In two days I fly to Sarasota, Florida for a week of vacation! This is the first real, week-long vacation I've taken in two years. The last was my trip to Chicago in September 2004.

I haven't been in Florida in 20 years (seriously) and have never been to Florida. A couple of church members have a time share condo there, and they invited me to come and stay for a week. I can't wait to lie on the beach and read and look at hot boys. How much relaxing fun is that going to be!

In fact, I've been spending time working on the stash of books I'm going to take along. I went to Borders on Friday and spent a couple of gift cards that I had saved up. I bought a collection of WH Auden poems, not so much for the trip, but because I needed it. I bought Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and plan on taking it on the trip. This book was recently named the fourth best American novel of the past quarter century. I didn't know anything about it, but put it high on my list to read soon. I also got a V. S. Naipaul novel. I've been meaning to read some Naipaul since he won the Nobel prize, and he's been on my Amazon.com wish list for a couple of years (no one EVER buys you anything from that, as Joe Hill told me way back when). I'll probably take that on the trip as well. I'll probably also take Billy Budd, which I've never read, and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Mom had loaned me the latter some months ago, and it has been in the stack to read. Time last week had an article on young writers and said that Zadie Smith was the best and this was her best work, so I bumped it up the list as well.

Now I often read four or five books when I'm on vacation, so the fifth one is Barbara Brown Taylor's memoir on why she left the ministry. I assume those five will do me, but I might take a sixth just to be safe. If so, it will probably be some Armistead Maupin. Gosh, if I read all of this, I will have so dramatically moved through my reading list that I might have to go buy more books after the vacation!