As you read this I will be on my summer vacation.
It is a staycation, of course, deep in the English countryside in a cottage called Black Cottage. But this location is anything but dark. I'm surrounded by nature and alongside my wife Francesca and our three cats.
I brought some summer reading, too, and I'd like to pass along some of my recommendations, knowing many of you may be staycationing as well this summer.
I have just finished Jonathan Raban’s “Old Glory: An American Voyage,” a momentous account of his puttering down the Mississippi by boat from Minneapolis to New Orleans, written in the very late 1970s and published in 1981.
It has quite a harsh narrative, including the navigation needed to negotiate the mighty river’s foibles, of those he meets and of the towns he mostly finds dying on its banks; but it also speaks triumphantly and warmly of people he encounters and of other towns reinventing themselves.
For my other reading, I chose something far more gentle — gentle in that the travel described in Iqbal Ahmed’s “The Art of Hospitality: A European Odyssey” is not a rip-roaring pursuit through strange landscapes and amid cold hearts, but rather a slow perusal of the wonders of varied, storied and vibrant Europe.
Barcelona, his adopted London, Paris, Basel, Granada and Venice are some of the destinations Ahmed takes us to, both because of his curiosity and also because of his role — sadly until the COVID-19 pandemic — as a concierge with Marriott International.
Ahmed knew Arne Sorenson, the former CEO of that hotel company until his sad death earlier this year, and it was Sorenson who suggested the first part of his latest book’s title.
That’s a pretty unique claim to fame, I would suggest.
Sorenson sent Ahmed flowers and a congratulatory note on the publication of one of his five books thus far, and he sent Ahmed a now treasured postcard from Shanghai informing him that he was in China putting the final touches to a deal.
It is such touching gestures from one hotel great that Ahmed replicates with his own tender paragraphs to us, his readers, on his voyages right up to and just beyond when the pandemic halted the world.
Peppered throughout his European travels are recollections of London and his birthplace of Srinagar in India’s Kashmir region. This reminded me of how I often travel, often Walter Mitty-ish in my own head, linking former trips with present ones and my knowledge of places that I hope will constitute new ones.
I might have mentioned this before, but one of my favorite travel books is Robert Sullivan’s “The Meadowlands,” which is an account of the New Jersey marshland that sits between New York City and Newark.
For most people it might be a polluted nothingness sitting between Manhattan and Newark Liberty International Airport, crossed quickly by rail or road, but for Sullivan it was a wonder of travel hidden right beneath our noses.
I worked on the edge of the Meadowlands for seven years, and on sunny lunchtimes I would often walk to a small Meadowlands nature reserve tucked behind a shopping mall to see what birds were there, an indication there was some life thereabouts.
Ahmed’s book has that same joy of unsolicited finds, less so a visit to the Mona Lisa but rather a conversation with an artisan leathermaker in a factory and showroom most of us would not notice was even there.
It also reads as one of the first testaments of the distress, horror and displacement that has come in the tail stream of the pandemic, in general and in the hotel industry.
Ahmed’s books have been chosen as Books of the Year by newspapers such as The Guardian, Economist and New Statesman, and I heartily recommend “The Art of Hospitality: A European Odyssey.”
Find more of Ahmed’s world at www.coldstreampublishers.com.
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