We arrived early for the movie at the Coral Gables Cinema so went across the street to Books & Books. In the east room three teenage girls huddled at tables they had pushed together, while over in the west room, a mother and her two sons admired the miniature Books & Books that had been constructed of Legos. In the front room, Jonathan Raban’s new memoir, Father & Son, occupied prime space on one of the tables. Browsing through it, I almost forgot about the movie.
I love browsing in bookstores, especially in Poland, where I can read the titles of the books much easier than the writing inside them. Also, seemingly every Polish bookstore has a large section devoted to the literature of travel, mixing books about journeys, usually to little-known places, with those of reportage. This is the legacy of Kapuścinski, of course – the rare travel writer to have been considered for a Nobel prize – and it’s heartening to see it continues, especially for someone who comes from a country with little interest in writing about the world beyond its borders.
Today is the publication day for Key West Sketches: Writers at Mile Zero, an anthology including work from, among others, Judy Blume, Alison Lurie, Thomas McGuane, Elizabeth Bishop, Joy Williams, Pico Iyer, Ann Beattie, Philip Caputo, Barbara Ehrenreich, and me.
https://blairpub.com/shop/p/key-west-sketches-writers-at-mile-zero
Every week, the New York Times Book Review interviews an author about his or her reading habits. The first question is often “What books are on your night stand?” – which usually elicits a long list of obscure titles – and the last question is sometimes the seemingly redundant “What do you plan to read next?” Yet no author has ever said “See above.” Invariably, the books on the to-be-read-next list are different from those sitting on the night stand. And I always wonder: So is the heavily piled night stand simply there to impress? And where are these next-in-line books being kept?
It says something about the lowly status books now occupy in American life that none of the stories I’ve seen about Michael Oher and the movie The Blind Side have mentioned the book by Michael Lewis from which the movie was adapted.
Back in April I taped an interview about my new memoir, Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer, which comes out in November. Yesterday it was posted: https://www.wxel.org/btc/