The Books I Read On Vacation: Italy 2024

As a general rule I vastly prefer paper books to an e-reader, but when it comes to travel, I am devoted to my Kobo. It’s just so brilliant; I can take many books with me, without taking up any luggage space. I had been happily curating my library hold list so that my Kobo would be populated with books with a variety of expiry dates. I had it perfectly planned.

One week before we left there was a huge cybersecurity breach at the Calgary Public Library. My Kobo is linked to my old Calgary card, and suddenly I couldn’t access the account. To this day, the library hasn’t recovered; apparently all the CPL branches are currently analog, with old-school paper due date slips and stamps, and the online system remains down.

Fortunately, Libby was still working and I was still – eventually – able to download books, but I learned something important: my Kobo will work with one library card and one library card only. Since I already had several books downloaded from the Calgary system, I nervously kept things as-is, and hoped for the best.

Another thing I learned about travelling with a Kobo: if there is a problem, you’re fucked. Well, “fucked.” We were at the Rome airport, ready to return home, and my Kobo froze. I couldn’t select books. I couldn’t change screens. I couldn’t even power it down. I was looking down the barrel of five hours of airport time plus eleven hours of air travel with no reading material.

My husband pried my Kobo out of my panicking hands and, looking down the barrel of dealing with me with no reading material for sixteen hours, bossily told me to just go buy a goddamn book! I grumpily went to the little airport kiosk, found their English section, and spent fifteen euro on a book I didn’t really want but was the best available option. WASTED fifteen euro, I should say, because by the time I returned to my husband with the book, he had somehow managed to power it off and back on. I stared at the blinking screen, manifesting, and ended up with a perfectly functioning Kobo for the remainder of the trip, along with a book that is currently sitting on my bookshelf, unread.

My husband told me it was not a waste at all, instead, it was an insurance policy against such a thing happening on the flight.

The tl;dr of this is that I managed to read a lot of books while in transit. Some were great! Some, not so much.

The Books I Read On Vacation

Three Apples Fell From The Sky. I did enjoy this fable about a tiny Armenian village, with all the friendships and foes and interesting lives, but I think it could have really benefited from a listing of the characters. There were so many characters and they were all intertwined in a complicated way – I kept getting confused as to who was who and how they were related. It also jumps into a lot of flashbacks, so I wasn’t totally clear on what time period I was reading about at any given time. Still, a charming and sweet read.

Summer of ’79. Okay, I got this on my Kobo so I don’t even know if this is a proper book or not. This short, cute, quick read is an addendum to the book Summer of 69, which I haven’t read, but that didn’t really matter. It wasn’t hard to follow, but I probably would have enjoyed it more had I read the first. It’s a fun read filled with 70s fashion and pop culture references, which sealed the deal for me.

In Love. This was a very sad memoir, about a woman whose husband wanted to die by medically assisted suicide after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. It was a very sad description of the search to do so as well as an exploration of his decline. Woof. It was rough to read, and it really made me think we need to do better for people in this situation, on every level.

The Authenticity Project. “Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead?” So asks The Authenticity Project, a little notebook that makes its way around a group of people leaving friendship, love, and self-acceptance in its wake. This is a truly charming and heart warming story about friendship and love, bringing together an unlikely cast of characters. What a good read! Thanks to my dear friend Nicole (HI NICOLE) who always knows what I like to read.

Under The Tuscan Sun. What could be more appropriate, I thought, than reading this book while I’m in Tuscany? I thought this would be a wonderful romance, and then on discovering it’s basically a memoir, I imagined it would be similar to the very delightful A Year In Provence. Friends, how wrong I was. This book about a couple buying and renovating a property in Tuscany, though lyrically written, is incredibly boring. I desperately wanted to DNF but I forced myself to finish because I AM IN TUSCANY DAMMIT. But alas. There are some good food descriptions but otherwise this was a snore. I did enjoy reading about flying in the 90s, when you could bring whole bottles of olive oil in your carryon. That, my friends, was the highlight of this book. If you’re going to tell me the movie is great, I will believe you, because I looked up the film description and it wasn’t anything at all like the snoozefest I read.

Here After. This author is from Calgary! It is so fun to read about little landmarks and spaces around my old hometown. However, this is not a FUN book, it’s a very sad and vulnerable memoir about a woman whose husband literally dropped dead at age 32. This is a book about grieving and dealing with the shock of a sudden, horrible loss. It is also a tough read, and no, I don’t know why I was reading grief memoirs on a trip of a lifetime to Italy. Well, yes I do, it’s because that’s when the holds came in.

One Of Us Is Lying. Speaking of library holds, I was getting perilously low on reading material, and I still had several train rides and 16 hours of airport and plane transit to get through, so I delved desperately into the “skip the line” loans. This was available, so I downloaded it. But I’m so glad I did. This is a very fun, Agatha Christie meets Breakfast Club story about five teens in detention – and then one of them dies. The remaining teens are under suspicion! But who did it? This was just super fun, and I really enjoyed it.

Abide With Me. I love Elizabeth Strout and how she perfectly captures a certain theme and feeling. This is about a small town minister in the late 50s, who is grieving the sudden loss of his young wife (related: yes, this is a surprising number of books on death and widowhood to be reading). Anyway, as with all Strout’s books there are so many layers to these seemingly simple lives. “This kind of thing gave the women something to look forward to, especially now that the days were shorter and darker, and the boredom of changing sheets or cleaning a bathroom could sometimes mushroom into a private despair before noontime even arrived.” I MEAN. Also, wisdom: “But he thought of George telling him that the ability to receive was as great as the ability to give, and so he simply said thank you.”

Instructions For A Heatwave. It’s the UK heatwave of 1976 and everyone’s losing it a little…especially the recently retired man who just leaves for the day and doesn’t come back. I enjoyed this story of an Irish family living in England, who have secrets and alliances and grudges, but come together to deal with their father’s disappearance. 

In notable news, I watched an entire movie on one of my flights (No you didn’t! my son said. Wait, did you really?). It was a French-Canadian production with subtitles, called Une Femme Respectable. It was not what one might call an action packed movie, and yet I was so invested in it that I GASPED and said “NO, don’t do it!” out loud at one part. I may have been the only person on the entire flight, and maybe on any flight ever, watching it, but I did really enjoy it. This week I started a long-anticipated book and it does NOT disappoint. But I’ll tell you about it next week. xo