A Latte Books

Monday, July 18

I’ve been reading a lot on this trip. I brought with me the Mizzou Reads book for the incoming freshman, which we’re required to read for ResLife, and I quickly finished that one, I think before we left Madrid. It’s called Zeitoun and it’s an interesting read about a man who stays in New Orleans through Katrina and the trials he faces as a Middle-Eastern immigrant in a city that is now chaotic. I recommend it.

Then I bought Pride & Prejudice in Madrid, and I zoomed through that with my usual hunger for that novel. Yes, it was in Spanish, but I know that book so well I didn’t even need a dictionary for the words I didn’t know. From memory, I could translate the rest of the phrase to English and insert the correct word. Obsessive? Yes. Convenient? Of course.

And then I discovered a drawer in my bedside table here full of trash novels. Not like smutty, harlequin romance trash, but one step above that. And all of them are in English. I can only assume my host mom has kept them from previous foreign exchange students (I know she’s had several, and there are other artifacts around).

So I started reading one of those last week. It was Husbands: Is One Ever Enough? by Adele Parks. A British woman is married and then discovers that her best friend’s new boyfriend is in fact her other husband from a run-away marriage after high school, and since she’s never technically divorced the one husband, she’s not really married to the new one. It’s trashy and tragic and fun. It was a good vacation read, but not exactly Oprah’s booklist.

And now I’ve started a second novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown. The premise is that on the same day that this man’s company goes public and starts trading stock in the hundreds of millions of dollars, said man tells his wife he wants divorced. She starts doing hard drugs while her daughters, a $100,000 in-debt feminist journalist and the pregnant high school slut, try to sort out their own lives so they can help her. We’ll see where it goes, but I’m guessing it’s not on my must-buy list.

The point of this rampage about books, besides informing the blog about how I’m filling my down time, is that I have decided I enjoy being the traveler who reads.

Today I went to a cute little coffee shop a few blocks down from my apartment, ordered a caramel latte, and read.

The latte was insanely delicious.

But it was wonderful just to sit there, enjoy the people and food and sounds of Oviedo, and indulge in my book. Some people on my trip have told me that they can’t read while on vacation because they feel like they’re missing out. And while I can see that, it’s definitely not how I feel. To each his own.

So while it’s small, I really enjoy finding this nugget of information about myself. I enjoy it almost as much as I enjoy the pun in my title for this post. It makes me think “A Latte Books” should be an offbeat bookstore with a small coffee shop in the front and a dozen cozy chairs around a big fireplace. Sounds like my kind of place.