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Europe For All

Europe For All

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This week saw the passing of Arthur Frommer, whose books changed my life. When I traveled to Europe as a student, it was with a wave of other budget-minded travelers whose bibles (and mine) were Frommer’s famous series that began as Europe on $5 a Day. Although that became Europe on $10 (and on up to $95) as the years passed, the philosophy remained the same.

You don’t have to stay in fancy hotels to see the Continent, Frommer told Americans. Stay in guesthouses. Grab a baguette for lunch. Forget about the private bathroom. Live like the locals, in other words. “I wanted to scream at people to tell them they could afford to see the world,” Frommer told the Houston Chronicle, as quoted in his Washington Post obituary.

Frommer was a U.S. Army lawyer stationed in Berlin when he wrote and self published The G.I.’s Guide to Traveling in Europe, which was the genesis of Europe on $5 a Day. By the mid ’60s he quit his successful law practice to concentrate on his guidebook empire.

Frommer, along with low-cost carriers like Icelandic and Laker Airways, made it possible for people like me to wander around Europe soaking up art, music and history. He democratized the “Grand Tour.” He convinced the American public that travel wasn’t just for the well-heeled. It was for all of us. You may want to curse him the next time you’re crammed into the middle seat of a fully booked 737. But as I read about his life this week, all I wanted to say was “thank you.”

Footprints in Time

Footprints in Time

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These are dry days in the mid-Atlantic. Though we finally received rain on Sunday, there was precious little of it and it arrived after a record-breaking 38-day drought.

A funny time to be thinking of footprints, then, because I can’t imagine the hard-packed ground would yield to a pickaxe let alone a hiking boot. But I was just skimming a book called Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, who discuss the importance of footprints.

Footprints are clues to the presence of natural resources, the authors say. They embed us in a landscape. If we pay attention, the impression of a boot or a paw tells us who has come before.

Here’s how Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it: “All things are engaged in writing their history … Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”

(Dinosaur footprints from the Algarve region of Portugal.)

Tap, Tap, Tap

Tap, Tap, Tap

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The question of the day is this one: Is it easier to skim books while reading them electronically? My answer would be yes.

It’s easier to tap a page than to turn one, and I’ve been tapping plenty while reading The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble.

It’s not that I’m not enjoying the book; I am. I’ve always liked Drabble’s novels. I would follow her voice anywhere, even into a 344-page book on jigsaw puzzles. In fact, it’s about much more than that, dipping into games, mosaics and children’s books.

Still, the book has much more puzzle than it does personal history. There’s a remedy for that, though: tap, tap, tap.

In the Stacks

In the Stacks

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I hadn’t intended it as a stress reliever, but when I stepped into the stacks at Georgetown’s Lauinger Library this morning, my shoulders relaxed, my fists unclenched, and my breathing slowed. The books took me to a cool, calm place, a place I needed to be.

I was there to pick up The Postsecular Imagination, but I wanted to make the most of the trip, so I browsed a bit. I found nature writing and place writing. I found solace.

All the words and all the wisdom. All the folly, too. The human condition writ large. The human condition writ, period. But the human condition between covers. Which is where I’d prefer to find it right now.

Dead Crickets Society

Dead Crickets Society

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I’m alone for a few days, which means the house is far too tidy and I’m the only one on bug patrol. Given that these are the first crisp days of autumn, wild creatures are seeking a comfy place to spend the winter, and there is brisk cricket traffic in here.

I have nothing against crickets, as long as they know their place, which is outside. But when they — especially the branch of the family known as cave crickets or sprikets, with their hefty bodies and long, spidery legs — hop into the house, they need to be dispatched quickly.

I know women whose husbands have a soft spot for bugs and will not kill them. This is not my situation. If I run into a spriket on the kitchen floor, I have eradication backup.

But for the next few days, I’m on my own. I have pressed heavy books into service — yearbooks, cookbooks, whatever is hefty and on hand. Since the critters hop toward whatever is frightening them, I generally just throw the book at them. So far, it’s Anne 2, Sprikets 0. I hope my winning streak continues.

(No spriket photos here!)

Monetization?

Monetization?

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For class I’m re-reading the excellent novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m highlighting many passages, in part for a presentation I’ll give in a few weeks, but also because I enjoy the observations and the prose.

Yesterday I was highlighting for an entirely different reason, and I was laughing as I did. The main character of the novel, Ifemelu, a young Nigerian-American, starts a blog where she muses on racial topics. In short order the blog becomes so popular and so profitable that she’s able to buy a home in Baltimore’s Roland Park. 

Granted, Americanah was published in 2013, much earlier in blogging’s history. I suppose its current earning power might be equivalent to that made by YouTube influencers. But still, I had to smile. I’ve never expected my blog to earn a penny — and it hasn’t! 

Passing on Genesis

Passing on Genesis

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I’ve been waiting months to nab a library copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis. I’ve read most of Robinson’s fiction (incandescent!) and some of her nonfiction (always erudite and thought-provoking). In fact, she’s one of my favorite authors.

When I cracked open her latest, though, I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge. Nothing against Robinson, but Reading Genesis deserves a more clear-eyed reading than I can give it now. This is a book for cuddling with on a cold winter’s evening. It’s about concentrated mental effort, the kind I don’t have much of when days are long and nights are short and the mercury is topping 90 every day.

Feeling this way about the book makes me wonder about the seasonality of our reading choices. Might I have finished Ulysses if I’d attempted it in September, with the crisp attentiveness of a new academic year? After all, that’s when I finally completed The Power Broker. 

On the other hand, it’s good to take the measure of a book before you start reading it, to save its revelations for another day. I’m sorry to pass on Genesis. But — at least for now — I will. 

(Photo: Detail of Sistine Chapel ceiling, courtesy Wikipedia)

Book Links

Book Links

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I think of them as book links, the way one book leads us to another. 

An author’s voice speaks to us and suddenly colors are brighter, the world makes sense again. We decide to pick up another novel she’s written, and we are even more enraptured this time.

Or maybe one book mentions another, a nonfiction happenstance. I just finished Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, which Oliver Sacks mentions in Everything in its Place. I was riveted by this memoir, a father’s story of his daughter’s mental illness. Here’s how he begins:

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives.”

Now I’m on a mission to find another memoir by Greenberg. After a few minutes of googling, I locate a copy of his Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writers Life. I hope to have it by week’s end.

The book links continue …

A Facelift

A Facelift

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A library becomes a sanctuary, its shelves and kiosks like the rooms and closets of home, familiar and well-worn.

Sometimes, worn enough to need a facelift, which is what’s happening at my library now.

The Reston Regional branch of the Fairfax County Library system shut down on Saturday. But I couldn’t let it close without a final look. 

I was there on Friday, wandering through the stacks, checking out a book, glimpsing the old place one more time before it’s transformed. 

Alive on the Page

Alive on the Page

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I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, a posthumous collection of essays by a master of that form. That he was a master of so much else — neurology, weightlifting, chemistry — ripples out from every page.

Sacks loved to swim, to walk in botanical gardens, to study ferns in Central Park, and the book contains short chapters on these topics and many more, easy explorations in the personal essay form. They move from the particular to the general, are informal and discursive. 

Sacks is most well-known for his book Awakenings, which chronicles his treatment of patients with a rare sleeping sickness, people who had missed whole decades of life then woke up and found themselves once again in the land of the living. 

Awake is how I feel after reading the work of this scientist and writer, gone almost 10 years but alive to me now thanks to this final, exhilarating collection. 

(Sacks’ signature courtesy Wikipedia)