I have my sons to thank for one of my wonderful literary adventures this summer. We were out on Long Island, spending the day canvassing the streets of Sag Harbor. My oldest son had noticed a used bookstore on our way into town and insisted that we backtrack to find it. He headed off with [...]
Continue Reading →Sarah Kemble Knight was an early American teacher, traveler, adventurer, and diarist. Her travel diaries of a journey she took from Boston to New York in 1704-05 provide wonderfully vivid and entertaining accounts of the people she met on her way, the landscape she passed through, and the troubles she encountered. A woman traveling alone [...]
Continue Reading →Anne Perry’s latest novel starring the intrepid Charlotte Pitt and her perfect Pitt husband (and with lovely long intervals of the marvelously unflappable Aunt Vespasia), entitled Treason at Lisson Grove, is an absolute treat of a read. As always Perry provides an entertaining foray into Victorian England and a marvelous and intelligent plot of intrigue [...]
Continue Reading →I love the travel books of H.V. Morton. Not only because of the fascinating tidbits of folklore, local history, and personal experience that he added into every book he wrote (and he wrote fifty books and pamphlets about his travels, starting with London and going on through the British Isles and all across Europe, right [...]
Continue Reading →H.V. Morton wrote more than thirty travel books over a span of fifty years, chronicling his travels across the Middle East, through Europe, and up and down the British Isles. His books are the most charming and engaging travel books I’ve ever read. They are full not only of his observations of the physical landscapes [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read a very moving travel memoir, The Tomb in Seville, written by Norman Lewis when he was ninety-three about a trip he made to Spain when he was in his twenties, in the fall of 1934. Spain was on the brink of civil war and Lewis was on a quest, together with his communist [...]
Continue Reading →Shirley Hazzard writes in her introduction to Ancient Shore, a collection of her essays written from and about Naples, that “I wake these mornings in Naples ….realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that….I — like Goethe, like Byron — am living in Italy.” I was looking forward to feeling some of that same surprise, gratitude and awe [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read Algren at Sea, two of Nelson Algren’s two books of travel gathered in one volume by Seven Stories Press in commemoration of the 2009 centennial of Algren’s birth. The two books, Notes from a Sea Diary and Who Lost An American? are simply wonderful, offering up Algren’s dry humor, quick wit, deep perceptions, graceful [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal, essays about the ten months she lived in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. It is a prosaic memoir of the telling details that made up life under the Soviet System, the cramped housing and long lines for goods and food, the black market for jeans and anything [...]
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