Yesterday’s post would seem to place me firmly in the realm of the onc-percenters. The literary one-percenters.
I came across the term Sunday, in a Herald book review, with great pleasure. It’s delightful to feel oneself part of a select group, and what’s more select these days than a group of people familiar with literature?
One of the many pleasures of watching The Trip to Spain – the latest in the series of road pictures starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon – is hearing a reference to Laurie Lee’s As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning. (I can’t remember ever hearing mention of a travel classic, other than On the Road, in an American movie.) And the book – one of the most beautifully titled in the history of travel literature – is not only referred to, it is discussed, with a young English busker who, of course, knows it well. Ah, England. Perhaps it was concern about alienating American audiences that kept the writers from bringing in V.S. Pritchett (Marching Spain) and Gerald Brenan (South from Granada).
We're having neighbors over this evening and I'm already anticipating the questions about all of my books. "Well the thing about books," I'm going to tell them, "is that, if you write 'em you oughta read 'em."
We had people over for dinner recently and one of the women, looking at my collection of books, asked me which was the most interesting. It caught me off guard. I’m used to people asking if I’ve read all my books. (“Twice,” I tell them.) People sometimes ask me what’s the most interesting place I’ve been, a question I always have trouble answering. But after a few seconds thought, I knew exactly what to tell her: Foreign Faces, by V.S. Pritchett, the book about Eastern Europe I bought several hours before spotting Hania behind the bar of London’s Mitre Hotel.
On my trip to Ohio I discovered two excellent independent bookstores. The first was Paragraphs in Mount Vernon, a cozy store run by the energetic Lois K. Hanson, who brought in two groups for my talk, one at 6 and one at 7, so I was able to sell every book that Lois had ordered. It was my first career sellout.
Three nights later I read at Mac’s Backs-Books in Cleveland Heights. It was a miserable evening – cold rain that eventually turned to snow – and I got an understandably small turnout. But the owner, Suzanne DeGaetano, took a seat and made me feel like a wise and entertaining author. Afterwards, with few books to sign, I scanned the shelves and was impressed not just by the number of books packed into the tight space but by the quality. I was honored to think that The Joys of Travel would join them.
I returned from my bike ride the other night and saw a small package leaned against the door. Opening it, I found Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro’s exquisitely written and immensely entertaining book about the South and its storytellers.
Pam – a dear and longtime friend – had told me that the book was being reissued, and I was delighted. She is one of the finest travel writers working today, and Sitting Up with the Dead is one of the best travel books of the last few decades. It intersperses colorful accounts of Pam’s travels through the South with the stories of the storytellers she listened to and talked with. It’s really two books, each one evocative of a place that is more a place, as Pam points out, than perhaps any other region of our country. How the two are connected is subtly explained in the prologue:
“Chaucer knew that stories are the surest guides on any journey. They are, in fact, journeys themselves, leading out of the graspable, sweaty present into the vanished or imaginary worlds that support it.”