Travelers may disagree on what goes in their carry-on bag, but most everybody on board packs a book. At least one.
Even lean-and-mean trekkers for whom traveling lightly could be a life-or-death matter will stuff a book in their backpack. When foul weather stalls an expedition, extreme ski mountaineer Andrew McLean says that he and his alpinist zealots grow so desperate for printed distraction that they rip apart paperbacks by chapters and pass the pages around, reading the works out of order.
Well worth their weight and the space they occupy – and not yet earmarked as a threat to homeland security – books can stoke enthusiasm for a destination, lessen the pain of a layover, provide poolside or beach company and even erect an effective protective boundary against annoyingly talkative fellow travelers. Even in this age of rude behavior, people tend to respect the space of someone engrossed in the act of reading.
Look around on any plane, train or ship and you’ll spot bookworms. Read between the lines, and it’s evident that travelers journey into fiction and nonfiction, potboilers or seam-rippers, academic or escapist tomes, voluminous classics or light chic lit. As the odometer turns, so too the pages.
Mile-high bookworms
Denver repeatedly shows up on lists as the U.S. city with the highest per capita education level. The Mile High City has high standards for travel books, what with our impressive public library system, a city reading program, the widely revered Tattered Cover Book Stores, a mayor who once commissioned Clive Cussler, Hunter S. Thomas and Kurt Vonnegut to pen copy for beer-bottle labels, and a first lady whose résumé includes a writing stint for The New Yorker. Herewith are notable locals who put in a good word about the literature in their luggage.
Many book lovers predictably plugged titles corresponding to their profession. By the book, lots of travelers embark on a busman’s holiday.
For instance, on a recent trip, Mayor John Hickenlooper read Rob
Reiman’s “I Could Write a Book…” an entrepreneurial success story he endorses.
Brit Probst, the erudite architect of record for the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building, has logged a lot of frequent-flier miles on round-trips to New York City. He builds up a book titled “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent. Probst said, “It covers an incredible moment in time with New York exploding with skyscrapers.”
Cleo Parker Robinson, the dance diva, was packing for a visit to the home of her friend Maya Angelou, the poet. In her bag she tucked a copy of “Kaiso! Writings by and About Katherine Dunham,” by Veve A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson. The title’s term “Kaiso” derives from music and dance rooted in Africa and developed from the Afro-Caribbean tradition of calypso. Dunham, who died last year at age 94, was a dance legend. In addition to being a dancer, choreographer, humanitarian and anthropologist, Dunham was one of Parker Robinson’s mentors, as is Angelou.
Upbeat, humorous books are key for Shawn King, the drummer for DeVotchKa, the local band whose tunes were featured in the movie “Little Miss Sunshine.” “For road travel, the funnier the better,” he said, recommending “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” by David Sedaris.
Also for road travel and life in a band, King suggests “Slaughterhouse-Five,” by Kurt Vonnegut. An ardent reader, he also touts “Miles: The Autobiography,” by Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe. “Even though there are about five curse words per page, it’s educational,” says King, who logs on to
bookmooch.com to trade titles.
When restaurant consultant John Imbergamo traveled to New York to chaperone Denver chefs cooking a Taste of Denver dinner for national and local food press at the James Beard House, he dined at Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern.
“It’s a classic restaurant that had been around for years – great food, but exceptional service,” said Imbergamo, who promotes Meyer’s book “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of the Hospitality Business.” Imbergamo said, “After reading it, I bought six copies and gave them to my clients.”
Local author and career coach Tama J. Kieves travels frequently to speaking engagements. She speaks well of “The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for Living Your Best Life,” by Marianne Williamson, which she read recently while in San Francisco to deliver the keynote address at an international “A Course in Miracles” conference.
“I enjoy reading Marianne because she is a practical, bold and inspiring voice for always choosing love instead of fear,” said Kieves, who brought a poetic voice to the self-help genre with her own book titled “This Time I Dance! Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love.”
Husband-and-wife team Bill and Mary Frances Jaster founded Colorado Vincentian Volunteers, a group of young adults who live together for a year and serve Denver’s inner-city people who are poor. After a pilgrimage to Israel, Mary Frances read “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini. She said, “It was helpful to have had the experience of the Middle East and then to have the news of Afghanistan.”
When the couple traveled to Mexico with their volunteers for an immersion experience working with people near the Mexican border between El Paso and Juarez, they packed spiritual reading: “The Long Walk of Faith, Spiritual Direction,” by Henri Nouwen, for her, while Bill took up “The Impossible Dream: The Spirituality of Dom Helder Camara.”
Joelyn Duesberry, a Greenwood Village-based artist whose landscapes are included in the Denver Art Museum’s collection, travels frequently to both coasts, as well as to France, to paint.
“I always like to read artist’s lives while traveling, always looking for kinship,” she said. “Cezanne’s biography by just about anyone is enormously satisfying.” She also raves about “Hadrian’s Memoirs,” by Marguerite Yourcenar, who, she notes, once was the only woman to receive the Legion d’honneur from France.
Not all wayfarers are reading what you might expect.
Ashley Phoenix owns Yoga on 6th and counts herself among an elite cadre of Americans certified to teach both Bikram and Baron Baptiste Power yoga. Last winter, Phoenix traveled to Chamonix, France, to ski. Traveling to and from Mont-Blanc she read “The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.” As the title explains, the book chronicles the ups and downs of the not-exactly-enlightened foursome of Motley Crue. “I was a metal fan, and I was fascinated by their story and how they grew,” Phoenix said. “It’s a wonder any of them are alive.”
Evan Weissman, a bibliomaniac and a Buntport Theater player, is known for comic originality, yet he’s serious about his travel reads. Wherever he finds himself, he reads local newspapers, and also packs something heavy like “Meditations,” by Marcus Aurelius. On the topic of wanderlust in general, Weissman recommends “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and also “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” both by Rebecca Solnit.
Comic’s tastes
“The Last Comic Standing” Josh Blue gives his nod of approval to “Life of Pi,” by Yann Martel. He’s currently reading “If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,” by Tim O’Brien. Next on Blue’s list: “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole. Actually, when Blue hits the road, he prefers to listen to books on his iPod, including, of late, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” by Stephen R. Covey, and “Misery,” by Stephen King.
Some readers on the go tend to go for nonfiction.
Rabbi Steven Foster of Congregation Emanuel recently returned from New Orleans, and Biloxi and Gulf Port, Miss. He was just about to finish John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town,” a nonfiction account of a man unjustly accused of, imprisoned and sentenced to death for rape and murder.
Panayoti Kelaidis, director of outreach at Denver Botanic Gardens, is quite possibly the region’s sovereign of the plant kingdom. He had just returned from California, where he read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” Kelaidis calls it Pollan’s most important book. “All the others were just practice,” Kelaidis said. “This book is to food what (Rachel Carson’s) ‘Silent Spring’ was to DDT. I’m buying the book for everyone. I just wish it would come out in paperback.”
Other travelers take up the literary works while making passage. For many, unfortunately, travel time is about the only time to read for pure pleasure.
When Zee Ferrufino, owner of radio station KBNO, travels, he opts for highbrow novels by writers from the Southern Hemisphere. Two all-time favorites are “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” both by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Nobel Prize winner from Colombia. Ferrufino also fancies works by Chilean writer Isabel Allende and a novel by Carlos Fuentes and Kristina Cordero titled “The Eagle’s Throne.”
Leonid Vyssokov, a native of Khazikstan and the owner of Izba Spa, gave an honorable mention to Robert Bly’s analysis of a Russian fairy tale (“The Maiden King,” with Canadian Jungian analyst Marion Woodman), but when he travels, he opts for fiction: “I like to see the story behind it rather than just pure history.” When he toured Paris, he read “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” by Victor Hugo.
Denver-based freelance writer Colleen Smith read “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, on a recent flight from Miami to Denver International Airport.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a designer’s error, a photo of Steven Foster was identified as Zee Ferrufino.
