Sunday Reading: The Simple Pleasures of Summer Travel

In the best of all possible worlds, you’re reading this while vacationing in some exotic or faraway locale. If you’re not, we’ve got the next best thing: a collection of pieces that explore the simple pleasures of summer travel. In “My Repertoire,” Calvin Trillin describes his culinary adventures in Nova Scotia. In “Dickens in Eden,” Jill Lepore writes about her sojourn at a summer camp for Dickens enthusiasts. David Sedaris recounts his family’s summer vacations in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, and Alice Gregory visits the last finishing school operating in Switzerland. In “An Odyssey,” Daniel Mendelsohn chronicles a Mediterranean voyage that he took one summer with his aging father. Finally, T. Coraghessan Boyle retraces his journey through Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico. We hope that these pieces offer a transporting respite from ordinary life.

—David Remnick

“My Repertoire”

“One way of looking at my Nova Scotia cooking repertoire is that I’m not a kitchen klutz with a limited number of dishes at his disposal but a locavore of such purity that I cook only what can definitely be certified as local and seasonal.”

“Dickens in Eden”

“At Dickens camp, there are faculty seminars, graduate writing colloquiums, and teaching workshops, not to mention Victorian tea, a Victorian dance, and, presumably, summer romance for graduate students, the less Victorian the better.”

“Our Perfect Summer”

“Experience had taught us not to trust my father, but we wanted a beach house so badly it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement.”

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“Finished”

“The women, many of whom had attended M.B.A. programs, were at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu finishing school not to learn how to make money but to acquire the gestures of having inherited it.”

“An Odyssey”

“A month after the end of the semester, my father and I were on a ship in the middle of the Aegean, retracing the Odyssey.”

“Nighttime in the Pool”

“We were looking forward to going north, to Mexico, where we would spring for a real hotel and a little luxury by way of compensation for all the rough—but illuminating—living we’d been doing.”