Books In the Cloud(s)

I'm flying away from Korea in about 20 minutes. Here are the books that are in my bag to enjoy on the plane:

1. Kindle (lots of books to choose from)

2. Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster. Thanks to Paul Cunningham for this going-away gift!

3. Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin. I'm still on page 500. Maybe I'll finish it during the flight.

That's it. Time to fly.

 

Put Your Little Book

In about 12 hours, I'm getting on a plane (the first of three) and heading to Kansas City.  I'm just about packed,

but I'm still grappling with the all-important question of which book(s) to take on the plane.  Yes, I'm taking the Kindle, but even though I trust the Kindle to work properly, I want a backup.  We're talking Busan-to-Tokyo, Tokyo-to-Seattle, Seattle-to-Kansas City.  In January, which means crap weather, which means possible delays.  There's nothing like the smell of a paperback book to soothe your nerves in an irritating situation.

 Just a little book, though.  I'm not toting anything that weighs more than 10 ounces.  It's got to fit nicely in my purse.  Combing through my bookshelves, I've rounded up some likely candidates for that spot.  I've never read any of these:

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury.  I love 1950s American fiction.  Why haven't I gotten around to this one yet?

The Lonely Hearts Killers - Wenzell Brown.  I'm kind of in the mood for some true crime.  Another whiff of mid-century prose.

The Black Monk - Anton Chekhov.  This one is teeny-tiny, maybe 3 ounces.  That means I could take two books.

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse.  I don't  know.  I'm on the fence with this one.

Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates.  I can never go wrong with JCO.

The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells.  I really liked the 1930s movie with Claude Rains as the title character.

This is always so difficult.  Good thing I don't travel for a living.

Reading On A Jet Plane

I'll be exiting the peninsula tomorrow morning and going back to the U.S. for nearly a month. After taking care of...STUFF, I'm hoping to do some traveling and shopping. And eating. Such eating I've got planned -- if it's delicious and not healthy, down the hatch it goes and all while I'm monitoring the day-to-day fortunes of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Before I can do all of that, there's the 14-hour plane journey and before that there's the big decision about which books go into my backpack. What to read? After that surfeit of Canadian novels, I'm feeling mostly nonfictional:

Clay - Suzanne Staubach. Eco Reading Challenge material.

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert. I've been shying away from this book since impulsively buying it more than 18 months ago. Now it suddenly feels like a summer travel read. Anne Lamott likes it. Good enough.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running- Haruki Murakami. Murikami's memoir of training for the New York marathon is tiny. Travel-sized. Virtually no extra weight and I can rack up another author from a foreign country.

The Egg and I - Betty MacDonald. Is there any thing like a good fish-out-of-water classic when you're wedged in the middle seat between Seoul and Dallas-Fort Worth?

A Single Shard - Linda Sue Park. I love Korea; I hate Korea. I can't wait to leave; I'm homesick when I'm away. I stride jauntily through the departure gate at the airport; I'm terrified that Immigration won't let me back into the country. I'd turn my back on it in an instant; I want to live here forever. No place enrages and enraptures me more -- it's just like being married. Maybe having this 2002 Newbery winner about a boy's life in 12th-century Korea on hand will keep my ambivalence at bay. At the very least, I hope my head will stop doing those worrisome 360-degree rotations.

The Log From The Sea of Cortez - John Steinbeck. More Eco reading, plus the thought of Steinbeck's voice in my mind's ear while we're both journeying -- he by boat and I by plane miles and decades apart -- makes me feel fresh and hopeful, which is the best frame of mind for traveling.

I never seem to be able to hunker down and blog when I'm on vacation, so I'll be AWOL for a while. I'll miss my fellow bookworm bloggers even while I'm careening madly from bookstore to bookstore with those sudden stops for yard sales. I'm already a dozen reviews behind, so catching up will be first on the list when I get back.

In a way, I'm impatient for time to pass quickly because on July 20th, I'll begin teaching my very first reading class in Korea. If all goes well, the class has a chance of becoming a regular feature in the curriculum. I still haven't quite managed to wrap my mind around the idea of getting paid to do what comes naturally, but it should all sink in beautifully when I'm in the classroom listening to the nearly musical flick of pages being turned. Meanwhile, happy reading to us all.

Back With A Bulging Suitcase

Hi, book bloggers! I'm back from my trip. Lots of drama in all categories -- too much to process right now, and that's the only reason you're being spared.

Hitting the Barnes & Noble in Columbia, I was able to find quite a few additions for my Pulitzer shelf: Lonesome Dove, The Magnificent Ambersons, One of Ours, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Optimist's Daughter and Humboldt's Gift. However, it was on the slightly gritty shelves at Trade-A-Book in Sedalia that I made my most triumphant find: The Late George Apley. I'm preaching to the choir here, but it pays to get down on your knees and dig back into rows of double-stacked books. 54 cents! Whee!

Of course I'm only human, so my booklust couldn't be restrained to all things Pulitzer. I also snatched up The Worst Hard Time, Atlas Shrugged (for March 8th's book group), The Terror, Farenheit 451 and that book by Anderson Cooper. I'm blanking on the title. There's more -- both titles and blanks in my brain.
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I almost bought an Amish cookbook. My mom bought it and I scanned it eagerly. The simple recipes, rendered in no-nonsense prose had me in blissed-out state of opticial cruise control.
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Getting back to my Pulitzer obsession, I forgot to look for The Fixer, which could have been found with ease. In August, I'll need to return to the US briefly, so there's no point in kicking myself. Building a brand-new wishlist is infinitely more fun.

Jet lag is still frying my circuits, so I need to return to the bed.

Slumping In January

My totals haven't been this bad since graduate school! So far, I've read only 2 books this month and 511 pages of Middlemarch. I am getting a little bit of a break though -- I fly out of Korea back to the US on January 31st around noon, and thanks to the magic of time travel (or at least time difference), I'll get to my destination on ...January 31st!

I (reluctantly) left Middlemarch behind and decided to travel with the 3 books for my Well-Seasoned Reader Challenge:
Let's Eat Korean Food - Betsy O'Brien
Fried Eggs With Chopsticks - Polly Evans
Consider The Oyster - M.F.K. Fisher

When I got to Seoul, I went to What The Book? hoping to pick up a copy of Lonesome Dove, but no joy. After looking at what Updike they had available (small but very nice selection), I decided to work on my Pulitzer shelf and bought a copy of The Bridge Of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. It's the 1928 Pulitzer fiction winner. This purchase dovetails nicely with my resolve to concentrate my US book buying frenzy into this particular area. I'm hoping to find Lonesome Dove (I need it for the February 15th book group meeting), The Optimist's Daughter, Advise and Consent, The Fixer, Humboldt's Gift, The Confessions of Nat Turner, One Of Ours, Alice Adams, and The Magnificent Ambersons. Wish me luck. My Inner Completist Bookworm is bouncing off the walls with this one.

I hope to post while I'm gone...or at least read *your* blogs!