River Reads

When you grow up in Iowa, as I did, you don't have coasts, but you do have rivers; in fact, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers make up the state's East and West borders. Since leaving Iowa, I have lived on both coasts, but there is nothing like a river to make me feel at home. Yesterday, my husband and I canoed on the Concord River, a river sacred to us as one year ago, we rowed down it to the spot where we were married.

This time, when we had returned our canoe to the South Bridge Boathouse, we walked back into town and ducked inside the Barrow Bookstore--a used bookstore with a great supply of New England literature. There I picked up Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A few weeks earlier, while visiting Lowell, I had seen where the Concord and Merrimack meet. Curious, I picked up the book.

"Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers," Thoreau writes. "They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure; and, by a natural impulse, the dweller on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents."

I had never seen the relationship between rivers and travel so clearly. It's no wonder I felt restless in my home state, with so much water flowing by, into unseen lands. A quick browse through our Destination Literature section at Booksmith proved Thoreau's point: rivers inspire travel, and, I would add, travel inspires writing. River literature is prevalent, I discovered, and makes for a perfect summer read.

One of my favorite travel narratives, Claudio Magris's The Danube, takes place along the river of that name. Patrick Leigh Fermor made a similar trek across Europe, a journey he relates in his whimsical Time of Gifts. My most recent river-read, aside from Thoreau, was Olivia Laing's To the River, in which the author walks the river Ouse, where Virginia Woolf drowned. Meander by Jeremy Seal is another newly released river-logue. Seal rows a canoe from the Meander River's source in Turkey to the Aegean Sea. Rosemary Mahoney achieved a similar feat in her Down the Nile. And expert travel writer Paul Theoux picks up the trend in his most recent novel The Lower River.

Stop in to Booksmith to pick up your next summer read--and get ready to be swept up in a current that is sure to take you out of your depth--which can be a great place to be.

To the Booksmith

You know most of the staff at Booksmith are readers, but did you know we are walkers, too? With the weather finally warming up, with my bike in perpetual disrepair and the 66 bus perpetually 30 minutes away from where I need it to be, I've been taking to the streets, walking to work. And whenever I do decide to foot it, I usually find a co-worker heading my way who has also decided to take the longer way home.

Whether I am in conversation with others or simply letting my mind wander, I am almost always inspired by a walk. I am not the first to note the meditative and thought-provoking powers of the path. Our Destination Literature shelves are full of walkers' testaments to the transformative nature of a good stroll.

The best of these wandering narratives that I've read in recent weeks is  Olivia Laing's travelogue To the River. Laing's gorgeous prose floats the reader down England's river Ouse as she walks from its source to the sea. Readers of W.G. Sebald will recognize his style in her textured meditations, at times melancholy and always beautiful. To the River is a survey not only of the river but of the entire landscape of English literature, from Kenneth Grahame and Iris Murdoch to Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship to the river in which she drowned is delicately excavated and explored.

England is turning out a lot of walkers these days. You can read about the poet Simon Armitage's 256-mile walk along the "backbone of England," the Pennine Way, in Walking Home. In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane, who you may know from his book The Wild Places, walks along England's historical byways, dredging up tales of pilgrimage, territory disputes, and other lively anecdotes that spring up from the natural landscape he crosses.

The pleasures and perils of the road as well as the purging, penitential benefits of a good long walk are explored by David Downie (Paris, Paris) in his new travel book, Paris to the Pyrenees. Downie and his wife, photographer Alison Harris, decide to walk the French portion the famous pilgrimage route, the Way of Saint James, reflecting all the while on the nature of religious ritual, local cuisine, and, of course, walking.

For the urban traveler, there's Michael Sorkin's new 20 minutes in Manhattan. This book reminds me of a non-fiction version of Teju Cole's recent novel Open City, in which the narrator meanders along the streets of New York City, musing as he goes. Sorkin's thoughts focus on the architecture he observes along his walk from Greenwich Village to his office in Tribeca, but the tangential nature of a walk allows him to digress into urban planning and the history of the city.

And finally, to remind us of the history of our wandering ways, there's Edmund White's classic The Flaneur. I recently picked up a copy on our remainder table--there may even be a few sale copies left--so walk on in for more inspiration!