Summer, and the reading is...

Every summer, I shuttle back and forth from the library, consuming less than half the books I check out, but still a great deal. This summer, once again unemployed, the habit stuck. However, some of the reading was more active - I'm attempting to learn Italian - and, living farther away from a library, the trips have been less frequent. Furthermore, in all the preparations for spending a semester in Italy, all the reading I'd like to do before I get there just isn't going to happen.

Today, I picked up Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education by Tim Parks, along with another Italian memoir and a history of Italy from the library. They join two dozen other books I'd like to read in the next twenty days. But even if I only get to skim them, I think they'll be beneficial.

It's amazing how travel can be amplified by reading. I kept browsing guidebooks to Italy and finding myself disappointed with the lists of hotels and grayscale photographs. A novel or memoir can pull me into a place so much more fully, giving me a heartfelt desire to see and understand the birthplace of its history. And Rome is the point of origin for so many aspects of Western history.

I've started Park's second book, and near the beginning he notes his stance on travel writing: "I have always been suspicious of travel writing, of attempts to establish that elusive element that might or might not be national character, to say in sweeping and general terms, this place is like this, this place is like that. One always thinks: But I've met French people and they weren't at all droll...Or worse still: How long has this author been there, anyway? Two months, three? How can he possibly know anything deep about the place? How can he tell us about anything more than the casual phenomena any traveler would notice...It all becomes no more than an exercise in eloquent reportage, or like those novels by Dumas that speak so entertainingly of countries the author never visited. When I arrived in Italy...I swore I would never write about the place."

But he did end up writing about his own experiences in Italy, which he differentiates from the kind of travel writing that is filled with generalizations. I hope I can write about my experiences there without being cliché. But if I am, so what? If thousands of American students have gone to Rome before me, should I really think that I'm so unique?

Which brings me to the question of what a new writer really has to offer to the world, whatever his or her subject of choice happens to be. It's hard to get published, and most of the books that manage to hit the shelves still don't attain any level of success. I've already blogged about the mind of the writer and what drives us to write. But we do expect audiences; we write with certain people in mind, probably a great deal like ourselves, reading the kinds of things we like to read. Do we edify them? Do the books I picked out this summer - some quite carefully, others for little more than a catchy cover - enrich the life I'll lead during the rest of the year? I've arrived at these questions, but I have little in the way of answers. And for now, that's best. Perhaps the answer is in one of my books.