Library Notes
Blissful Journeys: One Reader’s Vicarious Trip through Love and Happiness
February 17, 2013
Pam Everhardt Bloom

The thought of February makes me want to cry. Cold weather is not my idea of a good time. Add dark skies and my normally sunny disposition takes a nosedive. In February, I always make the effort to sit in the sun when the occasion presents. I also look for books to lighten my mood.

“Le Road Trip: A Traveler’s Journal of Love and France,” by Vivian Swift fits the bill. Who wouldn’t want to travel vicariously to France when the illustrations so beautifully duplicate a moment in time? The book is filled with hundreds of beautiful watercolors that document the author’s honeymoon journey.  Ms. Swift is a seasoned traveler, as is her new husband, and this memoir/journal is full of tips and musings of their road trip and their leisurely exploration of a much loved and visited France. This is not a guide book in the traditional sense. Instead the book opens with the author’s statement, “Every road trip has its ups and downs, just like a love affair, or the stock market…But more like a love affair.”  With chapters titled “Phase One: Anticipation,” to “Phase Five: The Going Gets Tough,” this book might make the perfect belated Valentine gift to yourself in the cold dreary month of February.

A selection that unexpectedly fit my category of light fare and a book I continue to think about is, “Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” by Eric Weiner. Weiner, a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio has reported a multitude of sad situations throughout the world. This time the field of positive psychology becomes Weiner’s guidepost as he sets out to discover places of bliss. He describes carrying a conviction based on a Henry Miller saying, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

See them I did and I laughed out loud while reading this book. Ten countries in ten chapters with an introduction and epilogue; at the very least you might just find a new understanding of happiness. Or like me, a newfound obsession with Iceland. (Note: Asheville, N.C. is mentioned in one chapter.)  The book on CD is also available at the library and I intend to listen to Weiner reading his book as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, I’m currently reading “12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe” by Mark Jacobson. Jacobson, a respected writer and journalist, sets off on a three month journey with his wife and three children, ages 16, 12, and 9. Light fare from a man who is known for exploring the seamy side of urban life? The first chapter, “Burning is Learning,” finds the family at the Holy River Ganges witnessing a cremation. Decidedly different from my view of world travel, I’m laughing by chapter two as I read Jacobson’s rational for whisking his children away from Brooklyn, N.Y.; “The biggest swindle in the history of the species was underway right here in the U.S.A. Corporate social engineers, closet Mengeles every last one of them, had dismantled the stages of human development… Like Moses, I would lead my children from pop bondage.” More than just a travel book, this book, like “Le Road Trip,” is a love affair. Jacobson, however, is in love with his children and this book will make any parent smile.

Love of place, love of happiness, love of family; it is a blissful journey for February. My mood has lifted.