What to do when you’re high and `Dry’

Internet cafes don’t grow underneath every coffee plant, so I’ve been doing a lot of being instead of recording here. But as Costa Rica is a place that encourages you to be instead of think, I’ve felt free to indulge myself.

And what better way of doing that by reading? In the beach town of Quepos, we visited a butterfly (mariposa) farm, we slid down steel cables set 300 feet over the jungle floor and we drank a few Costa Rican beers (Imperial is the best), but I also managed to read a oerfect beach book, Michael Crichton’s “Prey.”

And just before we began the long trip back yesterday to San Jose, stopping along the way to have a fairly disappointing lunch at a beach-side cafe, I started Augusten Burroughs’ aptly titled memoir “Running With Scissors.” That and his follow-up book “Dry” make horrific childhoods and early adult years (marked by self-destructive tendencies and alcoholism) seem actually funny. Which is a talent.

Somewhere in there I squeezed the just-republished hardboiled mystery novel “In a Lonely Place.” Written in 1947 by Dorothy B. Hughes, the novel predates Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels as a powerful exploration of the sociopath’s mind.

And now, after exploring the Museo Nacional, walking the streets of San Jose, shopping for knicknacks and examples of Costa Rican music, getting caught in a rainstorm and being fortunate enough to snag a cab, I spent the morning lounging by the pool and reading “The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003.” This is a collection of short pieces chosen by the writer Dave Eggers, of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” fame. No such collection has, so far, impressed me more. I have to rank it among the best book that I have read this year.

But that should come as no surprise. At this point, what else but a good book could make me take my eyes off the distant, cloud-shrouded mountains that seem to symbolize this paradise otherwise known as Costa Rica? Too bad I have to head home tomorrow.