rocketjk shoves off for a 2014 journey

I've had fun charting my travels the last four years. 2013 brought me to 12 countries, including the U.S. Plus there were a couple of books of global reach, one I sort of whimsically placed in the British Army, and one firmly planted in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, which could have more generally, but less accurately, been counted as Russia and Poland. Within the U.S., I read to 10 states, and finished several books that I considered non-state specific.

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" around. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2014 50-Book Challenge thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/166514

ASIA
HONG KONG
Hong Kong, China by Ralph Arnote

EUROPE
AUSTRIA
Reigen, The Affairs of Anatol and Other Plays by Arthur Schnitzler

ENGLAND
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
Murder at the Laurels by Leslie Cookman
Life Class by Pat Barker
Murder in Midwinter by Leslie Cookman
All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot

FRANCE
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
The Ides of May: the Defeat of France, May-June, 1940 by John Williams (non-fiction)
The Devil by Alfred Neumann
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
High Bonnet by Idwal Jones

ITALY
Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano di Torino - Pocket Guide by Daniela Orta (non-fiction)

SWITZERLAND
The Castles of Bellinzona by Werner Meyer and Patricia Cavadini-Bielander (non-fiction)

NORTH AMERICA
Canada
Far Arden by Kevin Cannon

UNITED STATES
Non-state specific
The Outfit by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake)
The Fool's Run by John Sanford
The Great Debate Between Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts edited by Lindsay Swift (non-fiction)
Bill Haley by John Swenson (non-fiction)
The Best Short Stories of 1931 edited by Edward J. O'Brien
The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson (non-fiction)
Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience by Howard Simons (non-fiction)
Lincoln's Men: the President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein (non-fiction)

California
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: the True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett (non-fiction)
The Five O'Clock Cake by Joan Sawyer Bloyd

Florida
The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald

Hawaii
The Room Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers

Maryland
Black and Blue: the Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America by Tom Adelman (non-fiction)

Nevada
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael A. Hiltzik (non-fiction)

New Jersey
The Prison Life of Harris Filmore by Jack Richardson

New York
Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages by Manuel Puig
A Shade of Difference by Alan Drury
The Prophet of Tenth Street by Tsipi Keller

Tennessee
The Empress File by John Sanford

Utah
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey (memoir)

Several years ago I began a personal tradition of beginning each year with a reread of a Joseph Conrad novel. This year it was The Secret Agent. Conrad's tale of alienation, despair and self-delusion set in early 20th-century London is not exactly uplifting, but his powers of description and insights into human nature always provide me with a wonderful reading experience.

Hi Jerry. The Secret Agent is one of my favourites of Conrad. As you say, his powers of description are at their best in this work. I remember the tension surrounding the bomb-maker's actions being supreme.

Well, back to England for Michael Cox's enjoyable faux Victorian Era psychological thriller, The Meaning of Night: a Confession. Gotta get out of this U.S.-England axis! Seriously, though, this was an enjoyable novel, although at 700 pages, a commitment.

OK, I finally got out of my USA/England rut by reading Reigen, The Affairs of Anatol and Other Plays, a Modern Library edition of a collection of plays by Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler was an important Austrian playwright in the late 19- and early 20th centuries. He wrote frankly about sexual matters and the furor over the content of his plays was evidently fueled by the fact that he was Jewish. Schnitzler died in 1931, but that didn't stop Hitler from having his books thrown onto the bonfires en masse during the Nazi's book burning heyday. The plays in this collection include Schnitzler's most famous, "Reigen," in which ten pairs of characters converse just before and after making love (note: not during), leading and ending with a prostitute. This play has been made into movies several times with the title La Ronde.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Schnitzler, confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons."

At any rate, these plays (there are four in the collection) were fun to read, for their historical value as much as for the fun of the plays themselves. Three of the plays are on Schnitzler's main theme, sexual mores, (or, as he put it according to Wikipedia, "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?"). The final play in the collection takes place in a Paris cafe during the French Revolution. I have to admit I had never heard of Schnitzler, and probably never would have, were it not for my modest Modern Library collection. A couple of years back I picked up at a garage sale a box of early ML volumes to add to that collection, and a month or so ago I decided to actually read one, picking Schnitzler off the stack more or less at random. The fact that my volume is a Modern Library first edition (alas, no dust jacket), published and printed in 1933, also added to the reading experience.

Although the first three plays could really take place anywhere in Europe, and the fourth takes place in Revolution-era France, Schnitzler importance as an Austrian playwright makes this, I feel, authentically enough a reading visit to Austria.

After reading a really bad spy book I'm not even including here and spending a month getting through the excellent but long history, Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael A. Hiltzik, I finally got out of the U.S. and over to France, I guess, with a reading of the wonderful Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. I say "France, I guess" because while the narrator of the story spends a lot of time running down and describing details about Gustave Flaubert's life in Normandy, that narrator is English and actually lives in England. Anyhow, I'm calling it a visit to France. Regardless, it's a terrific novel of ideas.

After a couple of U.S. books, I read Hong Kong, China, a thriller (barely) set in Hong Kong just before the takeover by China. It's a sub-par book, to put it kindly, set almost exclusively in the world of rich European business owners in the colony, but, well, I guess it counts as a visit to Hong Kong.

A literal rather the figurative visit to Europe brought my wife and me to eastern Switzerland and Turin, Italy. From that trip, I brought back and am including here two nice guidebooks. First I reread Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano di Torino - Pocket Guide by Daniela Orta. This is a guidebook to an excellent Italian history museum in Turin. Next was The Castles of Bellinzona by Werner Meyer and Patricia Cavadini-Bielander. This is a description of the three beautiful castles of Bellinzona, in the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, a lovely town we visited for almost a full week. The volume also includes a walking tour of the town.

Finally (for now), I just completed a full-length history: The Ides of May: the Defeat of France, May-June, 1940, by John Williams. This is a very well written and researched history of a tragic and frustrating event.

Back to England for Murder at the Laurels, the second in Lesley Cookman's "Libby Sarjeant" mystery series.

I finished The Devil, a novel set in 15th-century France, written in the 1920s by German author Alfred Neumann. It's really more a psychological study than an historical novel, but it is set in France. Lots of castle interiors (and dark interiors of the soul); very little countryside or culture presented.

Back to England for Murder in Midwinter, the third in Lesley Cookman's "Libby Sarjeant" mystery series.

I read to France again, modern day this time, via Muriel Barbery's enjoyable, erudite fairy tale, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Well, I am bouncing back and forth across the Channel this year. I just returned to England for the enjoyable, well known, All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot.

A pop up to Canada for the whimsical graphic novel Far Arden by Kevin Cannon.

And . . . back to France for High Bonnet, Idwal Jones' delightful novel about the world of high-tone Parisian restaurant, and, more specifically, the cooks and kitchens therein, in the 1930s. Lots of fun and great writing.

Well, not an impressive reading year, travel-wise. I only got to eight different countries, including the U.S., and nine specific U.S. states. I did read some good books, though! We'll see what 2015 brings.