ninaherenorthere.com

Mostly, I write in the morning. It is rare that I write in the afternoon or evening, as rare as it is for me to skip writing two days in a row. When I take more than one day off, things can get ugly.

On Friday morning, I got to my desk around 9am, opened MS Word, moved around a few paragraphs, and then got back into bed to read until a mid-day appointment. On Saturday morning, instead of working on my book at my desk on my computer, I sat in my reading chair and wrote about a recent experience in my journal, only half-convincing myself this qualified as writing. I went to bed early on Saturday night so I’d have time to write before my 11am yoga class on Sunday. I was up by 8am on Sunday. I let myself read until 9. I perused the Book Review section of the NY Times. I checked Facebook. I knew I was not going to write and started to hate myself. I jerked off. I still had an hour-and-a-half to kill before yoga. I thougt about my consicous and purposeful decision not to write. I blamed it on my upcoming trip, the fact that I’m already mentally vacating. I watched Greys Fucking Anatomy on the Internet even though the audio and video skipped regularly. I got angry at myself for getting up at 8am on a Sunday morning to do nothing. I blamed the nice weather. I blamed myself for being a bad writer working on a bad book. I yearned for yoga, an excuse to simply breathe and sweat, and stop thinking about how I was incapable of seeing any activity I’d done in the past few days as anything other than “not writing.” I promised myself it would be easier on Monday; it’s always easier to write on a weekday before work. (On weekends, there’s that annoyingly debhilitating freedom of too much time.)

On Monday morning my alarm went off at 5:45am. I snoozed to 6am. I started the coffee, showered, put product in my hair, dressed, sat at the kitchen table and had one bowl of cereal, and then another. I drank half my coffee and brought it into my room. I looked at my desk. Then I put my mug down on my dresser, took off my pants and my shirt, crawled back into bed and set my alarm for 8:30. Now, I’m just kinda disgusted with myself.

I work for a travel company, a discount booking website. Many people here are interested in travel, which means I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my upcoming trip to Turkey — Where will you be going? What will you be doing? Are you taking advantage of our hotel discounts? At first, I didn’t want to tell people I’ve never booked a hotel in a foreign country because I thought it would make me look immature and therefore unqualified to do my very adult job. (It probably means they all make more money than I do.) Outside of work, people keep asking me if I’m preparing for my trip. I don’t know what this  means other that to throw my backpack on my deck to air out the mildew smell, make sure I have a sleep sheet to protect me in the case of a nasty hostel bed, and buy a guidebook that I can read on the plane. (Basically, I spent all of my energy developing the travel booklist.) I have nothing on my must-see list and haven’t spoken to many people who’ve been there. For a second, I wondered whether I was being too lax and laidback. Then I got this email from my brother:

Hey, I’m sorry that I haven’t gotten in touch with you earlier because right now I’m headed out to North Wales on a school trip for 5 days. I think the only thing we really need to get sorted is to find a hostel the first night (morning) you arrive. I figure everything else we can figure out when you get there.

Psyched for Turkey,

Eric

I’m thankful to be traveling with someone who has the same itinerary as me — no itinerary.

I’m going to Turkey in a few weeks (to travel with my brother). Woohoo! My favorite part of preparing for a trip is the month before when I research, evaluate, plan, review, and finalize my reading list. I have always seen traveling not so much as an opportunity to see another country, but as an opportunity to carry large heavy books around another country, and to read for hours and days on end, uninterrupted by the distractions of city living. While developing a reading list may not seem as hard as nuclear physics, it actually is; there are a great deal of  factors to consider, some mathematical equations to work out, bookstores to visit, people to talk to. The only rule that goes without saying is no hardbacks. Here are some other bits of advice.

1) No library books, no borrowed books from friends. The freedom to ruin a book — to spill foreign sauces on the cover, squash the whole thing into the side pocket of cargo pants, or use the opening pages (the title page, table of contents, author’s note) as stationary — is crucial. However, I also consider the possibility of ownership should the book make it back to the States in one piece. As a rabid library patron, I buy approximately one in every four books I read, so it’s nice to think about how a puchased book would look on my bookshelf. It’s also good to buy newish books for which there is a very long waiting list at the library.

2) A travel book list is like a good mix CD; books need to work together. Usually, this means a selection of mixed genre (novel, narrative nonfiction, memoir, possibly an essay or short story collection). It’s a good idea to change up voice and style, to bring a book with a humorous tone and one that is educational. Within genre, it’s also best to diversify and never bring more than one family saga, one Russian author, one magical realist, you get the gist. The only time I read two books by the same author (Milan Kundera) was when I couldn’t seem to leave the Czech Republic and read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I’m sure you can see how this happened.

3) This brings me to reading destination-specific literature. For Turkey, I’m already going on the country’s most famous contemporary author, Orhan Pamuk. Because Nobel Prize winners (as well as canonical authors) scare me, I decided to start with his novel, Snow, thinking it would be easier to read than his nonfiction. I’m about a quarter of the way in, and if Pamuk manages to use the word “Snow” less than 200 times, I’ll consider reading the nonfiction, Istanbul.

4) It’s okay to take risks on the booklist. While there is NOTHING worse than being stuck in a bus station for 6 hours with the feeling, “I’m just not that into my book,” there’s always the possibility of putting it down and picking up another book in the pack. That’s why you should always put one extra book in, just in case there’s an unanticipated throwaway. That said, because there can be 6 hours of reading time available, challenging books may be tackled. For example, I’m not sure I could handle Catch-22 in spurts on my daily commute, but stuck for two days on a Croatian island in a rainstorm, I pounded through it. If the trip is long enough, it is generally a good idea to bring at least one classic, and by classic, I don’t mean total agony like the Scarlet Letter or the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I mean a classic like Catch-22.

5) Here’s where the math comes in. You want the average book length to be 300 pages, with no more than half the books coming in at exactly 300 pages. Bringing a 500 pager is super important. When it comes to that moment, which for me is usually after the first day, when you’re thinking, “Seen one mosque, seen ’em all,” you need a good excuse, like “I’m at a really good part in my book,” to avoid sightseeing and spend the entire day in the hostel. Travelling also offers the opportunity, almost unheard of at home, to have that unique experience of reading an entire book in one sitting, totally losing yourself in it. I had that experience reading Michelle Tea’s Valencia on a long train ride from Amsterdam to Slovenia.

6) Which brings me to: Don’t leave home without a queer book. Seriously, if you’re going to be surrounded by straight people, it’s sanity-building to have an escape. Old standbys are Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters. If you know your queer book is heavy on the adult content, it’s best to wait until you have your own hostel or guesthouse room to start it.

7) It’s a nice idea, for longer trips at least, to go with a known quantity. Pick your favorite author and hit the backlog. Think of it like a security blanket. I often travel with a John Irving or Paul Auster book for this reason.

Stack the odds in your favor. This means it’s not enough just to pick the right book. You’ve got to pick editions with readibility in mind. I’m talking about more than a tight narrative. I’m talking about eyesight. Bus rides are bumpy, lighting in hostels can suck, eyes strain after hours of reading, yellowing pages are hard to focus on (as are the white pages of the Xeroxed books that are the staple of the SE Asian market). This may be the reason I have to hold off on Lolita for this trip. My copy is just not up to travel standards.

9) Don’t chisel your list in stone. If someone hands you a must-read book, take it, read it. The only thing that might suffer is your back (that’s why trading is a good idea, just make sure the books are of equal merit). The joy in the travel booklist is the same as the joy of travelling. It’s not what you actually accomplish; it’s the process.

10) Remember that you can always go back to a country and see the sights. But you never know when you’ll get another chance to read that special book in that country.

My potential list 

I haven’t done the math or weighed the books, and I’m only going for two weeks, so I don’t think I can take them all. But this is my longer list for the upcoming trip.

• The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan)
• Lighthousekeeping (Jeanette Winterson)
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson)
• Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Istanbul (Orhan Pamuk)

I’ll take suggestions, but make a strong case for why your book should be included on my travel booklist.

He was hoping it was a boy, an 18 year old at least. She was hoping it was a girl and maybe she would get lucky.

What are you hoping for when you catch a glimpse of me?

I look to your reflection to put together the pieces of myself.

It’s not approval I care about, only survival.

The guys from the warehouse pushed me around, trying to be friendly, he says, I don’t know what kind of guy I am but I’m not that guy.

There are trade-offs: The Mach3 for Tampax, Propecia for Midol, an injection cycle for a menstrual cycle.

I shredded the pros and cons list months ago. Now I cross my legs, breathe, and wait.

I watch him push his way onto the subway car. He is overweight, balding, and greasy, a bad combination of running late and male hormones.

I am in the bar, the one I am always in, the only one to go to, and I am surrounded by the sameness that I love and hate and cannot walk away from.

I fear I’m walking the plank to invisibility, nudged by the sword of instinct.

What form will I take as I turn to the fun house mirrors of my daily life in search of elusive truths?

We are here to be better men, he says. My tears form but will they spill before my body becomes a no-crying zone?

I’d turn cartwheels for your beard, dark and thick and slightly effeminate, like that of a lumberjack faggot. Please forgive me for asking but did it come with a back hair?

Sticks and stones may break my bones but your ladies and ma’ams will kill me.

So where do you want it, your ass or my thigh, once a week or every two?

I don’t know. I choose D. None of the above. All of the above.

Can I phone the slumdog millionaire?