Reflecting back on 2015, there is a strong association between my favorite reads of the year and the places I visited:
- Phoenix and Essays by David Foster Wallace
This was the year that I finally got around to reading Wallace's work. Wallace grew up only about an hour from my hometown in Illinois. A couple of my best friends Tom and Peg also lived in East-Central Illinois, but now spend part of the year in sunny Phoenix. Denise and I went to visit them where they took us to three excellent bookstores (See "Valley of the Sun Book Shopping." ) As part of a thank you gift for hosting us, I gave them a copy of Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1998), which includes an introduction to the weather of East Central Illinois ("Midwestern life is informed and deformed by the wind."). Another essay is a long, detailed account of the closest thing to a religious festival in that part of the country - The Illinois State Fair. 2015 was a year that I also read parts of Wallace's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2007).
I have yet to see the recent film based on a Wallace book tour, The End of the Tour.
2. Nova Scotia and The Ashley Book of Knots (1944)
Denise and I did a ten day road trip with her brother and sister-in-law in Nova Scotia. We broke in the a new van rental big time, starting out in Halifax and trekking to the Bay of Fundy (shown here at low tide) and around scenic Cape Breton Island. There were plenty of bookstores to visit and it became a quest to find Clifford Ashley's The Ashley Book of Knots since I discovered that Denise's brother was also into knot tying. I thought of Anne Proulx's The Shipping News, which is set in Newfoundland, that uses knots from the Ashley book as themes for each chapter. As part of a journey, I hoped to find the book. You always need a quest when traipsing though bookstores. While book shopping in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy in Wolfville, I picked up a used copy of Joseph Neill's Netherland (2008) -- as kind of a "pity purchase" since I spent a lot of time yakking at the bookstore owner. The joke was on me. Netherland was one of the best novels I had read in quite some time.
And what happened to The Ashley Book of Knots? That's what's Amazon is for.
3. San Francisco and Rebecca Solnit
Sometimes the travel experience of a book can exceed actually going there. I haven't been to San Francisco since 1985, but Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010), a collection of essays of history, politics and culture of the City by the Bay, mixed in with a series of interpretative maps, was the best book I read in 2015. (More about it in my August 30th posting.) My daughter Cynthia showed it to me the Harvard Book Store several years ago, but I didn't buy it until I was shopping in the Bookculture bookstore near Columbia University in December, 2013. I really liked a couple of her other books, Wanderlust and Hope In the Dark. Go figure why a book takes so long to finally sit down and read. This year I have loaned it out several times to friends heading to SF, but each time I serve notice that I will ask for its return.
4. Apalachicola, Florida and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2011)
The only thing that a laid back Florida panhandle beach community and 900+ page novel set in 1984 from the world's preeminent Japanese novelist have in common is that I started the book as one of those "beach-reads" during a week long October vacation at St. George Island (shown at the top of the posting). To tackle a large book, I feel like I needed to have a significant chunk of time. Moreover 1Q84 is not a good candidate for the MARTA Book Club, which was where I do a lot of my daily reading. Murakami is an author (like Wallace) who has been swirling around me for years since I bought this book while traveling n Oregon in 2012. Though it took me through Thanksgiving to finish reading, I never wavered. From the get-go Murakami sets a slow, but steady pace as we trace the convergence of Tengo, a young, ghost writer of a novel that sweeps Japan, but puts him at odds with a dangerous religious sect and Anomome, a young woman who is hired to assassinate a leader of the same religious sect.
A shout-out goes to my book buddy Bill Gwin for patiently pointing me in the right direction.
5. Kansas City and Baseball Books
It's a rare year that you can be a Chicago Cubs fan and not be disappointed since the team advanced in the playoffs before being swept by the New York Mets. Moving forward, I will have to be cognizant of taking October vacations at places with limited television reception. Before the 2015 season began I read Jimmy Greenfield's 100 Things a Cub Fan Should Know Before He Dies (2012) as a reminder that a Cub fan should NEVER be any more than cautiously optimistic.
Maybe the Cubs will imitate a another team I like, The Kansas City Royals and finish with a World Series championship in 2016. If you need proof of my interest in the Royals, check out the George Brett Christmas ornament that graces my tree this year (purchased when I lived in Kansas 30 years ago).
I am also a big fan of baseball writer Bill James who is also a longtime Royals fan. I recently picked up a copy of Bill James' Guide to Baseball Managers (1997), which is the book that is currently sustaining me through the hot stove league.
Endnote
2015 was a good year for traveling and reading. In last year's final blog posting, I mentioned that I would be finishing a book in 2015, but this did not happen. The writing has expanded to include photography and art. Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (2016?) is going well but there are a few days that reminds me of the quote from Micheal Chabon's Maps and Legends about the writing of second books. He describes it as a "Lewis and Clark expedition ---an often long, dismal trip though a vast terrain in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize."
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