Trip Jennings
There I was on holiday break ignoring the news and immersed in books after a year that was so loud and distracting that I couldn’t focus enough to read as much as I wanted.
I can’t remember a more relaxing break: Cocooned with books, withdrawing into myself, leaving behind a world on fire.
There was a time in my 20s and 30s when I gobbled up books like they were candy, spending as many evenings as possible inhaling as much information as I could to make sense of the world I was starting to understand while also losing myself in the imaginary worlds spun into existence by great novelists.
What I mostly remember from those years is the feeling I got from reading: the slowing of time, the laying aside of the cares of the day, the engaging with my imagination.
Books are my sweet spot. According to the Myers-Briggs test, I am on the line between introvert and extrovert. Reading means I can have the quiet and isolation of jumping into the imaginary world of a book while not living like a hermit.
It has been years since I’ve recaptured that feeling, but this holiday break came as close as any in memory. It helped that I had tackled books by three recent Nobel winners: Septology by Norwegian Jon Fosse; Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk; and We Do Not Part by South Korean Han Kang. I highly recommend all three.
When I was younger, I was a much more ambitious reader, devouring not only the classics but hard-to-read texts that required multiple readings of sentences and paragraphs to understand what the author was conveying. What I felt over the holiday break was the afterglow of recovering my youthful ardor for “difficult” books.
And yet, now thinking back on it, what perhaps I treasured more than that was the quiet. Reading is a haven from the busyness of the world.
This became evident over the weekend when the world intruded on my literary reverie with the news that the U.S. had invaded Venezuela to capture Nicolas Maduro. I couldn’t ignore that story.
For an instant, it felt serendipitous that two novels I had read over the holidays — Distant Star and By Night in Chile — were by the late Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño.
The context for both is the 1970s U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende (author Isabel Allende’s cousin) and the imposition of a fascist government led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Distant Star is the story of one Chilean’s quest to track down a killer who pretended to be a poet to insinuate himself into a collective of young writers to spy on them. By Night in Chile is about a Catholic priest who is complicit in the Pinochet government’s targeting fellow Chileans.
Because of these two books, I was already focused on South America when this weekend’s news hit.
My thoughts then turned to my mom and my wife, who jumpstarted my interest in Latin America. My mom suggested in the late 1980s that I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, the first novel by a South American author I ever read. Around the same time, she visited El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras as part of a seminary course and asked me if I wanted to read the books on Latin American history she was assigned.
I said yes and thank you.
In the 1990s, my wife introduced me to Garcia Marquez’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as many other South American and Latin American authors, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes.
This marked the beginning of my reading up on Latin America and South America, including the U.S.’s fraught relationship with its southern neighbors.
In the intervening decades, I’ve read many more novels, histories, and memoirs about the region. My long-standing interest gives me a foundation with which to consider the actions of the Trump administration, although I’m still making sense of it.
As I reflect on the freedom to slake my curiosity about the world, I am thankful to live in a western liberal democracy where it is encouraged to pursue knowledge through books, film, art, poetry and music without persecution or pressure from the powers that be.
May it always be.
Honestly, however, I wouldn’t mind if the world weren’t so chaotic. I miss the quiet of the pre-internet days when I could read for hours. In fact, this holiday break gave me an idea: in 2026, I’m going to try to spend more time reading books than on social media.
We’ll see how it goes. I have high hopes.
Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.
