ones. More to come soon because yay summer! That's all she read.