A Year in the World

When I saw this book was being published, I immediately put it on my must-read list. I ordered it and decided to make it my entree for summer reading. By nibbling on it and picking off pieces of it, I've managed to make it last for over a month. In many ways, it was a perfect summer read, for a person who couldn't travel herself. Mayes took me to places I've always wanted to go, Portugal, Spain, Greece, even Turkey and North Africa.

But the book annoyed me, too. Mayes seemed hypercritical, judgmental off-and-on about her accomodations and her meals. She jumped around while describing her setting so that I felt like I was looking at her world through the eye of a jerky video camera.

Yet she also wrote poetically at times, describing foods she ate and places she visited so beautifully that I felt I'd eaten, too, that I'd travelled with her. The last chapter is a wonderful summing up of the need to travel that could equally well apply to the need to read as well. Mayes reminds us of T.S. Eliot's idea that in voyaging, we come back to our beginnings and understand our own world for the first time. A good reason to travel. A good reason to read.