Summer reads

Great escapes: From a journey down the Nile to the chronicle of a professional basketball player, these memoir recommendations will whisk you away.

Editor's note: This is the third of a four-part series of summer reading recommendations.

By Salon staff

Read more: Books, Basketball, Egypt, Dogs, Books Features

June 18, 2007 | Throughout June, Salon's staff is recommending summer books that won't make you feel cheap and empty. (Or maybe they will, in the best possible way.) Previous weeks featured killer thrillers and chic lit.

In this third of four installments, we spotlight five first-person narratives. All of them involve some kind of escape from average, everyday reality. Some document an actual journey: Anthony Doerr describes an enchanted year in Rome, while Rosemary Mahoney takes us on her trip down the Nile in a fisherman's skiff. Other books provide a peek at a different way of life: Paul Shirley chronicles his misadventures as a pro basketball player; Jon Katz conjures life with his animals at Bedlam Farm, manure and all; and Mary South recounts her decision to swap a publishing job for a life at sea.

No matter where you find yourself this summer, these memoirs will whisk you away.

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Bad luck may come in threes -- but what about good luck? The same March night that Anthony Doerr's wife, Shauna, delivers their twin sons, Henry and Owen, Doerr returns home to find the family's mailman has delivered another delightful bundle: an unsolicited letter from the American Academy in Rome, offering the writer a yearlong fellowship and his family residency in a sprawling apartment high on the Janiculum Hill. And so it happens that six months later, as an autumn rain settles on their Boise, Idaho, home, the new parents pack their sons and their suitcases -- full of diapers, baby formula, Italian pocket dictionaries and "two dozen Nutri-Grain bars" -- and board an Airbus for the Eternal City, and the adventure of their lives.

In this slim volume composed of four sparkling chapters, each spanning one season, Doerr describes both the mishaps and the moments of wonder that go along with being a new father and a foreigner in one of the world's most beguiling cities. The meter and rhythm of everyday life come alive in his accounts of grocery blunders (who knew the Italian phrase for "tomato sauce" was so close to that for "grapefruit sauce"?), chronic insomnia, birthdays and writer's block, but it is Doerr's poetic portraits of the yawning ceiling of the Pantheon on a white winter day and the funeral pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II that ring with the sublime. Forget Frances Mayes; this is not just another saccharine red-sauce and chianti-soaked travelogue. Instead, delighted by the parrots and pines outside his window, inspired by the great works of Pliny the Elder, Dante and Shelley, and awed by the layers of history he encounters beneath each footstep, Doerr has composed a bittersweet and artful meditation on the craft of writing and a celebration of the city and the senses. To the charmed reader, "Four Seasons in Rome" -- like Doerr's sojourn abroad -- may feel as though it ends too soon: It's long enough that you fall under the spell of his enchanted world, but not long enough to entirely know it. Then again, Doerr himself would be first to point out that, like a peep at St. Peter's Basilica through a locked garden keyhole, sometimes the most stirring moments of beauty are those that remain a mystery.

-- Sarah Karnasiewicz

Next page: A trip down the Nile