http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/travel/05bpreading.html

The New York Times
September 5, 2004
ESSAY
Fully Booked on Any Day of the Trip
By VANESSA HARTMANN


AS we are being driven through the palm oil groves of Costa Rica, my
mother's head is buried in Keen's guide to Central American mollusks.
My father is unsticking the clammy thin pages of a biography of
Trotsky, and my brother is reading about obscure weaponry used in the
Civil War. Every once in a while, a bump in the dirt road might cause
them to look out at an idle herd of cattle or a ditch-digging
operation. I would have a book on my lap as well if I weren't inclined
toward carsickness.

We spend four days on the edge of the Corcovado forest where there are
no phones or televisions and the electricity flickers. Land crabs with
bulbous red claws guard their territory underneath the dressers while
four-inch giant roaches keep our sheets warm, preparing to lay their
eggs. During the day we snorkel and hike, and in the afternoons, as a
boat takes us back to the camp, we fall silent in anticipation of our
books. We had forced ourselves to leave them in the cabin for fear
that they'd get wet. We walk straight to them, on the night stand, the
bed, on top of the suitcase. The daily summer rains give us a two-,
sometimes three-hour excuse to read.

My father shows me how the pages of his Trotsky book are mildewing
from the humidity, the edges turning yellow and black. Later, at home,
this will remind him of our trip. He sits on the bed after checking
for roaches in their screened room, gets through a few more chapters,
and drifts off to sleep to the steady rhythm of a blanket of rain.

On the porch of the cabin, my mother sits with her book of Ziegler and
Porreca's "Olive Shells of the World," taking notes. When the rain
transforms into a thick fog, I go down to the beach to pick up olive
shells and small cowries to bring back to her so she can identify
them. She saves the fresher ones to photograph for the field guide
she's planning to write.

I try not to read when we travel anymore because I end up visiting the
book and not the place. When I see our photographs of the blue waters
off the Amalfi coast, I think only of Esther in her bathtub from "The
Bell Jar." A summer family reunion in Maine reminds me of the streets
of St. Petersburg, a place I've never been, where Raskolnikov from
"Crime and Punishment" walked in a fever. I lost Grenada to the
endless card games of Stephen King's "Hearts in Atlantis." (I was
younger then, and not yet a literary elitist.) I still can't help
myself most of the time on this trip. I brought a Dubus collection of
short stories and two Julia Alvarez novels.

We must wait for my mother to finish the last pages of Anthony Doerr's
"The Shell Collector" before we leave our rooms to go to dinner. I had
given it to her because I felt she needed more fiction in her life.
The books she normally reads on the phylogeography of mollusks are dry
and leave little to the imagination. She has taken to fiction with a
zeal that stops time while the rest of us stand by the door.

I realize that when she's finished the Doerr, she'll come after my
Dubus and Alvarez. I go to my suitcase to hide them, but in the
process I fall into the Dubus and now the family has to wait while I
see what happens in "The Fat Girl."

On every trip we take, we bring one suitcase for the multitude of
books we inevitably buy along the way. However, there isn't exactly a
Barnes & Noble on every turn of the trail in the Costa Rican rain
forest. By the halfway point of our vacation, we had read everything
we had brought with us. In the slow afternoons of rain my brother
sits, playing solitaire, his baseball cap shading his eyes from the
dim overhead light. Perhaps he considers reading General Grant's
biography again, checking for any facts he might have missed the first
time. He writes these in those black-and-white speckled notebooks in
the form of quizzes, tests, and exams. In another year, he'll graduate
and be looking for a job as a high school history teacher, though my
parents are pretty sure that with his incessant fact cataloging, he'll
be working for the C.I.A.

Ultimately, he decides not to read the biography and tries to get me
to take one of his quizzes. I'm too busy fighting off the urge to pick
up a novel as I sit on the cement patio watching the squirrel monkeys
in the star fruit tree. Every so often, they throw a well-aimed
half-eaten fruit, which I pick out of my hair. My mother tells me I
should read the Spanish phrasebook if I'm bored, but I reach for the
Alvarez instead.

The first page is like a sigh of relief, the typeset a familiar face
in a country of steamy jungle scenery and relentlessly picturesque
beaches. While alcoholics hide behind their bottles, my family
retreats behind well-glued bindings and Times New Roman fonts when we
can't take in any more of the view. I tear through the Alvarez
greedily all evening, straining my eyes in the dull yellow light of
the generator-fed lamp only to realize at the end, having already
finished the two other books, that there is nothing left to read.

We return to San José for a day before going to the cloud forests of
Monteverde. As we walk around the discount shopping district, we look
for a bookstore between shoes and fake leather purses. My mother is
walking while consulting the travel guide, trying to find the address
of the one English bookstore that's mentioned, but neither the
buildings nor the blocks are numbered in San José, and the streets are
rarely named. My brother is angry because we aren't walking fast
enough. My father is annoyed that we aren't asking anyone where it is,
and my mother desperately needs an interesting book. I am jonesing for
print, preferably fine and tightly spaced. I need a classic, something
epic, something Russian.

We find a book and school-supplies store, but the only books in
English are an old Zane Grey western and a 50-page abridged prose
version of "Hamlet." We start back toward our hotel as it begins to
rain, the cold drops shocking our sunburned skin, realizing that we
may just have to borrow one another's books. I think that perhaps I
won't mind reading about Trotsky so much. Maybe I could just pick out
the parts with Frida Kahlo in them.

Suddenly my mother heads up a cross street without a word to any of
us, and we follow, walking faster as we see the sign she's heading
toward: "English Books." We disperse as we enter the sparse store,
lighted with an overkill of fluorescent lamps that outline the dust on
the orange linoleum.

Relief washes over us as we see the bookshelves to which we belong: my
father and brother to history, my mother to science and I to
literature. The two impossibly old ex-pats on the green vinyl couches
discussing classic sci-fi do not distract us for even a moment. I take
the widest, thickest book I can find, the one with the thinnest pages,
the most closely set print, "Anna Karenina," and hold it to my chest
as if it were more important than my passport. Now my memories of the
hazy greens of the cloud forest belong to Levin and his scythe as he
finds the best angle to cut the hay.


VANESSA HARTMANN studies creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.





On Mon, 6 Sep 2004 20:35:47 -0700, Ellen Bulger
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Stumbled across a shelly sort of travel article in New York Times:
>
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/travel/05bpreading.html
>
> As I have not (and will not) register, I am only allowed to read the
> first half.
>
> Anyone who's registered care to be a sport and send me the rest of the
> article?
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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