A little while ago, I wrote about not having the huevos to ask for time off to travel far, far away. I tried to find them - I really did – but instead I found a lot of excuses not to plan the adventure I wanted to have (time, money, work obligations, family responsibilities). When it came down to it, not only did I not have the huevos, I didn't have the energy to plan an enormous trip, or the inclination to leave my grieving mother behind for three weeks so that I could wear a ceremonial headdress of parrot feathers and exchange yams with reformed headhunters in Papua New Guinea.
When I finally gave up on the guilt-inducing non-planning of my overly-ambitious-for-my-emotional-state trip to PNG and defaulted into spending a week with my mom at the Little House, the relief was enormous. It wasn't an adventure, it wasn't improving, it wasn't going to change my life – it was a giant cop-out. But hell if it didn't feel like sliding into a warm, fragrant bath after months of tension. Sometimes the default setting is OK. Sometimes giving yourself a break is OK. At least that's what I'm telling myself as I eat ice cream cross-legged on the couch for the seventh night in a row.
Here's a funny by-product of this decision: I started reading again. I don't know what the deal was, but after my dad died, I couldn't pick up a book. It was a miracle of God if I finished a New Yorker, or anything more intellectually taxing than Real Simple, an infuriating magazine for clean freaks, button collectors, and upcyclers of pencil shavings.
Just when I thought my brain might leak out my ear, the dry spell broke. This is what I brought with me on vacation this week:
Keep the River to Your Right and Where the Spirits Dwell: Tobias Schneebaum is a nice Orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn who recounts his years deep in the jungles of Peru and Papua New Guinea, living among headhunters and cannibals. His books are utterly fascinating memoirs about finding community, embracing sexuality and...eating people. (I'm sure my friend, Deb, who read these two books during her "Summer of Cannibalism," would offer a more anthropoligically sound assessment than "Holy man-eating cannibal-bonker!" but you're stuck with me for the time being.)
Beautiful Ruins: I don't want to spoil it for you - just buy it. It's so transporting.
Tenth of December: Waited for this to come out for ages and only getting around to it now (see above). This article explains why so many of George Saunders' contemporaries worship him as the greatest short story writer in English, but he had me at this hilarious piece in the New Yorker and this brilliant piece of travel writing on Dubai long before I read anything else of his.
Sweet Tooth: I've read, loved and recommended everything Ian McEwan has written, with the except of Solar, which was a tedious grind. I'll let you know if I like Sweet Tooth.
The Best Women's Travel Writing: A bit suspicious of this one. Are travel writers now segregated by gender? If there is even one tampon anecdote, I will chuck it.
In the next installment of What I Took With Me, shit gets really low-brow -- even more low-brow than my crap book reviews. Stay tuned.
