Reading and Travel News

Heading to Santa Fe for the weekend. It's such a short visit I will see only a few people, an error of planning. Assembling my suitcase, but more than usually baffled by what books to bring. Last week I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Books that take place in parallel narrative threads, before and after some turning event that they spend hundreds of pages not telling you about, confuse and irritate me. But I have thought of very little else since I finished it, and momentarily only want to read really good books, and not just whatever's at hand. Luckily now I have Children of God, The Sparrow's sequel, to bring on the plane. And The Emerald Planet. And four somewhat randomly acquired (mostly Goodwill) paperback mysteries. That ought to do it, especially as Elizabeth George's new title should be out this weekend, and I'm allowing myself to buy it if I see it in the airport bookstores.

Now this is the strange part* about this trip. Santa Fe is so far behind me in my consciousness that I have the clear sensation I will be visiting instead my distant past in San Francisco, and keep imagining I am going to see the old old friends from my communal days in the City forty years ago, rather than the friends of those 22 years in the desert that I walked away from last August.