Hitting The Books Again

Normally, I'm a fairly voracious reader, but this year, I went on an planned "book diet".  It took me four months to read a single novel.  In the meantime, my waistline expanded and my brain shrank.

I didn't pick up another book for another four months, but I finished that one (Marco Polo Didn't Go There  by travel writer Rolf Potts) in about a week. Rolf and I talked briefly (I'm not sure what about; I didn't take any notes) at last summer's BP Travel Writers Conference.  Someone (maybe former San Francisco Chronicle Travel section editor John Flinn) recommended Rolf's book so I bought it during the conference, then promptly went off to Europe for a month, left the book at home, and didn't begin reading it until a week or so after I got back home.

Marco Polo Didn't Go There is full of great stories about places such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and more importantly, about "locals" Rolf met, such as Mr. Benny the Barber, and Mr. Ibrahim the Man Who Held Him Hostage in Beirut.  And as a writer, I'm very glad that he included end notes to each chapter explaining how he went about writing the stories.  Reading his book should help me sort out in my mind the type of stories I want to write based on my recent trip through the wild and tourist-invested regions of Western (and part of Eastern) Europe, dragging my rolling bag behind me, and hacking my way through a wall of living flesh with my digital camera.

Although Rolf has reported from more than sixty countries for many major U.S. magazines and National Public Radio, he lives on a 30-acre farm in Kansas.  The map of the U.S. I carry around instead of myhead has a large region marked "Terra Incognita" running roughly between the meridians piercing Denver and Chicago. Kansas lies in that No-Fly-Or-Drive-To-Zone, but maybe (unlike Marco Polo) I'll get there one day.