Merry Wanderer of the Night:
travel writing

Deanna Fei's A Thread of Sky is the story of three generations of Chinese women going on a trip to China. For some it means returning home, for others it means learning about a history they've never experienced. Each woman has her own struggle, her own secret. These secrets keep them from understanding and knowing each other. Throughout the novel there is the question from the grandmother, "What kind of woman will you be?"-- but then there is the answering question, "Does planning what kind of woman I will be trap me?" This is truly the most underrated book I've read this year.

Fei has that slow writing style I've become such a fan of lately. It's not so much the story that kept me going, although the story has plenty of twists and turns, but the beautiful prose. Each chapter focuses on one woman and Fei's writing style has tiny changes to suit each woman's personality. For the bulimic Sophie the writing is a little quicker, more urgent. For Irene, the mother who planned it all after her husband died, the writing is desperate. For the grandmother the writing is somewhat stern as she looks at these women and wants to tell them exactly how to live their lives.

A Thread of Sky questions what Feminism means today from the perspective of an old Chinese immigrant, a former Feminist revolutionary, a middle-aged Chinese American, and a teenager. What is clear is that the answer is something different for each woman, and the answer is also a struggle. Does Feminism really mean having it all? Or does it mean choices? Or does it mean going against the grain? Maybe it means all three things.

This is just great fiction writing. I was truly impressed by the skill Fei exhibited in manipulating her writing style to fit the time, place, and person. It was one of the books where I occasionally had to set it down and just say out loud, "This book is so good."

I read this book as part of TLC Book Tours. Be sure to check out the other reviews posted about it.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

This past spring I took a fitness walking course with my best friend from high school and we had to read a portion of A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson. I was immediately taken by the part we read because he spends a lot of time discussing how difficult it is to get around America without a car. How our country is not built for bikes or walking. This is something I'm passionate about and really noticed when I moved from Iowa City back to the Des Moines area the summer after my freshman year. That is all the book is about, in fact the majority of the book is a travelogue of Bryson (who is also from Des Moines I might add!) and his old friend Katz attempting to hike all 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Quite the feat, and you can guess right from the beginning that they won't be able to do it.

It doesn't really matter though. Bryson makes so many interesting observations about America along the way that I could have cared less about him actually hiking the trail. They stop in several small towns for breaks from the wilderness and they rediscover the wonders of a hot shower and warm meal. While there, Bryson talks about the loss of small town America and the loss of the sidewalk. He talks about hitchhiking and bonding out in the woods. He talks about real nature versus cultivated nature. And he does all of this very sarcastically, very wittily. The first three fourths of this book are really a joy; full of information but still interesting to read, the way all nonfiction should be. This example about the roads built by the Forest Service is a great example of this.

"The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service's 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third--49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio--is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon's Umpqua National Forest."

I'm glad I read this book, but I found the last fourth of the book rather difficult to get through. Bryson decides to leave the trail for awhile, and when he returns he decides to drive portions of the trail, get out and hike, and then drive a little further. This is extremely boring and difficult to read about. It felt like Bryson ran out of steam towards the end both physically and mentally, and the writing just gets crappy. Long gone are there great sarcastic paragraphs chock full of information about the Forest Service, and we are introduce to a crabby, sleepy Bryson who just doesn't give a damn.

I give this book a B.

Also, I recently started a podcast called Green Reads with my boyfriend and this is the first book were going to talk about. We're in the process of submitting our podcast to iTunes but in the meantime you can check out our blog, listen to our introduction podcast, and follow us so you know when our regular podcasts are going up!

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In general I'm a big fan of The Best American Series and the new one's for 2010 just came out. I bought The Best American Essays

and The Best American Travel Writing

since they are my two favorite collections. I flipped through the table of contents, skimming for essayists I know and love, and new ones I'm interested to read, when I saw that The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Essays both have an essay by David Sedaris in them. It's the same essay! Guy Walks into a Bar Car, which originally appeared in The New Yorker and can be read online. David Sedaris is known for being funny, so if you're looking for some giggles this is a great essay.

I wasn't vastly impressed by this piece but I think it's worth mentioning since it was chosen by Bill Buford and Christopher Hitchens this year. The essay is about Sedaris' trip on a train. In the bar car he meets a man who he is possibly attracted to, and he gets to talking and drinking with him. The guy is a total wreck, an alcoholic, screwed up family, and unemployed. Later in the essay he talks about a Lebanese man he met on a train some years before (he was 24), he felt an instant connection with this man, and the man invites him to come stay at his college with him, but Sedaris refuses. He later regrets this decision because, well, I think we've all been in that situation before. The essay looks at the train and travel as a kind of hopeful, romantic, new beginning, but then acknowledges that this is often not the case. And even when it is the case, we are often afraid of being truly romantic.

I love the way the essays starts: "In the golden age of American travel, the platforms of train stations were knee-deep in what looked like fog. You see it all the time in black-and-white movies, these low-lying eddies of silver. I always thought it was steams from the engines, but now I wonder if it didn't from cigarettes." This is a great set up for the rest of the essay. Sedaris gives us a well known image, beautiful, foggy, romantic train platforms that are full of mystery and elegance, but then he turns around and says something he has always though as beautiful and enticing might actually just be something gross or unimportant. And this is something I think happens a lot in travel. You dream up a place to be exactly what you want, but once you arrive it isn't anything like you expected. I experienced this when I went to Rome. I thought it would be this beautiful, romantic place, and I ended up thinking it was kind of disgusting.

He further ties this into age. He meets the Lebanese man at 24, but he meets the drunk more recently as an older man. "When you're young, it's easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you traveled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing next year and the year after that. Of course, you don't, though, and the next thing you know you're an aging, unemployed elf, so desperate for love that you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic." So in some ways life is a lot like travel. We enter with expectations, but as time goes on we realize they might not be exactly what we thought.

You can read this essay at The New Yorker, and if you do please come back to tell me what you thought of it!

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I got some wanderlust from my dad and I took a travel writing class last year, so I was really intrigued by Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

, one of the few full length travel narratives I've seen written by a female. To add to my interest, one of my good friends from high school really liked the book so I knew it had to be pretty good. Rita Golden Gelman has reached a turning point in her life. She is living with her husband in California, but they no longer love each other and she hates their modern lifestyle. Her children are on their way to college and she doesn't feel like they need her anymore. Her career, a children's book author, doesn't require her to stay at home. When she and her husband decide to take a break she goes south of the border to Mexico for an intensive Spanish class and finds that she loves traveling. After that trip she changes her life and has no permanent address, she lives on a small amount of money, travels, and meets new people.

The bulk of this book takes place in Indonesia and in my opinion it could have only taken place in Indonesia. Her time in Mexico shows us where her nomadic journey began, but her random trips in the United States and Canada could have been much shorter. Indonesia was really the only place where Rita got to know the people around her and really participated in the culture. I really liked the places Rita went to in the book, but she didn't get to know hardly anyone so it was basically just a book about everywhere she went in this time span and everything she did.

I wanted to like this book a lot. I love the idea of just packing up your stuff, taking off, and seeing the world in your own way. Rita's voice got in the way though. The book is written in the present tense, which lends itself to "I did this, I see this, I hear this" writing. She spends so much time talking about what she did that you don't ever get a good feeling of what the culture is like. She spends at least 100 pages in Indonesia but I didn't come away from the book with any different perspective on it. And that's not totally necessary for me to enjoy a travel narrative. The Moon, Come to Earth didn't change my perspective on Portugal, but it did make me think about travel in a way that I wouldn't have without the book. That was not the case with Tales of a Female Nomad. Honestly, I thought Rita was a little self-centered and while I enjoyed reading about a few of the amazing things she did, there was always this nagging feeling in my head that the way she was telling them just wasn't right. This book could have been awesome, but it ended up just being okay.

I give this book a C.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Thomas Kohnstamm's travel book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism

was published in 2008 and raised some questions about the ethics of Lonely Planet guidebooks and some questions about Kohnstamm himself. You can read more about that here because honestly I'm not going to waste a lot of time on this book.

Kohnstamm quit his life, his girlfriend, his office job, all because of an author to write a Lonely Planet guide to Brazil. On his way there he realized that the advance he had from Lonely Planet was not nearly enough money to get around all of Brazil. He also realized that there was no time to write and travel. He meets several colorful characters along the way, most of which are women, drunk, drug addled, or all three. He stays in a hotel where the rooms are separated by a shelving unit which allows him to hear every fart of his neighbor. Basically, let me sum the book up for you: He goes to Brazil, has lots of sex with trashy women, drinks a lot, worries about how much money he has, and cuts corners writing his guidebook. Do travel writers go to hell? Most likely yes.

I didn't hate this book, well, not exactly. If you decide to read this here are some tips:

1. Skip the first 72 pages. Here is the summary: Thomas is sad at his job in New York City and his girlfriend is mean to him. He decides he is going to leave. He has a fist fight with his best friend who he calls the Doctor. They have been drinking a lot. Thomas likes to drink.
   
2. Do not believe anything Thomas says to be 100 percent true because it's probably not.
3. Be prepared for several sexual encounters and lots of whining about how women are mean to him.
   

Pub. Date: April 2008
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Format: Paperback, 288pp

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The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

by Philip Graham is a travel book about a year he spent with his wife and daughter in Lisbon. On the surface, that is. When I began reading this book I was excited to read about Portugal, a place that has always mystified me. What I got instead was an amazing account on fatherhood, growing up, and finding yourself.

The book is a series of dispatches for McSweeney's and begins like a trip begins, how they go there. It moves to unpacking their items in their new apartment and on to exploring the nooks and crannies of Lisbon. Graham writes beautifully about the culture, inserting the Portuguese language at the most key of moments and speaking honestly about the good and the bad of Lisbon. He is definitely a narrator you can trust.

As the book moved on, for me, it became less about Lisbon and more about Graham's twelve-year-old daughter Hannah. She struggles at her first school where she knows none of the language and is bullied by other kids. After switching to a new school she finally starts to find her place and fit in, but only after a crash course in Portuguese and changing her eating habits. As a girl on the brink of adolescence she faces challenges that her parents do not face, and perhaps do not entirely see. Graham takes the blame too, he admits that taking his daughter to Lisbon might have been a bad idea. At the end Hannah does love Libson, and wants to return immediately, so there is a sense not all was lost.

Overall this was a fascinating book, one of my favorites I've read this year. It's a quick read and I truly think there is something in here for all of us.

Paperback: 168 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (November 15, 2009)
Language: English

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Jan Morris' Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

is a travelog of the city Trieste. Trieste is a place for those who are exiled and Morris is fascinated by the "nowhereness" of the place. It has had many famous inhabitants, including James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and Richard Burton. It is on the far northeast side of Italy, and as Morris points out, very few people in Italy actually know Trieste is there. The travelog weaves between Morris' own experience and Trieste and the ancient history of the city, as well as stories from the famous people who have lived there.

I was set up to dislike Trieste for two reasons, the first is that I hate Italy, the second is that I hate travel writing that moves away from the narrator's experience. I didn't hate Trieste, but I wouldn't say it is my favorite book I have read. Some parts are beautiful. Morris has been to Trieste several times and has a keen eye for small parts of life. She is also willing to admit she messed up when she judges something wrong, while some authors wouldn't include it she does and I admire her for that. What I didn't like about this book is that on page it will be present day and the next page it will be 1382. Perhaps I wasn't reading carefully enough, but I really struggled with the movement back and forth.

It's a quick read if you're interested in Italy or travel writing in general. It is the first travelog I have read that talked more about how everything is different within the city rather than how everything is different from where they came from. Demographically, Trieste is very unique because it is so close to Slovenia. The population is made up of Italians, Croations, Slovenes, Romanians, and people that have fled their country. It truly does have a fascinating history so read the book if you can keep up with the constant changes in time.

Pub. Date: August 2002
Publisher: Da Capo
Format: Paperback, 212pp

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