A woman reading a book while on a stationary bike was noteworthy. What made it blogworthy was the fact that the book was War and Peace.
I've been reading Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, the book in which he revisits the scene of The Great Railway Bazaar. That book, about traveling by train through Europe and Asia, was published in 1975 and it not only made Theroux famous, it created a craze for travel books that lasted through the 80s. Then, as we all know, the memoir came along.
In Ghost Train, Theroux is 33 years older than he was when he took that first train trip, and quite a bit more introspective. But he hasn't lost his boundless curiosity, his delight in life's absurdities, his brilliant descriptive skills, his gift for maxims ("Luxury is the enemy of observation."), his I'm-here-and-you're-not love of being alone in a strange place.
But the book, while well-received by critics, has not sold nearly as well as the first one. This is sad and a bit confounding. A book that promises the story of a man who boards a train and just keeps going - especially a man like Theroux - is going to be more enlightening - and probably entertaining - than a book about someone who had a rough childhood or overcame an addiction. For most people, sure, it's not as easy to relate to, but isn't the whole point of reading (as of travel) to be transported?
Tuesday I was browsing in a bookstore - the Travel section, if you can believe it - and came across Nancy Pearl's Book Lust: To Go. Pearl is the Seattle librarian who rose to fame with Book Lust (the original) and then had the great distinction - unprecedented for someone in her profession - of inspiring an action figure.
I immediately checked the index for my name. It wasn't there, even though - I soon discovered with increasing dismay - there was a section devoted to Poland. Among the books listed to give Americans a feel for the country was Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw. This is another in Furst's series of World War II novels and conveys little of the atmosphere of Warsaw back then, partly because few of the characters are Polish, and partly because the author (as he told me when I interviewed him in Miami a few years ago) spent less than a month in the city. It became clear after a few minutes of talking to him that he had little interest in the place; it had simply provided an exotic backdrop for his - at least in this case - rather workmanlike thriller.
I e-mailed Nancy - we met years ago in Portland when my second book came out - and told her about my first book, the result of living for two and half years in Warsaw, marrying a Pole, learning the language, becoming so attached to Poland that I now regard it as something of a second homeland. I said that I hoped she didn't think my e-mail impertinent, but that when one invests so much time and emotion in a subject, one wants to receive some recognition for it. And, I added, unless I write e-mails, I don't. As the Poles say: Always speak well of yourself; others will speak badly.
She e-mailed me back within an hour, saying she'd look for a copy of Unquiet Days and perhaps tweet about it. It's still true - as the Russians say - that what is in print cannot be removed with an axe. But what is not in print can now, swiftly and sometimes effectively, be acknowledged.
Reading the new e-newsletter from Books & Books, I was delighted to see that Martin Amis would be coming to town to talk about his new novel. For about five seconds. Then I noticed that the store he would be appearing at was not in Coral Gables, or Miami Beach, or Bal Harbour, but in Westhampton Beach.
I should be happy that our local independent bookstore is healthy enough to expand - especially in these aliterate, post-print times. And I am. But it's a little irritating to be teased with the prospect of seeing big names, and then to discover that they - as many of the top authors will - prefer appearing on Long Island. It makes me feel a little snubbed. For over two decades, Books & Books gave readers a reason to live in South Florida; now it will remind us regularly of the advantages of living somewhere else.
(I'm off to Baltimore tomorrow, followed by a few days in DC, so this will be my last post until next Thursday.)
The cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried an essay by Pete Hamill on the noble beauty of baseball in 1950s New York. It was disguised as a review of the new Willie Mays biography, but it talked almost as much about the Brooklyn Dodgers – and the pain of lost youth – as it did about The Say Hey Kid. Indeed, toward the end of his hackneyed elegy, Hamill confessed that his despair over the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles caused him a crisis of faith so great that he gave up watching baseball and never saw Mays play as a San Francisco Giant (which he did for 14 years, at the peak of his career).
Reading this confession, I felt pity for Hamill and exasperation at the Book Review. Why on earth would you pick to review a book about a brilliant athlete someone who missed that athlete’s glory years? Then it hit me: It is the NEW YORK Times Book Review, Hamill is a NEW YORK writer, Mays began and ended his career in NEW YORK. Who cares what he accomplished someplace else? And who cares what anyone outside of the five boroughs might make of those accomplishments? As usual in publishing, it’s all about New York.
The nice thing about having a library in South Florida is that it never gets disturbed. Most people who come into our condo pretend the books aren't there; at most they'll ask: "Have you read all of these?" To which I usually reply: "Twice." But almost never is anyone tempted to actually examine the collection, let alone ask to take a volume home.
But this week Hania's cousin is visiting from Warsaw, with his wife. The first evening Jurek started talking about travel writing, and mentioned Jan Morris. I said I'd just reviewed her latest book, a collection of vignettes from her years on the road. He asked if he could take it on their cruise. I reluctantly said yes, though I suggested that he should really get a paperback thriller with raised letters on the cover.
I showed him my shelf of Jan Morris books, and recommended "Pleasures of a Tangled Life." What was I thinking? He asked if he could take that too. It's a two-week cruise.
In the Caribbean. I went to my travel classics section and pulled down V.S. Naipaul's "The Middle Passage" and Patrick Leigh Fermor's "The Traveler's Tree," both with chapters on islands their ship will stop at. Jurek said he'd take the Leigh Fermor book; the binding of the Naipaul book was coming loose and he was afraid of causing more damage.
I showed him another book I'd recently reviewed: "Hammer & Tickle: The Story of Communism, a Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence." He thought he might find this interesting as well.
So now my library, normally pristine, is shot through with holes. I think of Anatole France, who said: "Never lend books. People never return them. My library is full of other people's books." I've read stories of passengers falling overboard and now wonder about books. And I tell myself: "This is not going to be a problem with Kindle."