In Beijing, of course, we climbed The Great Wall.  Our guide took us to a part of the wall not visited by many tourists so it was relatively free of the hordes.  And in order to come down, we took individual toboggans—which was really thrilling. Being there was incredibly exciting.

We also visited The Forbidden City which is very beautiful and The Temple of Heaven which is both lovely and interesting. We had lunch in one of the old neighborhoods called Narrow Alley where our guide had grown up, and we rode on a pedicab.  We drove around Tiananmen Square with the huge picture of MAO still overlooking it.  I felt like I had taken a step back in history.

Then we flew to Xian—a city of nine million—where the huge number of high rises going up is simply astounding.  It was there that we viewed the army of Terracotta Warriors, a stunning archeological discovery made in 1974.

Among other things, we also had a lesson in Chinese Calligraphy which was great fun. And we saw the Wild Goose Pagodas which overlooks Xian and is simply beautiful.

Then on to Shanghai.  This city, whose modern section is no more than 25 years old epitomizes modern China—rushing headlong towards the future.  There are incredible innovations in fashion, finance, technology and transport which have helped make this a global hub with one of the world’s busiest ports.  We walked The Bund—a  famous waterfront area in central Shanghai—several times and visited both the historical buildings along the way as well as the towering skyscrapers (many over 100 stories high) just across the Huangpu River near the mouth of the Yangtze.  We explored the old British and French quarters, the Yu Garden, which is beautiful, and shopped (or tried to at least) on the famous Nanjing Road.  One of the highlights was seeing a thrilling extravaganza featuring innovative acrobatics, death defying stunts and the latest in high tech special effects.  (It was like the Big Apple Circus on steroids!)

This is an adventure we will never forget.  It was challenging in that there is a twelve-hour time difference and the language barrier prevented us from doing certain things we would have liked to do.  But we agreed that this was probably the most fantastic trip we have ever taken.

And, of course, I am thinking of some book ideas inspired by China, and hope to be able to move ahead with them in the weeks and months to come.

In Beijing, we will go to The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and we will of course journey to The Great Wall (and climb a bit of it). I am so excited to visit these historic places that I have only read about in the past. In Xian, we will see the Terracotta Warriors (both those which have been restored and the actual “dig” which is ongoing), the Great Mosque of Xian, and the Wild Goose Pagoda. In Shanghai we will have a full city tour including the Old Quarter, Yu Garden and the modern city. One night we are going to an “extravaganza” including acrobatics, death-defying stunts and the latest in high tech special effects!

Throughout all of this, I am hoping to learn about the people of China and their culture and maybe, just maybe, I might return with another book idea or two.
I wonder what you come back from your vacations with? I would love to hear.

And as if Maine couldn’t get any better, big news today: a new independent bookstore is opening in Portland. Print: A Bookstore will join the three other independent booksellers in town, and the idea that a city of 100,000 can support four bookstores is sure to warm any booklovers heart. But the more I think about it, books are all around whenever we head up north. Damariscotta, a town of less than 3,000 residents not only has a thriving bookstore in the Maine Coast Book Shop, but the adjacent Skidompha Public Library is the cultural center of town (with possibly the best name ever).

Sadly, Print: A Bookstore won’t be open until October, so we’ll miss it this summer. But knowing that there will be a new place to browse on our way up (we often spend the night in Portland on the way to Damariscotta) is a good incentive to plan a fall trip…

My goals for the summer were more modest than Kreider’s (he was planning to spend a few weeks in Iceland) but I realized that I’ve read far fewer books than I planned, spent less time on my bike than I hoped, and failed utterly in my plan to teach myself to a) garden or b) grout.

Kreider’s article not only measured the (sad) space between best laid plans and actual outcomes, he also captured another facet of summer—one particular to publishing. He writes “though all other transactions in the 21st century are conducted electronically and instantaneously, the process of paying writers is apparently still carried out by scriveners and counting-houses and small boys dispatched with shillings in their hands…”

This made me laugh—rather, snort—aloud. All other aspects of the business may continue to hum along, but the process of getting an author paid does slow down, inevitably and inexcusably. The round robin of vacation-takers seems to insure that all of the necessary parties are never present when it comes to drafting agreements, executing them, signing off on payments and cutting checks. I’ve conducted no formal studies on this matter, but in summertime, livin’ is not always so easy for those who write for theirs. Houses expect professionalism from their authors, and authors should expect that they will be paid in a timely way. My job is to speed the process as much as I can, but (with regrets to Bartleby and his fellow scriveners) I think the process itself needs some modernizing.

The concept of “recharging” has always been anathema to me.  The dictionary defines it as “regaining your energy and strength,” something I always assumed could be accomplished in a long weekend.  Last week, though, I proved (to myself) that my preconceptions were wrong.

While I was away I got lots of sleep, played some golf, had lunch and dinner with friends, went to concerts and simply enjoyed the beauty of the Berkshire Mountains.  And it worked. I came back last Monday re-energized and ready to go.

I think it is so important for us creative types to take some time every so often to do just this—leave our professional world and enjoy other things we like to do.  Only then can we gain the perspective and energy to return to our work lives and move forward.

Check out this piece I found about ways to recharge.  How do you all do it?

But on vacation I can read anything I want.  And this year I’m heading to Sorrento to sit on a balcony sipping wine and reading and staring at the Gulf of Naples.  Now that everything’s booked, I have to turn to the important decision: what to read.  I’m trying to limit the physical books I bring to two, promising myself I can buy more books at the airport or in Italy if I really want.

So I’m welcoming suggestions.  The only rules are that they must be available at short notice in trade paperback (my format of choice for personal reading), they should be fiction or highly engaging and easily digestible nonfiction, and they can’t be on the DGLM client list.  Ideas?

My own literary map of London would surely be less beautifully detailed than the one I found on-line, here and below. I’m not much of a cartographer and there are titles here that I’ve not read—but  it would be fun to make a personal version.  What books, or what city, would feature in your own literary map? What book would you nominate as the quintessential London read?

This year was no different although our trip was a bit more exotic and adventurous than they have been in the past.  In mid-September, we went to Kenya on the east coast of Africa and journeyed on a nine- day safari.  We flew all over the country, from Nairobi where we visited Karen Blixen’s  home  (Out of Africa), to the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, to the Mara and Mt. Kenya, and back to Nairobi.  We went on at least a dozen game drives, saw the great migration and experienced the thrill of a hot air balloon ride (with its scary, controlled crash landing).  Ultimately we returned with wonderful photographs and stories to tell.

And, as in the past, I came back with a couple of book ideas that I am actively pursuing—a book about what the world would be like without wildlife and another about giraffes.  I am really hoping that one or both of these come to fruition.

In the end, this vacation was restorative to my psyche and my creativity.  Vacations should do that for all of us—enable us to renew our energy, so to speak.

I’d love to hear your vacation experiences and what resulted from your time away.  I hope you will share those here.

The train station in my town has a Give a Book, Share a Book shelf that I patronize regularly  in an effort to avoid becoming a a book hoarder—in Japanese known as a tsundoku (Thanks, LA Times) and I’ll bet you’ve got similar low-maintenance book swaps in your local coffeeshop, church, temple, or community center.   These are great, but there’s something special, almost magical about the Little Free Library boxes.

You can see a gallery and visit the Little Free Library site here, and there’s information on how to start a LFL in your town.

The cabin in which I was staying was laid out in such a way that no reasonable light could be left on for reading. I could squint at my smartphone, but the books I brought with me remained in my suitcase.  That is, until the last day, when I finished one, (Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis—riveting) started another (David Mitchell’s  complex and fantastical novel The Bone Clocks) and reacquainted myself with the singular pleasure of knowing I’m in the midst of a good book. Subtle and intoxicating, the sensation of something to look forward to makes me feel like a kid again, when even my impatience to return to a book just heighten the delight of reentry.

Before acquiring the galley for The Bone Clocks at BEA, I’d not read anything that Mitchell wrote, nor seen the tepidly received film adaptation of Cloud Atlas. It took me a few sections before I oriented myself to his style of interlocking stories, and a few more still before I started to see how they all fit together, but what a magnificent imagination that Mitchell has!

Now that I am back on the east coast and it’s reliably dark by 9:30, I’ve finished the book and am looking, hungrily, for another.  What book have you read recently that left you longing to get back to it?