6/16/2007

Reading the Lonely Planet guide to San Francisco in Dolores Park while his husband naps at their friend's house a few blocks a way. They're here from Toronto on their honeymoon.

In the backpack--Armistead Maupin's newest book, Michael Tolliver Lives, which is his husband's book. He brought along 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus , by Charles Mann to read on the trip. It dispels many misconceptions. For instance, that there weren't a lot of people in the Western Hemisphere when Columbus showed up.

His favorite book of all time--The Wind and the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. It's a comfort book. He reads a little bit of it now and then, maybe a couple or three chapters. He loves the opening scene, when Mole is underground doing his spring cleaning then, taken with spring fever, goes running out. The equivalent of this in his own life--canoe trips. He likes to go up to the Hudson Bay Basin where there are gorgeous great long rivers. His husband is not so into this, though he doesn't fault him for not liking to be cold and wet.

He enjoys both nonfiction and fiction, like the wonderful Canadian author, Miriam Toews, who wrote A Complicated Kindness about a girl growing up in Manitoba, Canada, surviving a hard family life.