Like many readers, I consider reading a way to relax from my everyday life. Whether it’s escaping to a fantasy world or learning about a new idea, reading improves my mood and gives me a break from the practicalities of life. Reading kept my brain moving during the years when my life was mostly filled with changing diapers, trips to the park, and knocking down block towers for the hundredth time today.
When I go on vacation, I like to take a break from my normal reading routine by finding something related to the place we are visiting. It makes me feel even more grounded in someplace new, even when as a family with small kids, the things we do on vacation are largely the same things we do at home: visiting parks, going hiking, visiting kid-friendly museums, and eating at kid-friendly restaurants. When we went to Disneyland, I read Creativity Inc. When we were in Japan, I read A Tale for the Time Being.
Last month we were able to escape the pandemic times to spend a few days with my family in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho. My mom’s family used to regularly visit Lava in the summers, staying in a camper at a campground perched right above the Portneuf River. My mom and her six siblings could float down the river then scramble straight up the bank to camp. I have strong memories of visiting Lava with my cousins in the summer. As we were floating down the river, I spotted the house where my teenage cousin introduced us all to They Might Be Giants and the scandalously named Bare Naked Ladies.
I had my doubts that I’d be able to find books that I wanted to read for this trip. After all, I wasn’t into cowboy books and what else was there to write about the west? For all of my annoyance that national television’s announced times regularly ignore the whole Mountain Time Zone as if it didn’t exist–skipping straight from Eastern and sometimes Central to Pacific–I have never been a big reader of books set in my native Utah or the rest of the Mountain West. Part of this is that I tend to read second world fantasy, which leaves out real places. But part was the ingrained belief that real stories happened on the east coast, south, or California, and that the west was only for gunslinger cowboy stories.
But I dug deep and found two books I was interested in reading that happened to be set in Idaho. The first was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. My mom had recommend it as one of her favorite books a while back, but it didn’t have any dragons or magic so it had somehow never made it to the top of my list. But besides being a favorite of my mom (who has a master’s in English and undeniable good taste), it won the Pulitzer Prize, so onto the list it went. The whole book isn’t set in Idaho, but the main character does live there at one point.
Angle of Repose was everything I thought that East of Eden was going to be, only better. (Did I mention still struggling with that book?) Like Steinbeck, Stegner had beautiful descriptions of the west, but it also had actual characters instead of the caricatures I was finding in East of Eden. Angle of Repose even has a first person frame story, one that works so much better than the random “I” occasionally interjected into East of Eden.
The story from the perspective of an older, newly disabled man. He’s trying to write a book about his writerly grandmother’s interesting life, and the way present and past interact through this frame is fascinating. It’s told with the full conceit that the author is piecing together his grandmother’s life from letters, publications, and other records. He argues with his typist about what to leave in, take out, or make up. The book is blowing me away with its commentary on historical fiction and creative non-fiction, how much we can or can’t know about the past, and whether people in the past are inherently different than people in the present or if that’s merely the beam in our own eye, so to speak.
The grandmother’s struggle between artistic life and family life is done really well, not melodramatically like so many artist vs life stories. She both wants to support her husband’s career of mine engineering and to be involved in the cultural conversations of the day, a difficult task with no computers or phones. I love this book in so many ways already, and I’m excited to finish it off.
The second book I picked up was The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan. This one was recommended by the Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide. I’m not always into her picks (where’s the fantasy?!) but I’m trying to use her list to expand my taste. The book covers the establishment of the National Forest Service, early attempts to manage the land, and the huge forest fire that destroyed Wallace, ID. It definitely falls under the cowboy category, but there’s also plenty of Washington DC politics. (I had to look up what the Skull and Bones club was because of this book.)
This pick turned out to be apt, since the sky was grey and the sun orange for most of the time we were in Lava. We’re continually surprised by forest fires, it seems, because the fire season in 1905 was just as dreadful as the current season. And the politics felt just as familiar: people with a dream for America, politicians who promise one thing to your face but are really serving special interests and are super sensitive to personal slights (*coughTaftcough*), neglect of our natural resources by those who would rather exploit them for personal gain. The early 1900s with their strong corporate interests really do seem like the best analogy for the situation we’re in today with big tech. (If you adjust for inflation, Rockefeller was four times as rich as Bill Gates!) Perhaps if people would stop writing WWII books and start writing about this period in time, we’d know better how to face our current issues.
Do you have something special you read on vacation? Or do you read on vacation? I’d love to chat about vacation reading in the comments below.
