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Any time I travel to a new place for which there is no Rick Steves guidebook, I feel a little cheated. Steves, with his impeccable recommendations, sensible budgeting options, and gently corny prose style, has served as the benevolent fairy godfather on more than one trip for me. So it’s a treat to read his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail, and meet a Steves who is much younger and much more unsure — perhaps in need of a fairy godparent of his own.

In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher who already had the travel bug. Together with a school friend, he was determined to make his way across the so-called Hippie Trail: from Istanbul to Kathmandu, an overland trek by bus and train through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences, and it’s that which forms the basis of the new memoir — a young man’s story, with minimal intrusions from the old one.

Along the Hippie Trail, Steves got high for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned, it was “as innocent as wine with dinner is in America.” Today, he’s an advocate for legalized cannabis.) He rode an elephant in Jaipur and bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. The dreamy travel descriptions are fun, but what’s loveliest in this book is to watch Steves slowly open his mind to a world that was bigger and more complicated than he ever expected. “What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives?” he wonders. 

Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your mind to the world, but one of the others is reading, which allows you to brush up against the consciousness of another person, touching your mind to theirs. Here are some books to help you do just that.

On the shelf

Gliff by Ali Smith

Here are some of the characteristics of the books of Ali Smith, who’s been called Scotland’s Nobel laureate-in-waiting: sneaky serialization. (Her acclaimed seasonal quartet was linked by a tricky, easy-to-miss series of daisy chain connections.) Linguistic play. (She likes a prose poem integrated into the text and, if she can swing it, a long discussion of etymology.) A set of anti-fascist politics that is not optimistic so much as it is committed to resistance and to the resilient capabilities of art and beauty. (The seasonal quartet contained some of the earliest serious post-Brexit and post-Covid novels.)

Smith’s new novel, Gliff, contains all of the above, and yet it still feels new and surprising. It’s simply not quite what you would expect

Gliff takes place in a near-future dystopia, and it tracks two siblings with the fairy-tale names of Rose and Briar. Their bohemian parents have sheltered them from the worst of their authoritarian state, but the state takes its strange and absurd revenge. Sometime in the night, we learn through Briar’s child eyes, someone comes to their house and paints a red line all around it, an opaque threat that nonetheless forces them to flee their home. Then the line comes for their camper van. It comes relentlessly, unstoppably, forcing Briar and Rose away from their parents, off the grid, into hiding, and even, eventually, away from each other. 

Gliff’s title comes from an old Scottish word with many meanings: It can be a short moment, a violent blow, a sudden escape, or a nonsense sound. Its companion novel is due to come out next year and is being advertised as “a story hidden in the first novel.” It will be titled Glyph.

Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski

What a treat, what an absolute delight this warm, funny novel is — which is a particular triumph because it is, in some ways, a Me Too novel. A little bit Slings & Arrows, a little bit Dorothy Parker, Mona Acts Out deals with the fraught relationship between esteemed Shakespearian actor Mona Zahid and her old mentor Milton Katz, who has been forced out of the theatrical company he founded after accusations of sexual harassment.

Mona, who as she approaches middle age laments that she will soon have to stop playing Ophelia and start playing Gertrude, credits Milton with “making” her. Yet she’s never felt completely comfortable with the way Milton wielded his absolute power at their theater company, a dynamic tracked here with the nuance befitting a book that takes Shakespeare as its subject. Over the course of one disastrous Thanksgiving, Mona gets very high indeed and, little dog in tow, walks out on hosting her in-laws to ramble across Manhattan, trying to get Milton out of her head and also work out the mystery of why her hair currently looks so good.

As Mona walks, she occasionally frets over the role she’s currently playing: Maria in Twelfth Night, one of Shakesepeare’s most sparkling comedies. Mona’s playing it dark and cruel, and no one quite understands why: Isn’t it supposed to be funny? With Mona Acts Out, Berlinski has pulled off the opposite feat. She’s written a sharp analysis of something dark, and she’s made it a pure pleasure to read. 

Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer

What a strange phenomenon the Disney Channel of the 2000s was: all those squeaky clean sitcoms about sweet kids with big dreams; all that ever-lurking paranoia that one of the sweet kids would pull a Britney any minute now. If you’re a millennial, odds are that you spent some time with Disney Channel as your babysitter. It fed mainstream pop culture one giant pop star after another — and then, somehow, it seemed to fade away, consigned to irrelevance as abruptly and inexplicably as it became, somehow, central in its heyday.

Or maybe not so inexplicably. Ashley Spencer’s Disney High is a smart, rigorously reported piece of both cultural and corporate history on how a combination of luck and prescience shot the Disney Channel into the zeitgeist over the course of the 2000s, and how corporate inertia let it fall again. Few would call the work Disney built over that decade great art, but it was a hugely formative influence on the childhood and adolescence of a generation. In Disney High, Spencer shows us how it got there. 

Off the shelf

• Have you been following all this uproar over book blurbs? I wrote about it here.
• Happy Valentine’s Day! LitHub has some advice from novelists on the art of the sex scene.
• At Harper’s, climate journalist Justin Nobel tells the story of pulling his book from Simon & Schuster after the publisher was bought by a private equity firm with investments in oil and gas. 
• Novelist Lincoln Michel makes the case that books will outlast AI. 
• At the Paris Review, Jamieson Webster celebrates the word-drunk language play of Good Night Moon writer Margaret Wise Brown.

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