Vacation Reading

Book #7 - Two for the Road, by Jane and Michael Stern

Jane and Michael Stern live a sweet life of traveling around the country, eating a lot of food. Usually around 12 meals a day or so. That sounds a little over the top, but otherwise it's tough to imagine a better way to spend your time. Besides their column in Gourmet and appearances on NPR's Splendid Table, they've put out a ton of cookbooks and guides to Road Food. This book is 2/3 memoir of life on the road, 1/3 recipes and tips on finding the best off the beaten path. It was a fun and easy read.

Book #8 - All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Speaking of fun and easy... this book is neither. Well, it's fun in the sense that I haven't read a better book since I graduated college. It's absolutely incredible, and I feel unequal to the task of talking about it. Robert Penn Warren does amazing things in this book, but the most amazing to me is the seamlessness of the writing. You're humming along, enthralled by the plot, when suddenly you stop yourself because you've just read a passage like this and you barely noticed it because Warren just slipped it in:

"He lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God’s eye, and the fangs dripping."

My point is, you should read this book now.