lemonhead

We’re off to Sardinia for a two-week vacation on Wednesday, to Cagliari, Carlo’s hometown. We’ll be staying outside the city at the beach. I’m sure it will be warm enough to swim, not like last year’s vacation to Denmark, where the only one with nerve enough to brave the cold was the dog. We haven’t been in to Sardinia in a long time. Carlo’s brother recently visited us, so the kids and I are all polished up on our Italian.

Most important is my reading list:

1. Personal Memiors of Ulysses S. Grant. I’ve been very very busy not reading this very very slowly, but plan to see it through, probably with copious skimming.

2. Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and enjoying this. The beginning was not particularly promising, then the narrator began hallucinating.

3. The Best American Short Stories 2002. I especially like reading short stories in summer, and especially on vacation. I’ll also bring The O. Henry Awards from 1998, which has been on my shelf ten years. I’ve read a couple of the stories in there but just notice it includes "Brokeback Mountain," which Laurel insists we all read. I’m trusting her.

4. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.

5. Either Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose or Ward Just’s The Weather in Berlin. Decision deferred until I’m walking out the door.

6. Poetry is up in the air at the moment. I like to take a big anthology for variety, but the ones I have I’ve pretty much devoured already. I may have to take The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, though I’ve got it nearly memorized. I really could use some recommendations on anthologies. I'm reading one at the moment - Language for a New Century - which is just not doing it for me.

I think I’ll also take Jay Hopler's Green Squall, Pier Giorgio di Cicco's Living in Paradise and Mercy Seat by Norman Dubie, three of my favorites. I’ll need something by Lucie Brock-Broido and a couple journals, too.