Sense and Sensibility

PILGRIMAGE: Tales from the Open Road by Patrick Pfister (Academy Chicago Publishers, $20).

Like all great travel writers, Patrick Pfister is on a pilgrimage to find his own inner peace. He hasn’t found it yet and I hope he doesn’t for a while because if his future search is as captivating as his past, I want to go along for the ride. In these 10 tales (from what seems to be years on the road), Pfister’s pilgrimage takes him to a close encounter along Interstate 10, to a long-suffering family in Germany, to a Greek island, to a beach in Zanzibar and to other odd byways. In every case, Pfister is a loner, an outsider in these places and he writes of them with the kind of clarity that an outsider brings. Which is not to say he’s a harsh critic. Pfister has yet to catch the Paul Theroux disease of showing off his erudition while criticizing the locals. Pfister has both sense and sensibility. He also has a dry sense of humor and a fine, muscular writing style.

In the remarkable tale, “A Distant Place,” Pfister hikes to a malignant Himalayan village of strange taboos and watches a civic ceremony: “Men had begun to go into trances. Two whirled convulsively in front of the throngs and a third lay writhing in spasms on the ground. In the charged atmosphere my pulse rate tripled. Just then some of the drums stopped beating and sections of the crowd turned around. I glanced to my left and right, wondering what they were looking at. . . . Then I saw a priest high up in a temple shaking his finger at me. In a second it struck home. He was accusing me of having touched the wall.” Pfister has a novelist’s eye for fringe characters and ear for dialogue. His people portraits are especially effecting. Though his observations are unsparing, he is quite nonjudgmental. “Pilgrimage” is Pfister’s first book. Quite a start.

FUNKYTOWNS USA: The Best Alternative, Eclectic, Irreverent and Visionary Places by Mark Cramer (TBS Publishing, $11.95, paperback).

An amusing twist on the “places rated” gimmick that has cheered and angered the country’s city halls the past few years, “FunkyTowns” was written to honor places “that have maintained their uniqueness and diversity while fighting off the incursions of the corporate monoculture,” according to its introduction. Among 12 categories, towns score for having “Unconventional Regional Customs” and “Public Hangouts,” if they are “Pedestrian Friendly” and “Cross-Cultural” or if they embrace “Independent Politics.” Five of the top eight are in California: San Francisco’s Mission District scored highest (40 out of a possible 50 points), Arcata, Venice, West Berkeley and Imperial Beach all scored 30 or more.

While Cramer is having fun, underlying the spoof is anger against the nation’s money culture and a celebration of those blades of grass managing to grow up through the cement of conformity.

Quick trips:

HORSEBACK RIDING TRAILS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA by Paulette Mouchet (Crown Valley Press, $14.95, paperback, maps). Nineteen trails from the Kern River to Anza-Borrego. Each trail is described and rated by difficulty. This is one of a proposed series.

THE SMITHSONIAN GUIDES TO NATURAL AMERICA: The Atlantic Coast & Blue Ridge by John Ross, photos by Bates Littlehales (Random House, $19.95, paperback, photos, maps). More in a series that already includes the Southwest, Northern New England and the Pacific of Alaska and Hawaii. These beautifully illustrated guides focus on parks, scenic trails, wildlife areas and preserves. Fun to browse through and of some value as an ecological overview. Nearly useless as a guide.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.