Vacation on the Cheap

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. E MILY D ICKINSON

There are certainly many reasons to vacation close to home, this year even more so. The fact that gas prices are traveling at light speed to the moon is just at the top of the list. I’ll be taking my annual agreed-upon four weeks of vacation beginning the last week of July, returning the fourth week of August. During that time, I’ll be venturing off a bit when I have to, taking my daughter to her final dance competition in Tahoe and later taking her to college in Chico on the days just before I return.

For the rest of my time away, I’ll probably be close to home, working on projects at our family’s new house or simply settling down with a good book. Every year I like to come up with some kind of book list to work on. I find that when I don’t, I can get lost in an endless stack of magazines, as I have a tendency to be a little short on attention span. So if I list my books to you, and actually stack them up on my dresser, I enjoy their company more and look forward to reading them. Here is what is beginning my stack: I want to start with the book I was so intrigued with in the late spring when Darryl Ray inspired me to look at the slow food movement. It’s Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This time, I’ll read it from cover to cover. The other books I’ve got on that stack are Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Nation. I’ll no doubt go back again to Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. I got started with some of these writing books last year but didn’t make it through this one. Wouldn’t it be fun to get a little book group to read this together and talk about writing our own stories?

My friend Michelle has been talking about the book that won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian. She was telling me that the other best book she read most recently was Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares. This series has been my daughter Natasha’s favorite. She also loved The Color Purple, and I think there’s nothing so great as re-reading the books your kids are reading. Finally, I bought the book Better by Atul Gawande, which is the non-fiction writing of a surgeon exploring the practice of medicine. I doubt I’ll get to them all, and I may change my direction as I begin, but this is the goal. I hope you have some plans for a restful summer. And if your plans are more for an adventurous summer, then I hope you take some time for rest on your adventures. Whether your frigate takes you far away or only through the pages of your book, I hope you enjoy as many moments as is possible.

Love Katie