2.16 Travels with Alice by Calvin Trillin

I'm sure that y'all will be pleased to know that I spent a good deal of time yesterday at the library and came home with a ridiculous amount of books. Some are about our travel plans for the summer, but most are about my favorite topic or fiction.

I've heard that Trillin is a great food writer, funny, wry, not too stuffy, so I picked this up. It made me super jealous that he and his family had the ability and inclination to travel all over and spend many weeks in one place. After I win the lottery and I buy myself a fantastic house, I will travel the world. For now though, I need to rely on the extreme kindness of others or read about other people doing what I long to.

Travels is part of Trillin's Tummy Trilogy along with American Fried and Alice, Let's Eat. This novel was more about traveling with the family and the sense of place of the locations they were visiting than food. It wasn't quite what I was expecting. Trillin has a biting sense of humor. Enough to make me smile, but not quite boisterous enough so that I look like a crazy person laughing to myself on the street when I'm walking home. His chapter about taureaux piscine is fantastic, I really liked how his search for the taureaux is as intense for his search for good food on St. Thomas.

Reading this had a hint of bittersweetness for me because I know that Alice, Trillin's wife, died of heart failure in 2001. It definitely colors a reader's expectations when she thinks that she knows the end of the story.