What I Read On Vacation Part 1

Posted on December 3, 2024 at 6:27 am by Gene Ambaum

I took a long trip last fall to Singapore and Nepal. Here’s some of what I reread, and one book I read for the first time, plus a few fails, too.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (2nd in the series) and The Penderwicks in Spring (4th in the series) by Jeanne Birdsall.

This series has become a go-to comfort read. My daughter and I originally read this when they were a kid, and I had to dive back into it when I was missing them and my wife. I forgot how brutal The Penderwicks in Spring is, with Batty (the youngest Penderwick sister) overhearing one of her older siblings say something terrible (it involves their mother, who died just after Batty was born) and then failing to communicate with anyone about it for a while. (I reread the third book in the series earlier this year, which is why I skipped it during my trip.)

No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Most of Machette’s short crime novels (translated from French) are excellent, and there are a few graphic novel adaptations by cartoonist Jacques Tardi available in English, too. This isn’t my favorite of Manchette’s novels, but I enjoyed it quite a bit; it involves a down-on-his-luck detective (he’s a former policeman) and a beautiful woman. It felt much more like a classic Raymond Chandler story than Manchette’s other books.

Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. by Rob Delaney

The darkest parts of Delaney’s autobiographical essays deal with his alcoholism and its consequences, but they still make me laugh out loud. I think I’ve read this book three or four times now. (This means I’m soon going to have to rewatch his TV series Catastrophe again in its entirety.)

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.

After discovering Banks’s Culture series in Kathmandu in 1999 — it’s my favorite science fiction series — I was nostalgic for it during my recent trip to Nepal. I picked up a dusty copy in a used bookstore there, a throwback to the good old days when I had to dig though piles of paperbacks I had never heard of to find something interesting. (Now most books in the stores there are new, in plastic bags, well-organized, and almost as expensive as they’d be here.)

This book (the third in the series) is as good as I remember. It’s concerned with war and soldiering and those with a natural talent for both. Rereading it I started to have the sense that I’d hated the ending when I first read it. And I was right, those last few pages suck, but I loved it right up until then. I tell you this only so you can stop reading it if you have that feeling, too.

Fails:

Maigret and the Tramp by Georges Simenon.

I’ve tried to read several Maigret books, but despite my love for short mysteries I haven’t really enjoyed any of them. I forced myself to finish this one. I’m still not sure why they’re so popular. (If you know which one of these I should start with, please tell me which that is. I have one more on my shelf, but I’ll probably give it away.)

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

True Grit is such a great book I thought I’d read Portis’s other four novels on my trip. I brought along the Library of America collection that contains them all. But reading this was like reading a well-composed joke that didn’t make me laugh; I could see why it would be funny to someone, but I didn’t care. I set the book aside for later.