Incoming Books: June 23

And my last recent book-shopping trip was during a business trip to New Orleans -- some people have one kind of fling on a trip, others have a very different kind -- last Sunday. Oddly enough, it again was two shops quite close to each other (in this case, at basically the same position on two parallel streets), and here's what I found there:

I Should Have Stayed Home, edited by Roger Rapoport and Marguerita Castanera -- an anthology of the worst travel experiences of a host of mostly famous names (Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Theroux, Rick Steeves, Pico Iyer, Isabel Allende, Joe Gores, Helen Gurley Brown), all of which appear to be original to this 1994 book.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, the third of her Jackson Brodie novels, after Case Histories and One Good Turn, both of which I read recently. I liked #1 enough to find #2, and #2 enough to get this one, which is a pretty good recommendation, given how slowly I'm reading these days.

Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights, the second of two volumes from the early '90s (after Fish Whistle) that collected Daniel Pinkwater's commentaries for NPR. (I have the sense that he kept doing them -- I might seem like the kind of person who listens to NPR, but I never actually have done so -- but they haven't been collected as far as I know.) I used to have both of those books, pre-Flood, and now I've got one of them back -- which may be a good enough excuse to read it again.

Marion Meade's biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? lept out at me from a shelf -- I keep thinking I should read more Parker, and I guess a biography of her counts almost as one of her books.

And last was Enough's Enough, continuing my attempts to re-acquire all of the Calvin Trillin books I lost in the flood. This one is particularly important, since the title essay/foreword turned out to be much more of a model for my own parenting than I'd expected when I first read it in the early '90s. I did "try to get one that doesn't spit up," but there's much more than that. I also am beginning to suspect that reading Trillin's books may have played a part in my own political wanderings over the past decade -- along with just knowing real people and living through eight disastrous years of George W.