East Toward Dawn - Nan Watkins

For the past couple weeks, I've been getting the travel itch again. I've spent a lot of time on-line researching all my faux vacations to Nicaragua, Belize, and Spain. So, I decided that reading travel literature might be a good way to cure my wanderlust. East Toward Dawn chronicles Watkins's 60-day journey around the world to celebrate her 60th birthday. She decides to travel alone, though she has friends and family in many of the locations she visits. Along the way, Watkins struggles to find meaning in her life as a musician, a wife, and most importantly a mother. She is now divorced (though in a new relationship) and still figuring out how to deal with the loss of her young son many years earlier. In general, I love travel literature. Reading a little always makes me want to read more. Watkins was a good reminder that I have many more places to read about and that I do enjoy learning about the world through the eyes of different types of people. Overall, however, Watkins story-telling was a bit disappointing. She seemed to try too hard to view everything through the perspective of her own personal experiences, rather than appreciating the differences in the cultures she was visiting. But, she did inspire me to pick up three more travel memoirs at the bookstore this weekend - one by Nicholas Sparks about his travels around the world with his brother, one by Paul Theroux in the South Pacific, and the last about a Thai-American who travels to Thailand to become a monk. We'll see where those stories take me in the upcoming months.