Me reading while on holiday.
Traveling in Martinique last month was an adventure in seeing things differently.
Roads are narrow and impossibly steep. In the jungle, every tree is a whole community of plant life. The history of enslavement is present and centered in public art and narrative.
Travel allows me to see new landscapes and it changes how I see home when I return. I see my own neighborhood with fresh eyes.
Our roads are impossibly wide and generally flat. A Virginia winter forest looks an awful lot like a big collection of sticks. Our country is afraid to face our painful history.
Travel is a privilege in every way. For me, one of those privileges is the time to read. Time in the airport, on the plane, in the afternoons when the sun’s too hot and in the evening when it is darkdark.
This trip I read mostly fiction. (I read a humdinger of a non-fiction, however, which I’ll get to next week.) Like travel, fiction allows me to see the world from different times, different life experiences, different perspectives and then changes how I see my own world.
6 Novels I Traveled With
Seeing The Best in People
Steven Rowley’s novel, The Guncle was full of delightful, funny, bittersweetness and The Celebrants continued in the vein. A group of college friends spend their adult lives grappling with grief, loss and life’s general batsh*t messiness by offering each other living funerals to help through difficult times. Their believable and enviable relationships moved me to messy tears.
This truly beautiful old-fashioned-feeling book inventively weaves rich characters and the supernatural with the human art of storytelling. Its metaphorical, dreamlike quality, left me feeling both satisfied and hopeful that humans might just be a little less terrible than I sometimes think.
Seeing The Worst in People
This complicated and sometimes difficult read about toxic masculinity and misogyny offers complex and nuanced writing and character building. Entitlement, hatred and ugliness came from expected sources while goodness came from surprising ones. There was hope here that I could believe in.
This is a “catch up with the rest of the world” book since not only have zillions of people already read this but they’ve gone ahead and made a TV series out of it. I was expecting to love it but mostly I was enraged at the patriarchy and misogyny (again). It was a fun story but it saddened me that the only way to pull some hope out of the black gaping maw of sexism was to resort to pure fantasy. Call me cynical, but I didn’t buy the glossy ending. It mostly just made me mad for women in the 50s and 60s...and who am I kidding? for women everywhen and everywhere.
Seeing Someone Else’s Life Experience
My straight, white privilege prevents me from really understanding the experience of more marginalized people. Novels are one of my favorite ways to expand my understanding and see what I don’t see. This is a revealing story of a young Black woman figuring out her life while dealing misguided progressive liberal white people both at work and in romance. Nuanced characters showed me places to look in my own thoughts, beliefs, words and actions in an effort to be less of a clueless white person.
Full transparency: I’m not finished with this novel yet and I’m loving it for all the perspectives it offers. A changing Puerto Rican New York community, the choices of different generations to make change, and the compromises they all feel forced to make – so much I didn’t know about and all set in a complex, energetic story. (I’ll come back and add anything that needs adding when I finish it!)
What about you? Have you read any of these and what are your thoughts about them? What book has changed the way you see things? What novels have you learned from? Please use the comments below to share your traveling with novels.