As I’m sure everyone has heard, Eat, Pray, Love hits theaters this Friday.  In case there is anyone unfamiliar with this cultural phenomenon, Eat, Pray, Love follows the protagonist, played by the always gorgeous Julia Roberts, as she travels around Italy, India, and Bali.  She starts a “no carb left behind” project, she consumes copious amounts of delicious pasta, she learns to pray and discover herself in India, and she finally finds love in Bali.  But here’s the thing: Julia Roberts isn’t playing some random character – she’s playing a real woman.

The woman in question is author Elizabeth Gilbert, who penned the 2006 memoir/travel narrative/food porn extravaganza that quickly became a best seller.  The book has inspired numerous readers to search within themselves for a deeper strength, and to reexamine their lives, looking closely at what makes them truly happy.

Gilbert starts the book – and the movie – unhappy.  She has just gone through a messy affair and a subsequent divorce.  She’s educated and wealthy, but she is just not satisfied.  Something, an elusive something, is missing from her life.  This realization prompts her to drop everything and begin traveling.  She is lucky enough to have the funds to undertake a project many of us can only dream of, but her story is still relatable.  Gilbert is lacking something, and through risking everything, she finds what she needed the most: herself.

In honor of the movie’s release, I’d like to suggest we all take a moment and think about what it is that makes us truly happy.  For some people, it’s the thrill of travel, or the calm of mediation.  For others, it’s creamy, indulgent pasta or freshly made sausage.  For me, it’s fresh basil, old cotton t-shirts, used books, and red wine.  What makes you feel blessed?

Our newest feature article takes us somewhere hot, somewhere new, somewhere a little bit dirty and a little bit dangerous: the back roads of Bolivia.

Author Stephen Eisenhammer decides to follow the trail of his personal hero, Che Guevara, who was captured and executed in the South American country.  Like Eisenhammer, Guevara was a man of letters, and took pleasure in documenting his journey.  With Che’s Bolivian Diaries in tow, Eisenhammer sets out on a pilgrimage to discover something new about the revolutionary figure.

It’s always a funny thing when we go chasing after heroes, and Eisenhammer’s trip is no exception.  In recent years, Che has become even more of an international figure, what with the films and books and preponderance of red screenprinted t-shirts.  Che has entered our consciousness as a man of uncompromising ideals and reckless bravery.  However, as it often happens, the myth has obscured the man.

The man was more than just a ruthless general: he was also a lover of poetry.  Che particularly enjoyed the works of Chilean writer Pablo Neruda.  While there are certain ideological similarities between the two men, I like to imagine that Guevara turned to Neruda for refuge from war.  I imagine him paging through the tender love poems, the odes to women loved and lost.  In my mind, this gives a softer edge to the Marxist hero.  Instead of seeing a general, a great fighter and a fearful opponent, I imagine a bearded figure, quietly drunk on words of love.  His appreciation for the written word adds another cast to Che – and it may be the reason he is so beloved by intellectuals everywhere, despite his bloody past.

If you, like me, are curious as to what Eisenhammer learns about his hero, you will have to check out the full article, On The Bolivian Trial of Che Guevara, A Literary Guerrilla.  And when you’re done, spend some time perusing our other articles on Che’s favorite poet: Pablo Neruda.

Back in the glory days, Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I disagree, unless “we” are identified as that ultimately solipsistic portion of the population that cannot feel engaged in life without constructing narratives. “We” need stories in order to process experience, to cope, to understand, to consolidate stray stimuli into graspable themes and get on with our lives. You’re one of “us” if your psychologist tells you to get out of your head. I’m happy to be placed in almost any grouping that places me alongside ole Joan, but I don’t delude myself: “we” are not everyone.

The nice thing about living in your head is that is makes books an extremely low-budget form of escapist travel. You could go the route of travel narratives, but that’s taking it a bit literally, and we favor the abstract. Period pieces can do the trick – they construct a complete, comprehensible reality. Or we can read books that take you out of your own angsty head, and visit someone who occupies a similar psychological space.

With this in mind, I’ve cast my eye on Melissa Milgram’s Still Life, Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, and a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories.

The narrator of Still Life began investigating the phenomenon of taxidermy from a journalist’s perspective, and ultimately ends up with her subjective hand all up in a drowned squirrel. A narrator who struggles with boundaries, who cannot feign distance between self and subject, is just the kind of head I can crawl into.

Likewise, German’s Eat When You Feel Sad chronicles that habituated loneliness that characterizes the life of a twenty-something. (Cough). Never mind that I’m totally bitter that this author has co-opted his ennui into a book deal even before he’s experienced its ambition-eroding properties full-force. Still, a stray paragraph from him novel proves that there is a mind – an entire population of adultolescents minds, I imagine – going through the same aimless motions, hoping a friend will connect to gchat, tossing away poignant, but predictable, independent clauses.

One’s twenties, in my experience, are a period of disappointment. This sense of disappointment is, no doubt, tied to delusions of grandeur, just as depression can be linked to narcissism. Woe is me, me, me, and I am the entire world.

Science fiction has explored this trope of speck-like human subjectivity, counterposed to a sublime, immense universe. Not to get too meta or self-contradictory, but I’m not sure if this is a bad thing. If we can acknowledge our speck-like perspective and use it as a means of appropriating some universal narrative, then we’re getting somewhere, even if it’s just more psychological wilderness.

Ballard’s Enormous Room is about a man whose refusal to leave a suburban house limits his perspective until he believes it is the universe. But this delusion of grandeur, this bloated perception, transforms the banal topography of the living room into a strange, new world, and the reader is awestruck, and temporary expanded, by the narrator’s lunatic explorations of his kitchen.

To the kitchen, then. I’m feeling sad.

The relationship between book and the physical world is one of equal exchange and opportunity.  Often we take to the written world to better understand things in the physical world, but just as often we take to the outside world to better understand what we have read.  Though some books are enjoyed purely for entertainment, many others instruct us, broaden our horizons, and open our minds (much like travel).  To put it more simply: We learn to read, we read to learn.

Reading, like travel, can also occasionally be a confusing activity.  It challenges us to view different points of view, to absorb new ways of thinking.  In this week’s feature article, Sabil of Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo, Egypt, author Robin Graham engages in both kinds of learning.  In my (literature major-informed) opinion, Graham approaches the work of Mahfouz in the best possible way: he both reads to learn about Cairo, and visits Cairo to learn about what he has read.

It doesn’t help that Cairo is not a simple city.  Like much of the Middle East and Africa, Cairo is beset with conflict.  Understanding this conflict, and the complicated intersections of Islam, tourism, and terrorism that go on throughout the city, is no easy task.

Viewing Cairo through the lens of Naguib Mahfouz, author of the Cairo Trilogy, Graham remarks that the Islamic city is a “changed world.”  Coming to Cairo, he is able to see that Mahfouz’s works carried an underlying “dark prescience that eventually cast its shadow into real life.”  Cairo is, through all the political turmoil and social change, a city of uncertainties.

Yet uncertainties are what make for some of the best reading – and the best thinking.  We invite you to take a moment on this lazy Sunday to broaden your horizons by reading Sabil of Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo, Egypt.  It may require a moment of reflection (or two) but we promise you will learn something, because even an expert in foreign relations can glean something from stepping into another’s shoes and walking the busy streets.

When people talk about travel writers, many names come to mind, from Bill Bryson to Marco Polo. One name that does not often pop up is Michael Crichton, most famous for his science and medical fiction thrillers. Crichton’s fiction, though often grounded in technology or medical breakthroughs, involves reality-bending adventures such as dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, time travel in Timeline, and aliens in Sphere. But Crichton also wrote a non-fiction adventure story: his 1988 book Travels, which details his travel to Los Angeles after leaving Harvard Medical School.

The book recounts his early writing career and his subsequent travels across the globe. From the heights of Kilimanjaro and the Mayan pyramids, to the depths of the shark-filled waters of Tahiti, Crichton uses his copious talent for gripping narratives to recount the personal adventures of a man seeking new experiences. Crichton’s writing chronicles his inner travels as well, focusing on forays into mysticism, exorcism, channeling, and psychic events.

Though travel writing may seem like a unique and specialized genre, many authors well known in other genres have published their own travel accounts. At it’s core, travel writing is the art of communicating one’s experience of the world. Michael Crichton is just one of these “hidden travel writers,” who used his flair for the thrilling, dramatic, and other-worldly to translate his physical and mental journeys into engaging prose.

(Michael Crichton, Travels. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.)

Chuck Klosterman is an American humorist, best known for writing on rock music and pop culture. But did you know that he is also a travel writer? In his book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, Klosterman traces across the United States, visiting the sites where famous rock and roll artists died. Much of the book focuses on his relationship with three women in his life, and his writing is often in the same high-speed, ranting, colorful style as his earlier works such as Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto. But at its heart, Killing Yourself to Live is a road story, following the classic American structure of a man with existential questions searching for answers on the open highway. And while Klosterman includes many fictional elements, the theme of music’s “death sites” lends itself well to travel writing. The impact of music, like the sense of a physical place, can be hard to translate into words. Klosterman’s writing isn’t explicitly interested in travel, but he clearly understands the link between place and sound, how a few details can stick in the mind and conjure up an entire experience. Klosterman uses the limitations of one to convey the other: listing off band names to convey the cooler-than-thou attitude of Manhattan, or capturing the hopeless boredom of a late night drive by describing the changing songs on the radio.