Vacation Reading

We just returned from ten days in Puerto Vallarta filled with warm temperatures, not enough sun, a few terrific restaurants, and four books under my belt.

I started the trip with Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked. Finished half of it on the plane and the rest around the pool. The book revolves around a fanatic blogger who fancies himself an expert on an old washed up rock "star" who managed to produce one album of note and then disappeared. This is exactly the kind of stuff that fuels blogging whirlwinds and creates the kind of experts that make me cringe.

You know the type. I recently did a handy man job for a lady who will remain nameless. When I ventured into her basement I noticed the most alarmingly complete collection of Grateful Dead concert tapes now extant and I could imagine what a conversation with the Deadhead in question would be like. He would undoubtedly consider himself an expert on the subject, the uncontestable bearer of meaning on the life and times of Jerry Garcia and he would consider his expertise to be on a par with say a Ph.D. in literature specializing in the Jacobean Period. He would equate his (some would say) wasted hours following the Dead around with the Ph.D.'s research and years of study culminating in a thesis and a teaching position at the local university. And to make matters worse, our Dead expert would invariably start a blog which would attract other pathetic losers and those losers would generate bogus ideas and strange conspiracy theories until a cottage industry was formed.

Juliet, Naked made me happy because it debunks all of that without being mean spirited. As it turns out, the blog devoted to the vanished rock star is just a massive collection of bullshit and the rockstar shows up to inadvertantly give the blogger his comeuppance. But in the process the book explores the nature of art and fame and love until by the end I didn't hate the blogger at all. The only thing I felt was an urgent need to go out and buy another book by Nick Hornby.

After I dispatched Hornby's book, I moved to Halfway to Heaven by Mark Obmascik. Obmascik is a Denver freelance writer who used to work for the Post and who has published one of my other favorite books, The Big Year, a fascinating and hilarious examination of fanatic bird watchers. His newest book is a chronicle of his attempt to scale all 54 fourteeners in Colorado in one year. I don't think it is as entertaining as the bird book, but it is still a compelling read. There are all sorts of crazy climbing types, a lot of obscure and not so obscure retellings of Colorado history, and an exploration into testing one's limits (and one's family's limits). One thing for sure, at least for someone as afraid of clingling to rock faces at 14,000 feet as I, if you ever entertained the idea of climbing all the fourteeners, this book will make you reconsider.

Next up, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo by Stieg Larsson. I read this book in one day by the pool because it was not possible to put it down. This isn't great literature. It isn't even a great mystery in the sense of Richard Price (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, Lush Life), but the characters are still rummaging around my head and causing me so much worry, that I am more than a little hesitant to pick up the next in the series.

I will end this little essay with the best and most disturbing book. I am not a huge Barbara Kingsolver fan, although I think The Bean Trees should be required reading for sophomores in high school (right up there with Catcher). I never appreciated Animal Dreams with the same devotion that my wife and her students did and while I like the didacticism of her first novel, I find that some of her later works, at least the ones that I've looked at, are too didactic. Her latest novel, The Lacuna, is a revelation. It focuses on a young mixed race man from Mexico who ends up working for Diego Rivera, Frida, and Lev Trotsky as a cook (all of Kingsolver's novels end up making my mouth water) and secretary. The young man ends up being a wildly successful author in the USA until the McCarthy era catches up to him. It is an exploration of the nature of the artist set in a world overrun with the irrational fears of a people on the verge of the cold war. The evil wrought by the conservative powers that be and the mindless paranoia about communism fueled by greedy capitalists sounds a lot like our current situation. The book and our times scare the hell out of me.