Two new books from G.M. (Mark) Baker

Hi, Brian.

This is to let you know that I have two new books out, both of them concerned with classic journeys, one fiction and the other nonfiction. The fiction is the fourth novel of my Cuthbert's People series, The Wander and the Way, set on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The Nonfiction is Ordinary Eccentricity, a journal of the trip my wife and I took down Route 66 in 2019.

The Wanderer and the Way

The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, now the most famous pilgrimage route in the world, was founded in the early ninth century, largely due to the efforts of Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia. As with most people of this period, nothing seems to be known of his early years. What follows, therefore, is pure invention.

Theodemir returns footsore and disillusioned to his uncle’s villa in Iria Flavia, where he meets Agnes, his uncle’s gatekeeper, a woman of extraordinary beauty. He falls immediately in love. But Agnes has a fierce, though absent, husband; a secret past; another name, Elswyth; and a broken heart.

Witteric, Theodemir’s cruel and lascivious uncle, has his own plans for Agnes. When the king of Asturias asks Theodemir to undertake an embassy on his behalf to Charles, King of the Franks, the future Charlemagne, Theodemir plans to take Agnes with him to keep her out of Witteric’s clutches. But though Agnes understands her danger as well as anyone, she refuses to go. And Theodemir dares not leave without her.

https://books2read.com/thewandererandtheway

Ordinary Eccentricity

Travel is not really about the destination or even the points of interest along the way. It is about the road itself. On Route 66 in particular, It is not the great monuments or the great attractions that matter, but the ever unfolding view, the thousand tiny attractions, a miscellany that slowly reveals its unity.

There is much that is eccentric along the route, but it is, for the most part, the eccentricity of ordinary people, both those who built it and those who preserve and memorialize it.

Route 66 is a museum to ordinary eccentricity. On Route 66 you are doing what everyone who ever drove it was doing. You are  driving to a real destination. You are following the Mother Road for real. No other museum gives you the opportunity to do the thing for real the way Route 66 does.

This is an account of the transcontinental road trip that my wife, Anna, and I took in the spring of 2018 and of a second trip that we took the following year. 

We found much of what Route 66 and the other roads we took go through is ordinary. Some of it is goofy. Some of it is kitschy. Some of it is blatantly commercial. Some of it is gorgeous. Some of it is ugly. All of which makes it human: a human artifact and a human place, a place of ordinary eccentricity.

books2read.com/OrdinaryEccentricity

Thanks!

--
G. M. (Mark) Baker 

https://gmbaker.net

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