Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance
Don George, ed., at Salon.com
(Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto: 2000)
READ: December 2004-April 2005
Randal gave me this for my birthday last year. I started reading it over Christmas and then promptly forgot to bring it home from Winnipeg, where we were over the holidays. Thankfully, Randal's dad was nice enough to carefully wrap it up and pop it in the mail - I believe I got it back sometime in February.
And I was glad - it's a nice read. It's a series of stories of things that have happened to various travel writers, most (if not all) of whom have previously written for Salon.com's online literary travel journal. I took my time reading it once I got back, usually limiting myself to one story a night, since it was quite enjoyable for the most part.
Some of the stories are lovely and magical - like the woman who finds peace sleeping beach-side on a small Greek island. Others are funny, some are meant to provoke. The only one that I remember leaving a distinctly bad taste in my mouth was based on a southern Thailand beach - a promising start! - but focussed on the author's obsession with catching up with Leonardo diCaprio who was also in the south of Thailand filming, apparently, The Beach. It was really long, really shallow, and really dull. But by and large, the stories here captivated me or at least interested me enough to keep going. It's a nice way to "travel" when you can afford neither time nor money to actually do so.
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