After weighing numerous factors, here are the books that are coming with me to Scotland today:
A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
I'm in the middle of reading Joyce's book anyway, it's ridiculously good, it's a portable size, and it resonates neatly with the visit to Ireland I plan to make. Well, a visit to Northern Ireland, that is. Which is not the same thing. But it's close. Geographically close, I mean. Yeah. Well, what the hell, Joyce self-exiled himself from Ireland anyway.
The point is, I'm happy to have the chance to give the book the sustained attention it deserves; I've been reading it in too many short sips over the last month or so.
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
It's Baldwin's first nonfiction book, a collection of essays published in 1955 that look at the protest novel, Harlem, the American in Europe, Baldwin's father, the black press, movies, religion, and more. Langston Hughes wrote in his admiring review of Notes of a Native Son that Baldwin is "A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity." Elsewhere, Baldwin's wrangling with race and race relations is frequently described as "searing." Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said that Baldwin "named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter ... articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."
Baldwin's book tips in as part of my 2009 intention to read "pivotal nonfiction books," building on the momentum of reading The Feminine Mystique, In Cold Blood, and Maus. Admittedly, this particular collection of essays may not have sparked quite the incalculable socio-cultural influence of those other three books. But Baldwin's impact as a public voice has been enormous, his essays celebrated even above his fiction, and Notes of a Native Son -- published when Baldwin was just 29-years-old -- is particularly cherished. I'm ready for this one.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
This was put in my hands by the proprietor of the Whistlestop Bookshop in Carlisle, PA, which I passed through on my literary road trip last September. It was a peculiarly apt choice, given my Midwest bookish focus and my habit of visiting cemeteries in the towns I visit. See, if you're not familiar with it, Masters' 1915 poetry collection is a set of free-verse monologues spoken from the grave by the former citizens of an imagined Midwestern town. 214 different voices speak, to be exact, and if my jacket copy is to be trusted, these voices are by turns confessional, angry, hilarious, plaintive, hopeful, and contemptuous.
I'm thrilled to bring the book along with me on a new trip -- it's suited to the pick-it-up-put-it-down rhythm of traveling, it's been too long since I've enjoyed a full poetry collection, and I'm drawn to the spookiness of the Spoon River landscape.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I've never read it. And I really, really like Virginia Woolf. And this is one of her most celebrated books. And my used edition is wonderfully portable with larger-than-normal print -- well suited for the kind of reading traveler that I am.
In filling this last slot in the bag, Mrs. Dalloway narrowly beat out Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (which, though it had the edge for fitting into another of my 2009 intentions to read the classic monster & adventure books, ultimately lost out because of its squint-worthy print and brittle pages).
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