I’ve learned over the years that people who say they’ll come to your talk often change their minds, while people who say they can’t make it, never do. Still, I was touched by the friends who did show up, and the people who came out of an interest in Poland, or travel writing, or a lack of anything better to do.
For the first time in history, the majority of Americans have passports. Meanwhile, the travel book remains a pariah among publishers. This seems illogical. But a novel creates its own world, and puts readers into the lives of others. A traveler thinks: Why should I read somebody’s account of a place I can visit myself?
The Catcher in the Rye graced the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The Salinger classic – 75 years old this year – was one of three works I read in high school that altered the way I saw the world and, without exaggeration, changed my life. The other two were Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The first two are still taught in schools, but I’m not sure about the last one.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for the Truth has been getting a lot of attention, most of it, here in the States, very positive. Reviewing the book in The Spectator, Philip Hensher, wrote that it tells an unnecessarily long story about a far from epic event. “It has,” Hensher writes, “the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book.”
The sentence seemed to beautifully describe a good number of nonfiction books.
It had been two years since our last trip to Key West, so we returned to favorite haunts – Blue Heaven, Café Sole – and in both places we had the same Polish servers we had had two years ago. This was heartening, as I wrote about the Poles of Key West in an essay “A Susurration of Palms,” that appeared in the anthology Key West Sketches: Writers at Mile Zero. Even more heartening was finding the book, published three years ago, prominently displayed in both of the town’s bookstores.
Sunday, the Ukrainian Yuliia Starodubtseva lost in the final of the Charleston Open to the American Jessica Pegula. Curious about the loser, I googled her and found, among other things, a video in which she was stopped on a street in New York City and asked what she did for a living. The interviewer was surprised to hear she was a professional tennis player; she looked like a lot of young women in New York, nicely dressed and carrying a book. She gamely answered questions about her outfit; there were none about the book. Because of the way she was holding it, I could make out part of the title and the name of the publisher: Knopf. Googling again, I learned the book was Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine by Olia Hercules. Yuliia Starodubtseva suddenly rose in my estimation. And of course I wondered how I could get Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer into the hands of Iga Świątek.