It’s sort of an American tradition to treat immigrants to this country like dirt and try to get the most work out of them for the least money. If your family was among the first waves of immigrants to the U.S.—the Germans or the Irish, for example—their experience as new arrivals was was a long time ago and perhaps forgotten. Yet, Benjamin Franklin opposed German immigration, stating that they would not assimilate into the culture. There was an anti-Irish “Know Nothing” movement in the 1840s and ‘50s predicated on the idea that Irish Catholic immigrants were overwhelming the country. The largest mass-lynching ever in the U.S. took place in 1891, after several Italian immigrants were acquitted of a murder in New Orleans. The scorn has been renewed with each new wave of newcomers–Jews from eastern Europe; my relatives, those dirty Scandinavians; the list goes on.
Literature takes immigration from the realm of policy and the culture wars, the view of immigrants as “those other people,” and makes it real. There’s no better way to get a glimpse immigrant life in America than by reading their stories. Their experiences kindle empathy, no matter what your political views. To that end, fellow book-blogger Colleen at Books in the City has thrown down the gauntlet with a reading challenge: to read a specified number of books about the immigrant experience in 2011. Check out the reading list. I plan to read Major Pedigrew’s Last Stand (Helen Simonson), Zeitoun (Dave Eggers), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) and 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (Jane Ziegelman).
Literature lovers have used books to inspire their travels since the nineteenth
Twilight fans are trekking to Forks, Washington
century when they traveled around England to contemplate the sites that writers had written in or about, traversing imaginary literary territories such as “Dickens’s London” or “Hardy’s Wessex.” While much has changed on the literary scene since then, literary tourism is stronger than ever as the number of tours based on the Harry Potter novels, Eat, Pray Love, the Da Vinci Code and Under the Tuscan Sun have proven. More recently, Stieg Larsson’s trilogy has fueled a tourism boom in Stockholm and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series has put Forks, Washington, on the map for travelers. But you don’t have to travel to Bali in the footsteps of Elizabeth Gilbert to take a “lit trip.”
“You just need to pick a destination or a topic and find a book to match,” says Valerie Van Kooten. Van Kooten is an instructor at Central College in Pella, Iowa and an avid literary traveler. She approached a local independent bookseller, The Book Vault in Oskaloosa, Iowa, about coordinating a traveling book club. Through the Book Vault (so named because it’s located in an old bank building) she assembles book-based trips that range from close-to-home to cross-country. For example, in September a group read Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War of the the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich and Mary Kay Risks’ Escape on the Pearl. In October, they traveled to historic underground railroad “stations” in Iowa. No matter how great the book, there’s nothing like actually standing in a tiny space meant to hide a runaway slave to drive home the runaways’ experience. Next up on the traveling book club itinerary: a tour of haunted Iowa based on a book of the same name; a trip to Franklin, Tennessee, for tour of Carnton Plantation with The Widow of the South author, Robert Hicks, a pilgrimage to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie sites, and a jaunt to Seattle and Forks, Washington, to get a real-life view of the landscape in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga.
There’s been a lot of discussion in the press lately, most recently in The New York Times, about the ways in which independent bookstores are trying to retain their customers with “extras” such as coffee bars, wine bars and toy sections. Whether it’s a marketing tool or not, literary travel seems like the perfect means for independent booksellers to engage their readers in a special way, which is something they always try to do. “After I put down a book,” says Van Kooten, “I wonder what the place looks like, what the people there are like. It’s an incomplete experience.” Reading-related travel, she says, completes the picture. Contact her at VanKootenV@central.edu to find out more.
Even if you don’t live near Oskaloosa, check out the Book Vault’s terrific newsletter. It has synopses of books that look like great book club fare.
These frustrating attempts at interaction take place between spouses and between children and their parents every day. It can be a struggle to engage, even if you have plenty of time over the dinner table. So, imagine what it’s like when deployed soldiers and their families have just a short time to speak to each other.
Alison Baverstock, who is married to a British soldier stationed in Iraq, realized that her family was struggling to relate to one another during phone calls because of the difference in their daily experiences. She told the Guardian, “When your husband rings up from Afghanistan or Iraq, you have a very limited time to talk, but sometimes you just don’t know what to talk about. Your existence can seem quite humdrum in comparison to theirs – and you can’t ask them what they are doing [because military details are secret].”
She found an answer in books. “Being able to talk about a book we’re both reading is great because it gives us some common ground.” Consequently, this March she’s launching The Reading Force, a project designed to bridge the divide between military personnel serving overseas and their families at home by encouraging them all to read the same books. Reading Force will encourage groups of family and friends of soldiers to commit to reading the same book, and recording their thoughts about it – whether by letter, email or in a drawing – in a scrapbook. Those away on tour will also get involved, helping families feel connected and to bond again properly when the tour of duty is over.
Reading is at the core of another project that brings military family members closer, United Through Reading, which has been around since 1989. Through this program, soldiers bond with their families by reading books aloud, recording their reading on DVDs and sending the DVDs home. So, it’s like a virtual bedtime story. The organization has similar programs for grandparents who live life far away from their grandchildren and for parents who are incarcerated or in treatment.
Reading the same books provides common ground and creates community through shared experiences and ideas. Colleges and universities see the value in this concept and often assign all of the incoming freshman the same book to read before they arrive on campus, thus putting everyone on “the same page,” at least a little. The “one book, one city” programs embraced in Seattle, Chicago and many other communities across the country have the same goal. Check out Chicago Library Foundation’s One Book, One Chicago reading list, even if you don’t live in Chicago.
No matter how noble the mission, not everyone sees the value in the idea of entire communities reading the same thing. Harold Bloom, the country’s most prominent literary critic told The New York Times in 2002, “It is rather like the idea that we are all going to pop out and eat Chicken McNuggets or something else horrid at once.’’
Moreover, choosing a book to read together can create as much dissention as harmony. Entire committees meet to choose the right book for the programs in Seattle and Chicago and a book club can end the evening with everyone in a huff after wrangling over the book choices. I love discussing books with my family, but they’re all male, even the dog, and they each would rather have a root canal than discuss Jane Austen with me. We have found common ground in books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the rest of Larsson’s trilogy (over which you can start up a conversation with just about anyone in the world).
Okay, I can see why Larsson’s Lisbeth might be a more attractive character to guys than Austen’s Elizabeth. So, we compromise and end up with a mutual reading experience that brings us together for a while–far more satisfying than McNuggets.
I just finished reading Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, the story of her life with the artist and photographer Robert Maplethorpe, a life dedicated to art and to each other. Smith and Maplethorpe met in New York in the late 1960s, while they were in their early twenties and through most of their journey together they lived like stereotypical starving artists—homeless, jobless, hungry, and itching from various vermin.
Of all her talents—art, punk rock, poetry—I’d say Smith is best at writing, which she demonstrates in this beautifully crafted memoir that’s hard to put down. I’m always fascinated with how writers, particularly memoirists, pick and choose the details they include in their stories. Smith offers less a photographic view than an impressionistic view of their lives, weaving together some (mercifully not all) of the seemy side (she seems surprisingly unfazed at the possibility of contracting gonorrhea from Maplethorpe) with fascinating encounters with the artists of the day including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg.
The book offers not only a fascinating and tender look at their relationship but also a tour of the Manhattan in the last period of 20th-century artistic ferment. Many hot spots such as Max’s Kansas City are long gone, and gentrification has pushed the art scene into the Meatpacking District, Brooklyn and beyond. Yet, there are still places that carry on the bohemian tradition, though like most of the parts of the city, they’re cleaner, nicer and more expensive than in the 60s. The biggest change has been in the Times Square area, which now fills with crowds of tourists and Disney characters instead of hustlers, addicts and panhandlers.
Ditto for the iconic Washington Square Park, which was refurbished over the last couple
Washington Square Park has been refurbished.......but still has its share of crazy people.
of years. Not to worry, there’s still enough questionable activity there to make it seem bohemian. Smith tells the story of a couple of tourists who saw her and Maplethorpe hanging out there. One asked the other if they were artists and hence people they should photograph. The other said no, they’re “just kids.”
You can still go to Coney Island as the pair did when they could only afford one hot dog at Nathan’s. And, if you’re particularly dedicated to experiencing the life at the Hotel Chelsea www.hotelchelsea.com where Smith and Maplethorpe lived for many years, you, too, can stay there. The rates are exponentially higher than in the early 70’s, but from what I can see from TripAdvisor reviews, you can have an authentic Chelsea Hotel experience—complete with the bugs, stains and loud music and with the same furniture and carpeting from Smith and Maplethorpe’s day. Better, perhaps, to fork out $40 for the occasional tour the Chelsea offers and actually sleep in another hotel.
The St. Mark’s Poetry Project where Smith performed is still going strong. To get another taste of the poetry scene, head to the Bowery Poetry Club and Café, especially on Tuesday nights for the Urbana Poetry Slam. If you get a chance, eat dinner at DBGB, across the street (by contrast, new and very trendy).
Looking for more of the history of Greenwich Village? Take a Big Onion Walking Tour, which travels into the tiniest and most charming streets of Manhattan, so unlike the concrete jungle beyond the Village borders. These are the haunts of William Faulker, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac and his Beats buddies. Some of the buildings, which date back to colonial times, served as slave quarters and servants’ houses but are now the most expensive pieces of real estate in the city.
Top off your walking tour with a latte and a giant cookie at the cozy Grey Dog Coffee Shop on Carmine Street. I love that they serve my latte with the froth in the form of a dog’s paw print. Clearly, I don’t have what it takes to be a starving artist.
The hottest gift for anyone who reads this year is an e-reader, be it Kindle, nook, iPad or others. I’ll never give up printed books completely, but I’m sure to succumb to an electronic version for a lot of reasons. If you travel a lot, you can load up on books to take with you without needing an extra suitcase to carry them all. An electronic reader is an even greater benefit if you travel to places where books in English are few and far between. I’m leaning toward that new color version of the nook at Barnes & Noble, partly because that nice nook sales person greets me so enthusiastically every time I go to Barnes & Noble, which is a lot.
Yet, there’s a huge array of alternative and less expensive gifts for your favorite reader/traveler. At the other end of the spectrum from e-readers, Levenger.com offers a wonderful array of, as they say, “Tools for Serious Readers.” They have a greatassortment of bookends. I’m particularly partial to the Winston Churchill Pig bookend inscribed with his quote:
“I like pigs: cats look down on human beings, dogs look up to them, but pigs just treat us as their equals.”
A tenement isn’t the first place you think of for buying Christmas gifts, but I got an “I Read Banned Books” bracelet at the Tenement Museum in New York City a while back and every reader I know comments on it. Also, declaring that I read banned books makes me feel like a rebel.
A lot of stores are selling really cute Kate Spade “Library Books” and “World Traveler” mugs. You can find them online or at Macy’s, Bloomingdales and other places. Pop that together with a pound of coffee or some fancy tea and your “giftee” can settle in for a good read.
Magellan’s.com has a huge array of gadgets, gear and clothing for travelers. Check out the book 1,000 Places to Go Before You Die and its accompanying travel journal. Or, conversely, 100 Places Not to Go Before You Die.
Finally, if your goal is a gift for the greater good, give a copy of a book paired with a donation, for example Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky with a donation to one of the many charities on the Half the Sky Movement Web site.
Bundle a book about Haiti such as Isabelle Allende’s novel Island Beneath the Sea or Tracy Kidder’s non-fiction Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti with a contribution to Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health. Or, Dr. Greg Mortinson’s book Three Cups of Tea (a lot of book club people have already read this) or his newer book Stones into Schools pairs well with a donation to his non-profit foundation, the Central Asia Institute. He also has a children’s book called Listen to the Wind. Take a look at the video about the latter book and his work in Afghanistan.
For most visitors to New York, Midtown means the theater district and shopping. But, it also offers great strolling opportunities for lit lovers. I often start my mornings in this area with breakfast at Pain Quotidien (40th and 6th). It’s a chain, but very cozy, especially on a blustery New York winter day, and they offer great bread, pastries, fresh OJ, and killer oatmeal. If it’s warm, get coffee and croissants to go and eat across the street in Bryant Park.
Carb-fortified, I started my walk at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd, adjacent to Bryant Park and gave a nod to Patience and Fortitude, the lions that guard the entrance. They’ve had several names since the library was dedicated in 1911, but Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia gave them these names in the 1930s because these were the qualities he felt New Yorkers needed during the Great Depression, qualities we need now, actually.
Books aside, the building’s colossal Beaux Arts architecture and majestic ceiling frescos make the library worth the trip. Yet, for book lovers, the sheer size and solidity of the place, with its grand staircases and the giant Rose Reading Room, give a feeling that books—in whatever form–will never go away. They also have a great gift shop. Check the Web site for current exhibitions. When I was there, among several others, they had a exhibit on Mark Twain, “The Skeptic’s Progress,” held jointly with my next destination, the Morgan Library & Museum at 225 Madison (at 36th ).
Financier and book/manuscript collector Pierpont Morgan built this library to house his collection (If this was his library, I’d love to see his house!) and the library has been adding to the collection ever since. They also added a modern wing. The original section of the library was restored this year.
When I was there Charles Dickens’s hand-written manuscript of A Christmas Carol was on display. And the Mark Twain exhibit, in honor of the 175th anniversary of his birth, was a treat for any Twain fan, loaded with photos and original hand-written letters and manuscripts.
Then, I hiked and window-shopped my way back up Fifth Avenue. Since it’s the holiday season, the tree at Rockefeller Plaza (at 46th) and the store windows along Fifth Avenue are worth the exercise. Pay homage to Holly Golightly at Tiffany (at 57th) (see also the story of Summer at Tiffany) and check out the jewelry boxes in the windows at Cartier (at 52nd) from which truly breath-taking jewelry emerges. Ispent quite a bit of time gazing at the crazy gorgeous windows at Bergdorf-Goodman (at 58th), which are works of art every year. Then, with Eloise in mind, I wandered by the Plaza Hotel. If you’re feeling wealthy, stop in for lunch or afternoon tea (including a Tea with Eloise menu) at the Palm Court. If you’re feeling really wealthy, you can stay in the Eloise Suite, which starts at $1125 a night. If not, looking around is free, which is what I like.
And, if you can’t make it to New York during the Christmas season, it’s also free to take a video trip to see Bergdorf’s windows, entitled “Follow Me.”
For anyone who is already burdened by the holidays—the cooking, cleaning, entertaining, putting up with difficult houseguests—I’m offering a bit of perspective. I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s latest book At Home: A Short History of Private Life, and I must say we don’t have it that bad, no matter how laborious our holidays seem.
In most of his books, Bryson recounts in hilarious fashion his adventures as he treks around places such as Australia, England, Africa, and the Appalachian Trail. But, in At Home, Bryson takes a look around his own house, an old Church of England rectory in Norfolk, England. (Born and raised in Iowa, as we learned in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bryson has been living and working in England for years. He now speaks with a curious British/Des Moines-ish accent.) He takes us on a tour of the house, but it’s not really about the house. He uses each room as a starting point to look at the development of building materials, inventions such as gas lighting and the telephone, why salt and pepper are always on the table, and countless other investigations. I haven’t gotten to the “Bedroom” chapter yet, but I can just imagine.
Anyway, his stories of social customs got me thinking about how lucky we are during modern-day holidays compared to our forebears. You think you have a lot of houseguests? Be glad you’re not entertaining Queen Elizabeth I. About 150 of her entourage accompanied her on her visits to noble households around England. Says Bryson, “Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.”
By the end of the Thanksgiving meal, do you feel like a cook and scullery maid rolled into one? In the “Scullery and Larder” chapter, Bryson offers a diary entry from a servant woman named Hannah Cullwick, who recounts her endless days of cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, scrubbing the street and sidewalk in front of the house on her knees, emptying the slops, and on and on. Funny thing was, the man she called “master” was secretly her husband.
Wish your children or your guests had better manners? Keep in mind that “John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in American but not evidently the most cultivated, astounded his hosts at one dinner party by leaning over and wiping his hand on the dress of the lady sitting next to him.”
So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re in good company. Try to find time to escape to Bill Bryson’s house for a little diversion.
Nora Ephron—author, screenwriter, director, blogger, and seriously funny person—was in the spotlight at “Talking Volumes” in St. Paul Wednesday night, here to promote her new book, I Remember Nothing. I took my eighty-year-old mother to the event knowing that she would enjoy hearing Ephron make fun of pretty serious subjects—aging and memory loss. Also, I figured that between my mother and I, we could later remember at least parts of what was said.
Actually, my memory of reading Ephron’s work goes back to the early 80’s when I read a collection of her writing in a book called Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. In that book, she laments that she’s not exactly a full-figure gal in a hilarious piece called “A Few Words About Breasts:”
Ultimately, I resigned myself to a bad toss and began to wear padded bras. I think about them now, think about all those years in high school I went around in them, my three padded bras, every single one of them with different-sized breasts. Each time I changed bras I changed sizes: one week nice perky put not too obtrusive breasts, the next medium-sized slightly pointy ones, the next week knockers, true knockers; all the time, whatever size I was, carrying around this rubberized appendage on my chest that occasionally crashed into a wall and was poked inward and had to be poked outward—I think about all that and wonder how anyone kept a straight face through it. …
Over the years, while not writing and directing films such as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle and Julie and Julia, Ephron has moved progressively upward as she considered her life and her body.. A few years ago she lamented, I Feel Bad About My Neck. Now, in I Remember Nothing, she discusses not only what she can’t remember, but also the physical trials of aging such as that little bald spot forming on the back of her head that she calls an “Aruba” comparing it to that island, windswept and bare.
The New York Times called I Remember Nothing “fluffy and companionable, a nifty airport read.” I probably wouldn’t recommend it for a book club read, unless you pair it with some other book that revolves around similar topics. A fluffy and companionable discussion of aging would provide a refreshing contrast to the youth and beauty obsessed main character Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example.
Ephron, now in her late sixties, looks so good in her skinny leather pants she would make a twenty-year-old jealous. She’s happy when she can wear a turtleneck and has a great hair stylist to camouflage the Aruba. Yet, what’s most inspiring is her attitude about it all, so unlike Dorian Gray. Her motto: Get Over It.
I usually think about books and travel, not books that travel. However, I’ve been looking at a Web site called BookCrossing which offers what looks like a useful option for people like me who must periodically purge their piles of books to keep from being featured in an episode of that “Hoarders” show on A&E.
This site allows you to register the books you want to pass on. You put a label in each book with a BookCrossing code and then release it in a variety of ways. You can pass it on to someone you know or send it to a fellow BookCrosser who is looking for that book. You can take the book(s) to a designated “Crossing Site.” For example, in the Minneapolis area where I live, there are 41 books are floating around, free for the taking, at sites such as coffee shops, a Lutheran church, Eden Prairie Mall, and a Wells Fargo Bank office. Or you can release the book “into the wild,” that is, just lay it around somewhere. Ideally the person who picks it up will see the label, go to the Web site, and register where the book is and who has it. You can also request book that you’re looking for and see what happens.
I’m very big on supporting bookstores and I use the library all the time. Yet, I find this idea intriguing, a way to share books and make contact with fellow readers all over the world, and better than “abandoning” my books at Goodwill or a used book store. (For defenders of the printed book: This is one of the things that paper books can do that e-books can’t.) I haven’t tried Book Crossing yet, but it would be interesting to set up a place to leave books with specific people in mind—children, English language learners, homeless people, moms, soldiers.
It seems like you have to be fairly motivated to get involved in all this, but apparently quite a few people find it worth the effort. The site reports 850,000 active BookCrossers and almost seven million registered books traveling around 130 countries. As one user said, “I can’t wait to see where the books I have read go… to see where the ones I discover are from… (it’s like being on a continual treasure hunt!).
I just ran across the answer to a question that people in my book club regularly ask, “I’m not enjoying this book. How much should I read to give it a fair chance before I toss it aside and take up a book I really like?” So many books, so little time.
The answer is Book Lust Author Nancy Pearl‘s Rule of Fifty. She says: “People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit. Since that number gets smaller and smaller as we get older and older, our big reward is that when we turn 100, we can judge a book by its cover!”
Another suggestion: start skimming. At least you can participate in conversation about the book. I just did that with Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. It’s a vampire story, so you’d think it would hold one’s attention, but I it so convoluted, long, and full of explanatory letters, I became very impatient.
Or, take the book chunk at a time. I just started thumbing through the gigantic Autobiography of Mark Twain which is less narrative and more bits, pieces and reflections. It gives great insight into Twain’s character and I’m going to be quoting from it a lot. I’m prone to stick with this volume because hefting it gives me enough exercise to forego the gym. My aching biceps.
Travel to the places you read about. Read about the places you travel.
get the most work out of them for the least money. If your family was among the first waves of immigrants to the U.S.—the Germans or the Irish, for example—their experience as new arrivals was was a long time ago and perhaps forgotten. Yet, Benjamin Franklin opposed German immigration, stating that they would not assimilate into the culture. There was an anti-Irish “Know Nothing” movement in the 1840s and ‘50s predicated on the idea that Irish Catholic immigrants were overwhelming the country. The largest mass-lynching ever in the U.S. took place in 1891, after several Italian immigrants were acquitted of a murder in New Orleans. The scorn has been renewed with each new wave of newcomers–Jews from eastern Europe; my relatives, those dirty Scandinavians; the list goes on.
immigrants as “those other people,” and makes it real. There’s no better way to get a glimpse immigrant life in America than by reading their stories. Their experiences kindle empathy, no matter what your political views. To that end, fellow book-blogger Colleen at Books in the City has thrown down the gauntlet with a reading challenge: to read a specified number of books about the immigrant experience in 2011. Check out the reading list. I plan to read Major Pedigrew’s Last Stand (Helen Simonson), Zeitoun (Dave Eggers), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) and 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (Jane Ziegelman).
Off The Beaten Page Travel 
