Book Lust to Go Read online

  Seoul and surrounding environs in the 1970s is the setting for a series of mysteries by Martin Limón. Military Police Sergeant George Sueño, who, along with his partner Ernie Bascom, normally investigates crimes involving black marketing, drugs, and prostitution among the American troops, narrates them. In their sixth outing, G. I. Bones, the crime is a cold case that occurred right after the Korean War ended—twenty years before—and its solution opens windows on Sueño’s past that he thought he’d closed forever. Limón offers a clear view into a time and a place that’s unfamiliar to many of us. If you like this mystery, try my other favorite: The Wandering Ghost.

  Another terrific mystery—this one set primarily in North Korea—is Gus Lee’s oldie but goodie, Tiger’s Tail.

  If you were to pick a locale in which to set a novel, I don’t think you could find anyplace more remarkable than the setting of Jeff Talarigo’s The Ginseng Hunter. It takes place along the Tumen River, which divides China from Korea. The themes—love, war, political oppression, the grief of solitude, the solitude of grief—all make this an unforgettable reading experience.

  In Korea, A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, Simon Winchester provides probably the friendliest guide to South Korea, describing, with his usual panache, its history, geography, and culture.

  The best book for the nonhistorian on the Korean War (which was not, in actuality, ever declared a war, but rather described as a “police action”) is David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. It’s long, thorough, not tedious, and filled with fascinating and little-known facts.

  The sections of Chang-rae Lee’s brilliant fourth novel The Surrendered that are set in Korea (and Manchuria) during the “police action” make excruciating reading. I can’t imagine the pain it must have caused Lee to write them. But oh my goodness, what a splendid novel this is.

  In a first novel based on the life of her mother, Eugenia Kim’s The Calligrapher’s Daughter tells a tale of a country and a woman trying to balance the old ways with the new.

  All the stories in Once the Shore by Paul Yoon are set on a South Korean island; their time frame covers the half-century between just before the Korean War to the present.

  The stories of men and women who managed to leave the country form the basis of Barbara Demick’s consistently interesting Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. One of the first things you’ll want to do, I suspect, is mull over how ironic the title is.

  LAOS

  Although there are many books on Indochina or Southeast Asia that include Laos, here are some that focus on the country itself.

  Mystery fans rejoice—don’t miss these little-known treasures: Colin Cotterill’s series starring Dr. Siri Paiboun, coroner to the nation. I’d read these in order: The Coroner’s Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, Anarchy and Old Dogs, Curse of the Pogo Stick, The Merry Misogynist, and Love Songs from a Shallow Grave.

  In Lost Over Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship, Richard Pyle describes a search for the remains of four combat journalists who were killed in 1971, as the Vietnam War was raging. Horst Faas’s photographs complement the tale.

  Kao Kalia Yang’s affecting memoir, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, remained with me long after I turned over the last page.

  LAS VEGAS

  For many people (members of my own family among them), Las Vegas is a vacation spot of choice. When it came time to write this section I decided, for some reason that makes total sense to me—maybe because Las Vegas seems to change radically moment by moment and certainly year-by-year—to arrange the recommended titles roughly in order of publication date.

  John D. MacDonald is best known for his Travis McGee mysteries (all set in or near Fort Lauderdale, Florida), but his non-series novel The Only Girl in the Game is like a snapshot of Las Vegas circa 1960; it’s so well plotted and the portrait of Las Vegas is so well drawn that reading it is like taking a trip back in time.

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson is a drug-hazy account of adventures in the city that first appeared in Rolling Stone in 1971, and set the tone for the stoned decade to come.

  Although I’m generally not a true crime fan,I did quite enjoy these two books: James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker and Nicholas Pileggi’s Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, an account of the two men who ran the Mob (and therefore ran Las Vegas) in the 1980s. In addition to being both enlightening and nicely written, Pileggi’s book is a good companion read for McDonald’s novel.

  In Beautiful Children Charles Bock, a native of the city, portrays the dark underside of Las Vegas through the experiences of a twelve-year-old boy who leaves his home in the suburbs and disappears into the maw of glitter and grief of Sin City. And the sins are major, though not those that you might first expect.

  And fans of Carl Hiaassen’s and Donald Westlake’s capers will enjoy Chris Ewan’s novels that take place in different cities around the world—The Good Thief’s Guide to Vegas is the third in the series, but there’s no need to read them in any particular order. Charlie Howard, the eponymous hero, also appears in The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam and The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris.

  LEAVENED IN LEBANON

  If Lebanon’s your destination, don’t miss these. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story is a graphic novel based on the film of the same name, written and drawn by Ari Folman and David Polonsky. It’s about the experiences of an Israeli soldier during the 1982 attacks on Shatila and Sabra.

  Novels either set in Lebanon or by Lebanese writers include Beaufort by Ron Leshem (about an Israeli based in southern Lebanon whose commando team is undergoing constant attack by Hezbollah); Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust, set in a small town just outside Beirut; Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game; and The Hakawati, in which Rabih Alameddine weaves the whole history of the Middle East into the story of one unforgettable Lebanese family (this is not a book to rush through—you have to take the time to savor what Alameddine has accomplished). If you appreciate Alameddine’s style and substance, you might also enjoy his novels Koolaids: The Art of War and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters.

  All of Hanan al-Shaykh’s novels deal with the role of women in the Middle East, particularly in her native Lebanon. Her best known is probably Women of Sand and Myrrh, so I’d start there; I can also highly recommend her epistolary novel, Beirut Blues.

  Al-Shaykh also wrote The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story as a way of coming to understand just what it took for her mother to divorce her father in a society where women were expected to accept what fate dealt them and any deviation from that behavior was severely punished.

  Other nonfiction not to miss includes Joel Chasnoff’s The 188th Crybaby Brigade: A Skinny Jewish Kid from Chicago Fights Hezbollah:A Memoir, in which an Ivy League-educated comedian whose career is going nowhere decides to change directions, joins the Israeli Defense Forces, and is sent to Lebanon (hard to believe this could be funny, but it is); Origins: A Memoir by Amin Maalouf includes not only his family’s history, but also the amazing story of his grandfather’s trip to Havana to bring his younger brother home; and Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A House at the Edge of Tears.

  There’s a full chapter about the refugee camps in Lebanon in Caroline Moorehead’s devastating Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, and one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in years is Fouad Ajami’s cultural history of the Middle East in The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey.

  LIBERIA

  The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper, who formerly worked for the Wall Street Journal and is now diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, describes her idyllic childhood and the horrors following the descent of Liberia into civil war.

  The Darling by Russell Banks is the story of Hannah Musgrave, American born a
nd bred, a child of hopeful dreams and political protest, who flees the FBI’s clutches and moves to Liberia in 1976, where she marries one of the rising stars of the growing revolutionary movement there. Now living in relative seclusion on a farm in upstate New York, she travels back to that war-torn country to find her three sons. Banks’s novel features a heroine whom you can’t entirely embrace in friendship and good will, but whose idealism and good faith you can’t deny.

  Political junkies won’t want to miss Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s memoir This Child Will Be Great. It’s the remarkable story of a little girl growing up in the 1930s and ’40s in a dilapidated area of Monrovia, the country’s capital, and ending up in 2006 with her election as Liberia’s (and Africa’s) first woman president.

  LOS ANGELES: CITY OF ANGELS

  Genre readers are really in luck when it comes to L.A.—some of the best-known writers of the past and present set their books there.

  From the past, there’s James Cain (Mildred Pierce is the one to pick up first) and Joseph Wambaugh (especially The Choirboys; the title is totally ironic, but you have to read the book to find out why). Wambaugh’s nonfiction work, The Onion Field, is one of the few true crime books that I’ve really enjoyed. It takes place in L.A. in 1963, recounting the events that occur after two policemen pull over a car for a routine traffic stop.

  From the present there’s Walter Moseley, whose Easy Rawlins novels, read in order, present a history of the city’s racial politics. Begin with Devil in a Blue Dress, which introduces all the major themes that Mosley explores throughout the series.

  Other favorites of mine include Michael Connelly (especially his very early novels, including The Black Echo,The Black Ice, and The Concrete Blond) and Robert Crais (especially The Watchman , featuring Joe Pike).

  For a look at cool L.A., try the lighthearted mysteries by Harley Jane Kozak and Susan Kandel. Kozak’s main character is Wollie (short for Wollstonecraft) Shelley, a greeting-card designer whose antics will delight you. Some of my favorite parts of Dating Dead Men and her other novels are the zany characters who populate Wollie’s life. Kandel’s character, Cece Caruso, writes biographies about famous mystery writers (and thus always stumbles across a body or two in her researches). Although it’s not necessary to read them in order, the first one is I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason; my favorite happens to be Christietown:A Novel About Vintage Clothing, Romance, Mystery, and Agatha Christie. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s New Jersey romps will enjoy these West Coast read-alikes.

  But there are lots of terrific non-genre novels (old and new) about the City of Angels, including The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle; Bebe Moore Campbell’s Brothers and Sisters; Marisa Silver’s Babe in Paradise; Michael Tolkin’s The Player;The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West; Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber; and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

  And nonfiction as well: Sandra Tsing Loh’s Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, and Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner (which broadens the geographical narrowness of this section considerably), for two.

  If you’re looking for topnotch nonfiction writing about the state (not just L.A. or San Francisco), take a look at John McPhee’s Assembling California, the last book in his Annals of the Former World series. If anyone can make geology both essential reading and understandable by the interested layperson, it’s McPhee. A friend once mentioned to me that even though he’s read McPhee’s essays in The New Yorker, he’s always drawn to reread them in book form because McPhee’s style is so captivating.

  LYME REGIS

  If you’re going to Lyme Regis, a wonderfully broody and very atmospheric city in England that seems to be on the verge of falling into the ocean, the book to turn to first is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. Read it for how Fowles fills the story with Lyme (and, if the book is new to you, for the wonderful way he plays with the idea of story itself). If you do travel to this city, you can find The Cobb and the rock formation known as Granny’s Teeth that Fowles refers to in his novel.

  Another novel to pick up is Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Here Anne and others stroll the windy streets of Lyme and silly Louisa Musgrove jumps from The Cobb as she flirts with Captain Wentworth.

  Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier is a Victorian-era novel focusing on real women—Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot—who were speculating about evolution and the nature of the world before Darwin; together they changed history (though they got little credit for it).

  Note for mystery fans:There’s even a terrific Colin Dexter mystery called The Way Through the Woods, in which Inspector Morse, whom we usually find operating out of Oxford, travels to Lyme Regis on vacation and stumbles on a crime involving a missing Swedish woman who disappeared while on holiday there.

  THE MAINE CHANCE

  People go to Maine for the beauty of its coastline, the romance of its forests, the fun of clamming, and the coziness of its small towns. There are many great reads set in the Pine Tree State. Here are my favorites.

  One of the classics that has kept its charm is Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, originally published in 1896. It’s set in a coastal village and is marked by the acuity of its observations, its appreciation for nature, and its gentle insights into the lives of women. (In a strange way, it reminded me of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, although the two books have really nothing in common except that they’re word pictures of a particular time and place.)

  All three of Elizabeth Strout’s novels are set in Maine.There’s Amy and Isabelle (one of the male characters is a contender for the most loathsome man in fiction, second only to Humbert Humbert, in my opinion); Abide with Me, which takes place in 1959 (fans of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home will probably enjoy it very much); and Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked short stories that won the Pulitzer Prize. Book groups take note: all of these would make an excellent choice for discussion.

  Before she became famous for Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a terrific novel called Stern Men, which is set on an island twenty miles north of the coast of Maine. Fort Niles is separated from another island only by a small channel, but each island’s inhabitants, mostly lobstermen and their families, loathe anyone from the other island. After attending boarding school out of state, Ruth returns to Fort Niles determined to end the internecine warring—partly by falling in love with the “wrong” young man.

  When you finish the Gilbert novel, take a look at these two reader-friendly micro-histories of the lobster industry: The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard and The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson. Corson is a marine biologist and a third-generation lobsterman—here he describes what’s known, and not, about the lobster, and intersperses that with stories of his family’s life on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

  I frequently suggest Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story to readers who believe books in the horror genre are too, well, horrible for them. It takes place primarily in a non-supernatural Maine and is quite a good choice for book groups, as well.

  Some Maine-based classics include Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods; Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods; and Arundel by Kenneth Roberts, which recounts Benedict Arnold’s march to Quebec as told by Steven Nason, a (fictional) young man from Arundel, Maine. (Nearly every high school student in the state has read this book.)

  One book that should become a classic is Bernd Heinrich’s A Year in the Maine Woods, in which he describes the time he spent in a small cabin deep in the trees pretty much alone except for his pet raven, Jack. When I finished this, I wanted to spend a year in the Maine woods, too, seeing, hearing, experiencing, and knowing all that Heinrich did. And, of course, to get a raven of my own named Jack.

  Contemporary Maine novels include the Tinker Cove mysteries of Leslie Meier (there are lots of them,
so if you enjoy them you’re in real luck; there’s no need to start with the first one); the bed-and-breakfast-themed mysteries of Karen MacInerney, especially Murder Most Maine; and Paul Doiron’s first—but I hope not last—mystery, The Poacher’s Son. Doiron is editor-in-chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, and he knows the state well.

  And please don’t forget Cathie Pelletier’s funny and poignant novels; their characters still shine in my memory. The Bubble Reputation and The Funeral Makers (among others) will definitely give you a feeling for the quirky charms of the state.

  MAKING TRACKS BY TRAIN

  I seem to be quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay often these days; there’s a poem of hers called “Travel” that I memorized years ago because it has always described how I wish I felt—especially the last verse, which ends: “Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.”

  I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person whose adventurous nature would lead me to emulate the poem’s speaker and just take a train ride for the joy of it. My longtime dream—sadly unlikely to be realized at this point in my life—is to travel from Sydney, Australia, across the enormous country to Perth by train. I constantly console myself by seeking out and compulsively reading the accounts of other, more adventuresome travelers. It’s a shame that there aren’t more contemporary writings about train rides available to the armchair traveler, but we’re so lucky to have the ones we do.

  In The Big Red Train Ride, über-traveler Eric Newby, along with his long-suffering and mostly very patient wife, Wanda, traveled from Moscow on a three-thousand-mile journey to the Soviet Far East and the Sea of Japan in 1977. The description of their trip—written in Newby’s always understated humor—is a delight, although you might be grateful (as I was) to be reading it in a warm house, wearing flannel pajamas, and having cups and cups of hot tea readily to hand.