Carnival Coping: Books to Help with Homesickness

It's my favorite time of year: Carnival. It's a magical season of parties and costumes and satire and food and community. And parades. Lots and lots and lots of parades.

Or, rather, it's usually my favorite time of year. This year, it's not. Because instead of cavorting through the streets of New Orleans--where it's sunny and 65 degrees--I'm here in Illinois trying to keep from crying homesick tears out of fear that they will literally freeze as they run down my cheeks.

Basically, all of my friends and family are going out in public looking like this:

C & D getting ready for Krewe Delusion

And I'm not leaving my house because my front yard looks like this:

My front yard: a colorless landscape of frozen horror

My Mardi Gras-heightened homesickness has led me to reread a lot of my favorite books from and about Southern Louisiana. I've fallen in a whole new type of love with books from my childhood like Mike Artell's Petit Rouge: A Cajun Red Riding Hood (which you can read--and hear read--on YouTube) as well as Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales by Robert Tallant and Lyle Saxon. I've reread some of my favorite histories of the city (The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette and Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children: ... and Other Streets of New Orleans! by John Chase) and of the Carnival season (Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill). I've also gained a new appreciation for classics like The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life by George Washington Cable (available as a free Ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg!) and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as well as all things Kate Chopin.

Mona Lisa Saloy's Red Beans and Ricely Yours. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. These are the books and writers keeping my New Orleanian heart warm through Illinois' winter.

So, I'm wondering: are there any books or authors that mean home for you? Are you a child of the prairie who reads Willa Cather when you find yourself missing Nebraska? Does reading Jamaica Kincaid help when you yearn for your Caribbean childhood? Does Sherman Alexie sate your hunger for Washington State (or, as my Washingtonian peers call it, God's Country)?

What do you read when you're missing Home?

Literature in Review

The beautiful thing about literature is all of the places that it takes you. Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I feel like I'm at an airport. You get to choose where you want to go. Perusing the aisles and looking at all of the pretty/interesting book covers, feeling their jackets, flipping through the pages-it is all of the fun in it! I've walked through the damp streets of London, lived out of a hut in the Congo, been an albino hunchback circus-mutant and a wandering Japanese poet all without ever having to leave my own home.

The ability of literature to transform us is profound. I can remember the overall feeling of reading The Idiot, or Oliver Twist and I get nostalgic. Dickens' ability to capture certain dialects amazed me. "Cub id, sir, Cub id" (a nasally "Come in, sir, Come in.") when I say it aloud it amazes me. And now I have all of these characters running loose in my head. Each one of them has shaped me into the person that I am today. Reading a good book is like making a good friend and whenever you hear that name you will smile inwardly and remember that feeling. When I finished Hunter S. Thompson's Kingdom of Fear, the last sentence made me smile for a week straight. When I read A Farewell to Arms nearly a decade ago, I didn't want to talk to anyone for the rest of the day. Woody Guthrie's autobiography made me feel like a child. Diane di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman enveloped me for days. There are so many things that you can do with books. You can keep them on your shelf to remind you of a time. You can stack them and use them as a table. You can read them! You can ask a question and flip open to a random page (a fun game I like to play). You can eat oatmeal with them.


What will you do? Where will you go?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xv8EY2vWJg