Manhattan skyline, June 2016 (personal photo)
Above all else, I love to travel. Trips to Colorado and New Mexico helped me gain an appreciation for the landscapes of the western U.S. I could never turn down a trip to Colorado, no matter how much it's snowing and how cold it is at the time. A trip to Washington made my desire to live in that state much stronger. Of course, no trip is complete without sampling the local wares. Fortunately for me, I've always enjoyed Mexican food, seafood, and coffee. It often seems that these states and I were matches made in heaven.
Over this summer, I traveled to New York City, which was, unsurprisingly, a much larger city than I'm used to. It lacks the sweeping landscapes of New Mexico or Washington, but the cityscapes are equally impressive. I'd be dishonest if I said the energy of that metropolis didn't hold some attraction for me, a lover of solitude and nature.
Eminently depressing books
Ever since I was in elementary school, I've been an enormous fan of reading. It seemed that whenever I wasn't in class or doing some extra-curricular activity (baseball, Cub Scouts, etc.), I could be found with a book in my hands. At that point, my interests tended towards the fantastic, rather than the realistic: each book typically had at least one alien, dragon, or troll.
In contrast, the list of books that I read this summer is one dominated by realistic fiction and nonfiction. Those books that I enjoyed reading the most this summer were the following:
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
To summarize a novel of several hundred pages and of more complexity than I can hope to provide in a paragraph, the story centers on a woman who lives in an authoritarian, dystopian state. She is a slave to the state in that she is considered little more than a means with which to repopulate a society ravaged by pollution, among other man-made disasters. She is able to rebel against the strictures of the society, in her own minor ways. Given the relevancy of these issues, it was odd for me to consider to consider the fact that this book was written thirty years ago.
War in the Val D'Orcia by Iris Origo
This book is part of the diary of a British expatriate who lived with her Italian husband on an estate, La Foce, in Tuscany during World War II. This book offers a glimpse of history that is far more personal than a history textbook spanning the entirety of the war on several countries and continents. Origo provides not only her perspective, but that of her estate's tenant farmers. Both her family and those of the farmers hid and assisted fugitives from fascist forces. Had one of these fugitives been discovered, the person or persons who had hidden them was destined to be murdered by the fascists.
Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories by Giovanni Verga
This book is a collection of short stories by a Sicilian author of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the stories in this collection relate the experiences of Sicilian peasants and landowners. Southern Italy, has, at least for the past few centuries, been markedly poorer than northern Italy, so these stories present the poorest of the poor. Among the problems that these peasants must face are disease (most noticeably, malaria), drought, famine, and their callous, frequently oppressive socio-economic superiors. Given these circumstances, it becomes little wonder that so many southern Italians were immigrating to the United States in huge numbers during Verga's lifetime.
Looking through my recent reading list, it's an altogether depressing one. Of course, stories or narratives without conflict have relatively little chance of being compelling. In my opinion, the sharper the conflict, the more interesting the story. Perhaps this is why I've always been drawn to books which demonstrate the heights and depths of humanity.
