Traveling south along the eastern edge of the United States from Connecticut, you’ll eventually get to Baltimore, Maryland, just below the Mason Dixon line that separated the North from the South.
I’ve only ever been to Baltimore through the eyes of Anne Tyler and John Waters. If you know who these people are, you know that […]

Sometimes when you travel through books, you follow roads that start at one point in time and lead back a hundred years and across an ocean. I arrived at Vanity Fair in England circa 1850, but I started in Connecticut in 1979, where a spoiled suburban girl was forced to read the book in her […]

I love to watch Mira Nair’s movies, especially the ones filled with the color and beauty of India, like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. One movie she directed that didn’t take place in India was Vanity Fair, but it too had her color and beauty infused into it.
I had a problem […]

The scene is St. Petersburg in the mid 1800s. A clerk works in a meaningless job sporting delusions of grandeur. Everyone in his office is talking about him, and everyone is out to get him.
One thing you can say about Fyodor Dostoevsky, he can really get into the mind of the mentally ill. I recently […]

So I stared out the window of my fourth floor cubicle yesterday for a half hour. There was a guy who looked like he was waiting for a ride, and at first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was on one of those phones that attaches to the side of your […]

It seems the founders of my little Dallas suburb were fans of literature, just like me. After all, they named the town after “America’s first man of letters,” Washington Irving. Credited with creating the short story, Irving was from New York City and served as a US ambassador in England and Spain.
Nowadays, there’s a very […]

Lots of people in the US are fascinated with India. It was the birthplace of Buddhism and other such Eastern philosophies. Yoga is huge among the Burkinstock crowd, and even Madonna is doing it. Then there’s the whole tantric philosophy espoused by such great individuals as Sting and Scarlett Johansson (rumor has it).
I live in […]

It was an adventurous but exhausting nine months at sea. I sailed with Muslim and Christian soldiers and slave traders in an incredible, epic novel called Ironfire by David Ball. I sailed with some nasty pirates in Barry Burg’s non-fiction work called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (Believe me, Johnny Depp was way too nelly […]

Several years ago, my sister recommended Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, but I never got around to reading it until I found myself on an ocean voyage. I was actually glad I’d read Moby Dick because it helped me to appreciate some of the references.
Ahab’s Wife has all the fun and action and suspense […]

I love to read adventure novels that include maps. The paths are twisting and turning and you have to reference them from time to time so you can see where you are in relation to the rest of the world. Maps really make me feel like I’m on a journey.
So, when I read Moby Dick, […]