This Week's Reads

Honeymoon with My Brother
By Franz Wisner (St. Martin's, $23.95)

In the waning years of the last century, Franz Wisner had a really crappy year. His career as a lobbyist for a California developer was quickly becoming downwardly mobile, his vast office was being replaced by a tiny cubicle, and his fiancée decided to call off their wedding just before the ceremony.

Dumped and depressed, Wisner hatched an escape plan—invite his brother Kurt, who was between jobs, to accompany him on the aborted honeymoon to Costa Rica. Then why not leave everything behind and travel for a year, maybe two? Their resulting two-year adventure took the brothers from Prague to Damascus to Lombok, Angkor Wat, Machu Pichu, Botswana, and many points between.

Though it's an irresistible premise, Wisner is a less-than-inspiring writer. Much of the book dwells on the failed marriage-to-be and relations with his brother. No doubt this sort of soul searching was invaluable to the author's mental health, but it's about as interesting as sitting in on a support group with complete strangers.

That said, Wisner brings a wry perspective to the whole backpacker circuit. As a former PR man for California Gov. Pete Wilson and a big-business lobbyist, he's an unlikely vagabond. "You're a Republican," he tells himself before joining the great unwashed hordes tramping the world in Teva sandals. "You just don't do this." Yet this outsider's perspective yields dead-on descriptions of the backpacker culture of "book exchanges, chai teas, deep-tissue massages, Internet hookups, [and] hemp clothing." And he's obviously a fiscal conservative rather than a social one—he's not above an occasional sexual dalliance with a fellow traveler. But beyond the Lonely Planet circuit (and he comes to loathe the whole guidebook lemming culture), Wisner experiences sincere travel epiphanies. In the African nation of Malawi, as he encounters generous humor and hospitality amid dire poverty, Wisner begins to feel a bit of remorse for the pyramids of shrimp and endlessly flowing Scotch he once witnessed at the Republican National Convention.

As often happens with long-term travel, Wisner has his perspective on the world changed. He learns to ditch his guidebook and get all his information through conversation—and in the process meets a host of characters valiantly struggling to make ends meet in a rapidly globalized world. "Travel is the only investment with guaranteed returns," he concludes, and he's right. In Australia and Europe, taking a year off to see the world is an accepted rite of passage. Here in the States, it's seen as an eccentric life choice. Hell, our own president bragged about never having traveled to Europe before he was elected. Here's to more Americans following Wisner's example and discovering how the rest of the world lives. ANDREW ENGELSON

Franz and Kurt Wisner will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Thurs., April 14.

Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante
By Ayun Halliday (Seal Press, $14.95)

Sometimes, late at night, vivid memories of previous jobs I've held haunt me. I see myself in high school counting slice after slice of pepperoni, ensuring that I don't rip off diners by giving them 79 pieces instead of the promised 80. I can recall aimlessly wandering around a hellish clothing store, working as a sales associate, lost in a sea of khaki (my absolute least favorite material) and constantly being ribbed for my lack of aggressiveness with the prepped-out customers.

But none of my memories compares to the various indignities described by Ayun Halliday in Job Hopper, where each vibrant chapter relates a different horrible gig, from being a bartender who can't live up to the billing "Kamikaze Girl" to a brief stint as a nude model for pretentious art students to being "Bert" (with a giant puppet head) for a Sesame Street mall appearance with wailing children clinging to her crotch. Professionally speaking, she's done it all—generally wearing something incredibly unflattering for little pay and no benefits, under a crazy bitch of a boss.

Beginning with a chapter in which the excitement of working as a museum guard drives the author to converse with her windbreaker's zipper (which she compares to a one-eyed duck's head), we join the journey of a woman who refuses to be defined by any of her strange jobs. Instead, she sees even the most obscure occupation as a chance to define herself—mainly in opposition to what she does for money. Halliday emphasizes how it's possible to preserve one's sense of self even in the worst of circumstances (like trying to maintain control of 30 screaming-banshee schoolchildren, few of whom speak English, as a substitute teacher). Her humor, intelligence, and even tenderness turn each dismal professional stop into a laugh-out-loud vignette. Job Hopper also serves as a kind of warning: Be careful of how you treat the help when you next shop at the Gap; that miserable employee folding khakis just might mention you in her book. HEATHER LOGUE

Ayun Halliday will appear at University Book Store, 7 p.m. Mon., April 18.

Misfortune
By Wesley Stace (Little, Brown, $23.95)

Based on a ballad he wrote in 1997 under his musical pen name, John Wesley Harding, Wesley Stace's debut novel, Misfortune, is both self-consciously old and self-consciously new. Packed full of plot and colorful characters, it's rooted in the 19th-century English novel. With sudden loss of social station, a mixture of high and low society, families turned against one another, and disclosures of secret paternity, the book owes an obvious debt to Dickens (including its style), but Stace, a former Ph.D. candidate in English literature, knows other, newer traditions, too.