No Time to Italicize Book Titles

I’m off to Oaxaca in a few hours (1am flight with a 5 hour layover in Mexico City at 5am, ick). I suspect I will blog while away, which I typically don’t, because I planned this to be a lowkey vacation and it will just be me entertaining myself and I think I’ll have plenty of free time and hopefully an internet connection that works.

All I have planned so far are cooking classes (with different instructors) on Tuesday and Wednesday and Spanish lessons from 6pm-8pm five evenings. That’s it. I’m trying to decide what reading material to pack because I view this a big reading opportunity. All I ever do at night if I’m home is watch TV and use the internet. My two stops, transfer, two stops, transfer, one stop commute isn’t conducive to reading at all.

I’m trying to decide what to bring. I reserved and just picked up from the library Motherless Brooklyn (semi-recent neighborhoody classic I feel dumb for never having read), The Adderall Diaries (because I’m trying learn how smart people write about themselves in dark/funny ways without being too self-absorbed though I have no idea if that’s what this book is actually about), Love is a Four-Letter Word (once again, to figure out how successful people write essays even though the subject matter may sound sappy at first glance), The Global Soul (I don’t really want to read this and will probably leave it at home primarily because it’s big and heavy. I’ve just heard lots of people like Pico Iyer for travel writing and wanted to see why). I bought Hard Rain Falling because there’s no way I won’t like a seedy, down and out tale of an orphaned street kid in Portland in the ‘60s by an author who killed himself in 1995 even though I don’t generally read true crime stuff. I expect to buy the New Yorker at the airport. I only buy it once per year because I really don’t enjoy reading this magazine but their annual food issue always comes out right now, a week I tend to be traveling. I don’t always like reading it either but feel like I should probably know who these literary tastemakers are even if I don’t care for their writing or slants on food.

I think I will bring the bleak, violent Portland-based novel, the drug/s&m memoir and I’m not sure about the third. Oh, I didn’t even realize Motherless Brooklyn was also about an orphan (with Tourettes) jeez, those are total downers for a sunny locale. I also think I have an orphan fetish. I used to date a guy who was raised in a D.C. orphanage in the ‘50s and ran away at 12 and never went to school.

Ok, I’m going to go play orphan in Mexico for the next week. That would be huérfano in Spanish. I just looked it up.