First Thing I Pack

As I previously mentioned how much I enjoy reading, it should come as no surprise that the first thing I think about when packing for a trip is which books I'll bring.  Last year I was able to go on several "reading" vacations.  These are vacations where the point is relaxation and the destination usually involves a body of water and lounge chairs.  Last year I was so blessed with this type of vacation that I was able to read the Hunger Games trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, gigantic Pillars of the Earth, The Help,  and probably a handful of other books I can't recollect at the moment.  This year, I've read World Without End on vacation.  That's it.  One lonely (1,000 page) book.  I've had amazing vacations this year, but they've been city vacations.  The point of going to Baltimore, DC, and New York is not so much to relax as it is to do everything you possibly can.  Super fun, but less than restful.

So you can imagine that I am beyond excited that my last 3 precious, hoarded vacation days are going to a beach vacation (apologies to my family who will be seeing me for four days instead of seven at Christmas - this is so needed, though!).  I have had my stack of books set aside on my bedside table for close to a week now.  There are four books, roughly one for each day.  And here they are...

1. Until There Was You.  Sigh.  I'm a little embarrassed that this one is in top.  This is my book version of a romantic comedy.  Light, funny, you know how it will end, not terribly edifying in anyway.  This type of book is what I call my "airplane book".  A page turner that still keeps things light and isn't (hopefully) going to get dry or boring.  When traveling, I generally like a book that helps me lose track of all time.  I think this stems from all of those horrendous 24 hours trips to and from Asia.  This book is about a guy and a girl who had some kind of heartbreak saga thing in high school (imagine that?) and are reunited years later surround by pretty New England, quirky family, and a dog.  We'll see how it goes.

2.  Olive Kitteridge is a book that a friend has been recommending to me for years and I'm finally getting around to reading.  It's a Pulitzer Prize winner; however, after watching Newsies again last weekend, I'm not sure how much a fan of that Mr. Pulitzer I am.  From what I can gather it's a collection of stories about one woman (Olive) who lives in Maine with her family.  The stories are told from the perspective of people around her so we get to see her through many different lenses.  That could be totally off base.  I'll let you know how it goes.

3.  The Sex Lives of Cannibals has a really ridiculous name, I'll admit.  Earlier this year my boss gave me a book on CD by the same author (J. Maarten Troost).  The book was called Lost on Planet China and after two weeks of forgetting it on my desk at work, I finally put it in the CD player.  And from that point on I wanted to drive everywhere and never ever car pool so that I could keep listening to this book.  It was dead on about China, such a pitch perfect take on how a foreigner feels and what a foreigner experiences in China (at least this foreigner).  So he's written a couple of other books, and I thought I'd like to get his take on other places since I know he speaks with a voice I appreciate.  He spent two years living on South Pacific islands and this book is about that time.  Very much looking forward to diving into this one.

4. Matched is a YA book (that's young adult, ya'll, look how good I am with the library slang).  It's planned to be a trilogy and it wants to be Hunger Games so bad you can practically taste it.  We'll see how it measures up. I'm increasingly becoming a fan of YA lit as it lacks many of the qualities I dislike in contemporary adult literature: moral ambiguity, relativism, and no happy ending.  YA lit still seems to have some of these basic ingredients.  For instance, there are generally values, some concept of right and wrong, and if not a gloriously happy resolution, then something that begins to at least look in the same direction.  Please note: I realize these are gross generalizations.  I'm just saying that on the whole I find myself more drawn to these types of stories than a lot of the contemporary adult lit out there today.  I do realize that I've told you exactly nothing that's actually informative about the book, but I can't quite exactly remember (and it's upstairs and I'm sick, enough said).  Basically, some kind of future society where the government arranges your marriage.  I imagine the teenagers aren't going to take that for too long.  I'll let you know how it goes!