Category: Chatwin, Bruce

Mark’s Best of 2011

2011 was a great year for me in travel and reading.  Here are some of my personal favorites.
Cruising the Nile
Cruising the Nile

Travel

  • Damascus, Syria. Walking the old city to find all eight extant gates.
  • Cairo. I fell in love with this big, dirty town.
  • Istanbul. Walking the old city walls, taking the ferry to the Black Sea and eating at Çiya Sofrasi and exploring Kadiköy afterwards were highlights of my second trip to Istanbul.
  • Aleppo, Syria. The ruins of St. Simeon of Stylites just outside of Aleppo were a treat.
  • Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I go to Idaho every summer with friends, but driving highway 2 across central Washington was a new twist.
  • Walla Walla, Washington. Again, taking the back roads to Walla Walla for a weekend of wine was an interesting way to discover my own state.
  • Luxor, Egypt. Riding a felucca on the lazy Nile was one of my favorite parts. Not to mention Karnak temple and 3,000 years of history.
  • 9/11 Memorial, New York City. I go to New York a lot, but this year I visited the newly opened 9/11 Memorial.
  • Lake Quinault.  I got to enjoy the lake twice this year–once with Mom in July and again in December when it was wet.

Reading

  • Out of Egypt. André Aciman. The story of a Jewish family’s life and exile from Egypt.
  • Mani: Travels in the southern Peloponnese. Patrick Leigh-Fermor. My new favorite travel writer, who is no longer alive, wrote about Greece in the 50s.
  • The Tiger’s Wife. Téa Obreht. A multi-layered story woven throughout 50 years of Balkan conflict.
  • Comedy in a Minor Key. Hans Keilson. A Jewish man is harbored by a Dutch couple during WWII.
  • The Wrecking Light. Robin Robertson. Blow-you-over poetry.
  • To a Mountain in Tibet. Colin Thubron. One of my favorite travel writers travels to Mt Kailash in Tibet.
  • Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin. Previously unpublished letters of Chatwin’s.
  • Atlas of Remote Islands. Judith Schalansky. Her sub-title “Fifty islands I have never set foot on and never will” kind of sums it up.
  • The Trouble with Poetry. Billy Collins. Who doesn’t like Billy Collins?
  • The Tao of Travel. Paul Theroux. A book of travel quotes from Theroux’s favorite authors.

Music

  • We are the Tide. Blind Pilot
  • Pickin’ Up the Pieces. Fitz and the Tantrums
  • I Am Love Soundtrack
  • Biutiful Soundtrack
  • Cairo Time Soundtrack
  • Arco Iris. Amina Alaoui
  • Monqaliba. Natacha Atlas
  • Sentir. Yasmin Levy
  • Fados Soundtrack.
  • Sunyata. VAS.

Movies

  • I am Love. Tilda Swinton at her best playing a Russian wife of an Italian industrialist. Think: Unhappy marriage, passionate affair.
  • Bill Cunningham New York. I always look forward to Bill Cunningham’s spreads in the Sunday NYTimes style section. This is a great documentary about this octogenarian who chronicles city life.
  • Incendies. Intense story of two grown children of a Lebanese political prisoner who return to Lebanon after their mother’s death to discover what her story was.
  • Cairo Time. Beautiful, lyric (if a bit romanticized) meditation on the city through the eyes of an American woman.
  • Biutiful. Rough, intense—one of those movies you only need to see once in life.
  • Mother of Mine. Story of a Finnish man who, as an adult, attempts to unravel his childhood experience living in Sweden during the war. Themes of loss and abandonment prevail.
  • The Sheltering Sky. Technically I’d seen this before when it came out but I had forgotten how great it is. John Malkovich at his best.
  • SherryBaby. Story of a chemically dependent ex-con who is paroled from prison and tries to rekindle a relationship with her child.
  • Red Road. Scottish thriller set in Glasgow.
  • Helvetica. I’ll never think about font the same way again.

Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

I first read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines in 1990 after picking it up in the Seattle Public Library shortly after moving to Seattle.  I don’t remember now how I heard of Chatwin or why I picked it up, although my memory of it thinks that I just happened upon it on the shelf and was drawn to it, but how knows.  I did however love it instantly for it’s spare but evocative description of the Australian outback and it’s portrayal of movement, walking or travel as a basic human need.  Since then I’ve read his other major travel book — In Patagonia (he was not a prolific author) and his two biographies by Susannah Clapp and Nicholas Shakespeare.  Chatwin’s life fascinates me because he was a curious traveler who went wherever he wanted on any lark.  He was curious, a lay academic, a lover of life and of people and a collector of things, people and experiences. He lived the life I would loved to have lived. (never too late I guess).

This collection of his letters (Under the Sun: The Letter of Bruce Chatwin) from 1948 to 1989 when he died of HIV related illness showed me a couple of things.  1. He was a very funny man, which doesn’t come across as much in his writing and 2. He is very witty and smart in small doses like letters and postcards.  Having read so much of his life I feel sort of like a literary stalker.  But having read his letters I now feel like I actually knew him.