A Reading List to Get on the Road
How Jan Morris shaped my wandering dreams.
When I was a skinny-legged teenager, I would earn money babysitting or hustling chips & gravy, and then head down to the bus station/smokeshop-diner in my small town in southern Ontario and buy magazines. Other kids read the Archie comics, the DC and Marvel heroes. My heroes were workers and artists. I plunked my $10 (or so) down for Ms. and Rolling Stone magazines, then I rolled them under my arm, and stealthily took them to my garret bedroom of our old Victorian home on Beech street, where I would sit in the window seat reading and smoking Du Maurier cigarettes. I wanted to feel mysterious and sophisticated and a part of things. Ms. came into town sporadically, but Rolling Stone was always there with its shiny late 70s covers of David Bowie, Linda Ronstadt, and Aerosmith.
I cared less about big personality journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. When I sat down to read, I looked for Welsh writer Jan Morris. I loved her work on Watergate Washington, Delhi under a State of Emergency, Rhodesia on the eve of independence, Cairo during Israeli-Egyptian peace talks, and Panama during the United States Treaty debate. Navigating between London, Oxford, Trieste, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and New York, Jan Morris was a wise and perceptive guide, and since I hadn’t been anywhere except for the mandatory dreaded spring escape to dismal Florida, she lit up my imagination about what might be possible for someone with a bit of wanderlust. She complicated a place and an experience.
“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard felt came not but from myself”
I appreciate the depth and inward turn here today as much as my adult self was conjured through the turn of the new century by these words from Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.
My particular dream to go everywhere would be delayed because I married while still in university and got pregnant a few months later, but for a time I envisioned only travel and adventure. Reading Morris made me yearn for experiences I thought that I might only have on the road.
Joan Didion called Morris’ essay on Los Angeles "the best thing I have ever read about the place and its state of mind. A lot of people come here and don't get the point. She got it." Morris was a giant of a writer to me, the kind that wrote of place and experience as part history, part travel, part politics, part imagistic shadow dance. Morris is best known for the 1974 memoir Conundrum, which chronicled her decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery, one of the first memoirs to do so.
I was thinking about her work and the fires lit in me to wander, and then eventually to write when I remembered that ten of Morris’ essays about cities are collected in her book, Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone (1982). I’d borrowed this book many times, from friends and libraries, the way that I did then because we didn’t own many things at all. Now I wanted to re-read all that I’d discovered as a kid.
I realized that this journey into my past might be the thing that helps me create the wild journey we are about to take, to end our connection to house as home by unfurling ourselves over seven destinations with no place to come back to. We don’t know much yet about how long we will stay out there, or even all of the places we wish to go. I wondered what other words might be inspirations for such an untethering to fixed notions of home, and so I made this idiosyncratic wandering book list to sit with who I am now, and to explore what I might become.
I hope it takes you somewhere, even if you can’t travel for a while, even if you choose not to get on a plane. I hope it helps you remember a trip you might not have taken yet, or one that you did that redefined your life. I hope it will inspire some inner wandering, or even seeing your neighborhood in fresh ways. Maybe you’ll take one of these books to the lake or the beach and get your imaginary wanderlust on.
What book of travel and adventure has spurred your wandering?
Note: I didn’t make it to the novels yet, but here’s an astounding way to find books linked to geography at 1,001 Novels.
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xoxo Sonya
Thanks! You too on your travels. I hope you'll write more.
Joan Didion said of the time at Rolling Stone that she was beginning “to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.” I think she and a few more of those journalists might have doubted much more. She never wrote about punk or rave culture. RS ignored hip hop. I think having a few more Black journalists and less elitism might have helped the magazine a great deal.
Thanks for the book recs and good luck on your travels! What are your thoughts on Rolling Stone separating itself from the counter culture these days, compared to back when Morris was writing for them?