Book Lust to Go Read online

  When I first saw the title—Edward Lear in Albania—I was excited to find that one of my favorite nonsense poets (author of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” etc.) had also traveled the wide world o’er. Then I looked more closely and read the subtitle: Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans. It took me a minute to realize that there must have been two Edward Lears, and this was the one I was unfamiliar with. So of course I had to learn all about him and the trip he took through Albania and Macedonia in 1848, with paintbrush in hand. Lear’s keen eye for subjects translated into a sharp interest in his surroundings, both the people he met and the places he visited. This book, edited by Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie, is a lovely piece of book art and a captivating read.

  ALL SET FOR ALASKA

  I emailed my pal Dana Stabenow, fabulous mystery writer and Alaska native, for suggestions of good books about Alaska. Her list—as only befits the kind of person she is—is eclectic and enticing. I’ve also added a few of my own suggestions at the end. Dana’s comments are in quotation marks, while mine are not.

  Dana’s choices:

  Confederate Raider in the North Pacific by Murray Morgan: “The last shot fired in the Civil War? It was fired in the Aleutians, by the CSS Shenandoah, on a mission to attack the Yankee whaling ships in an attempt to disrupt the North’s economy. For rebels, these guys are almost too good to be true—no man is murdered, no woman is outraged, and I don’t think they lose a single crewmember.Wonderfully engaging and well-written tale.”

  Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush by Lael Morgan: “A story of the girls who came north with the rest of the stampeders to mine the miners in saloons, dance halls, and hook shops from Dawson to Nome to Cordova. Many of them came because they could only make a dollar a day as a farm hand Outside. A you-are-there picture of a place and time.”

  The Last Light Breaking by Nick Jans: “The story of a white man in an Inupiaq world. Beautifully written eyewitness account of a hunter-gatherer culture being rear-ended by the modern world.”

  The Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield: “This is a page-turning account of World War II as it was fought in the Aleutians. Reads like a Tom Clancy novel.”

  Two Old Women by Velma Wallis: “An old Athabascan tale re-imagined by a modern Athabascan writer. Very controversial in the Alaska Native community.”

  The book that was next on her list of “to reads”? Fifty Miles from Tomorrow by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley: “Inupiaq kid from Kotzebue grows up to shepherd the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act through Congress, leading to the empowerment of Alaska’s Native peoples.” (You can watch my interview with Stabenow at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030905.)

  And here are a few more Alaska titles to add to your growing pile of books:

  If you’d like a sense of Alaska thirty or more years ago, you won’t want to miss John McPhee’s classic Coming Into the Country.

  In Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska, Miranda Weiss describes her experiences moving to Homer,Alaska, from her New Jersey home.

  Robert Specht and Anne Purdy’s Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness takes place in Chicken, Alaska. Schoolteacher Anne Hobbs leaves “civilization” to work in the Alaska bush. It’s a good companion read to Benedict and Nancy Freedman’s classic novel, Mrs. Mike. Although set in the Canadian wilderness and not Alaska, it shares with Tisha much of the same feel.

  Working on the Edge by Spike Walker is a you-are-there account of king crab fishing.

  One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith (from the journals and photographs of naturalist Richard Proenneke) is the story of how, in the late 1960s, Proenneke decided to build himself a cabin in the rather remote Twin Lakes region of Alaska.This is good reading for live-on-your-own and do-it-yourself-ers, as well as those interested in ecology and the environment.

  Stan Jones writes a series of mysteries about Nathan Active, an Eskimo state trooper whose territory includes some of the remotest areas in the northwest part of the state. The first in the series is White Sky, Black Ice.

  AMAZONIA

  The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann would be a perfect gift for anyone, male or female, who enjoys a bit of history, a bit of mystery, and a lot of (true) exploits. Although it doesn’t provide an enormous adrenaline rush, it’s definitely compulsively readable. The author, a staff writer at The New Yorker, combines first-rate reporting skills with an engaging style and an adventurous spirit to tell the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who, along with his twenty-one-year-old son and his son’s best friend, disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 while looking for remnants of the fabled, once flourishing and wealthy City of Z.

  Peter Fleming, brother of Ian Fleming (author of the James Bond novels), also tried to discover the whereabouts of Fawcett back in the early 1930s. He describes his quest in Brazilian Adventure.

  Another search for a fabled city is recounted in Searching for El Dorado: A Journey into the South American Rain Forest on the Tail of the World’s Largest Gold Rush by Marc Herman, which melds adventure and ecology with a rousing story.

  It’s seemingly difficult to write a dull book about Theodore Roosevelt because he was such an interesting, larger than life character. River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard is no exception. Describing the events that followed his unsuccessful third-party campaign for president in 1912, it tells the story of Roosevelt’s literally death-defying trip down a previously uncharted river in the Amazon rain forest, accompanied by, among others, his twenty-four-year-old son, Kermit, and Candido Rondon, the noted Brazilian explorer. This book has it all: it’s fast-paced, well written, and difficult to put down.

  One of the most compelling biographies I’ve read recently is Robert Whitaker’s The Mapmaker’s Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon. When Isabel Grames was growing up in eighteenth-century Peru, she never dreamed that her marriage to Jean Godin, a French scientist, would result in a twenty-year enforced separation (he was refused permission to return to Peru by the French colonial government) and then her own brave, incredibly grueling journey across uncharted territory to reunite with him.You know that old saying about truth being stranger than fiction? It would be impossible to make this story up.

  And don’t miss Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin. It’s the mesmerizing account of one man’s dream to re-create Midwestern America and its values in the Amazon jungle, and how he almost—but not quite—succeeded.

  AMERICAN GIRLS

  Americans abroad has always been a popular theme with novelists, and the novels that are particularly appealing feature young women who, despite the fact that they’re totally out of their league, appear to thrive. Or not. Here are some of my favorites.

  Of course, all novels about female Americans abroad owe a debt to Henry James and his singular creation, Isabel Archer, the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady. (Many of them also owe at least a little something to Truman Capote’s greatest invention, Holly Golightly, heroine and heartbreaker of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s not my subject here.)

  Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a fizzy cocktail of a novel, was originally published in 1958 (the same year as Capote’s novel, in fact). It chronicles life among American expatriates in Paris in the 1950s as seen through the eyes of twenty-one-year-old Sally Jay Gorce, who arrives wide-eyed and innocent from Missouri, eager to experience all that Paris has to offer. The story is more than a little autobiographical, and you can’t help but try to identify the expats Dundy describes. But don’t trust me on the charms of this recently re-issued novel: no less a literary critic than Groucho Marx declared when it first appeared that “I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).”

  Dundy also wrote about the swinging London of the ea
rly 1960s in The Old Man and Me. The heroine—now older, wiser, and much more cunning (not to say bitter) than Sally Jay Gorce—is Honey Flood. It’s not as much pure fun to read, but is still a perfect evocation of a time and place long past.

  England is also the setting of Do Try to Speak as We Do by Marjorie Leet Ford (some editions were called The Diary of an American Au Pair). This humorous diary of a young woman working for an upper-class family is filled with the Brits’ reactions to Americans living in England, and the everlasting confusion and embarrassment Americans experience with Briticisms and cultural etiquette.

  Two lighthearted fictional accounts of Americans in Paris can be found in Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce and Le Mariage.

  Cornelia Otis Skinner’s Our Hearts Were Young and Gay is one of my favorite cozy reads—it’s the true story of the European adventures of Skinner and her good friend Emily Kimbrough (check the index of Book Lust To Go for books by Kimbrough—they’re equally entertaining). Skinner and Kimbrough’s experiences will have you chuckling for hours.

  AN ANGLOPHILE’S LITERARY PILGRIMAGE

  Setting off on a voyage usually requires a map and, if you’re Great Britain-bound, none could be better than A Literary Atlas and Gazetteer of the British Isles by Michael Hardwick and Alan G. Hodgkiss. Hodgkiss, a cartographer, and Hardwick, a writer, take readers on a detailed journey through the large and small literary landmarks of Great Britain with maps, photos, bibliographies, and biographies. By following their directions readers can find all kinds of wonders. For example, in Nuneaton there is a statue of George Eliot in the middle of a busy square, and in the nearby museum are Eliot’s writing desk and a range of her dresses. The landscape of Nuneaton is vividly described in Eliot’s novels (most particularly The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede) and current-day visitors to Nuneaton can still see the wooded walks and “capricious hedgerows” of Eliot’s world.

  Taking a turn to the north, readers can follow the steep and winding hills to the Brontë Parsonage. If you have ever wondered how Emily Brontë dreamed her moody landscapes and vast expanses of heath and doom, you only have to gaze upon the lichen-darkened tombstones she saw out her window every day, and beyond them to the endless land that beckons with its boggy ground. It’s a grand thing to find a book whose tone so well matches its landscape, but Wuthering Heights exceeds even this high mark, inhabiting the land to the point that the narrative is every rock and crag, as well as every letter and line.

  Much lighter in view and tone is the home of Jane Austen in Chawton. In the well-tended seventeenth-century red brick house, Austen wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, and revised for publication Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey. The stress on family and houses, village life and open landscapes for walking, are all seen at Chawton, only fifty miles from London, but located in a small village. Austen spent eight years at Chawton, and it gave her space and a sense of being settled, both of which appear as themes in her novels.Visitors can experience the same space and ease Austen felt from her well-tended garden, tiny writing desk, and large decorative windows with their view of the village streets.

  As glorious as the villages and heaths of England are, it is London that serves as the literary heartbeat of the Isles. Less than an hour from Austen’s home sits the city of Dickens and Shakespeare—as well as Virginia Woolf. Woolf loved walking in London, and set herself and her characters off on long rambles through the city. There is a great deal of Woolf ’s London left to see in the streets, squares, and parks. The urban landscape of London, marked by the chiming of Big Ben, makes for a great walk for fans of Mrs. Dalloway. Begin at Westminster and ramble up Victoria Street to cross through St. James’s Park, out to Piccadilly, and then up Bond Street to Oxford Street. As you do, think about the rumble of omnibuses and busy shop fronts, and of Septimus enduring his hallucinations in Regent’s Park.

  After taking in the sweeping order of Regent’s Park, wander back down to Westminster Abbey, enter its cool, dark corridors, and head to the South Transept and Poet’s Corner. Here you’ll find a hodgepodge of sculpture, tablets, and signs, all forming a mosaic in honor of the literary greats of England. Chaucer, Browning, Dickens, Hardy, and Tennyson are actually buried here, but memorials exist for Byron, Shakespeare,Austen, Blake, the Brontës, George Eliot, and dozens of others as well. It’s amazing to stand in the recalled company of so many voices and quite enough to send you scurrying to Stratford or Tintagel, with Hodgkiss and Hardwick as your irreplaceable guides.

  APPROACHING APPALACHIA

  According to Wikipedia, the word Appalachia describes a cultural region that runs from western New York State to the northern reaches of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. In most people’s mind, though, its most likely association is with the mountainous regions of Tennessee and North Carolina. (Incidentally, my research has shown that the consensus seems to be that each “a” is short, and the “ch” is pronounced as it is in “chuckwagon.”)

  For me, the books that best give a picture of Appalachia are the “ballad novels” of Sharyn McCrumb. These novels, set in both the past and the present (or at least the 1990s and later), are all based in some way on the traditional music of the region. The first one is If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, but it’s not absolutely necessary to read them in order. The first one I read was The Ballad of Frankie Silver. I loved every word of it, including McCrumb’s note at the end of the novel, despite finding the story to be almost unbearably sad.

  John O’Brien’s memoir, written after he explored his family’s background following the death of his estranged father, is called At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. His writing is fluid, unpretentious, and irresistible.

  One of the best books I’ve ever read is Dennis Covington’s exceptional work of nonfiction, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. The writing is superb and the subject fascinating.

  Lee Smith sets most of her novels and collections of stories in Appalachia. One of the finest is the epistolary novel Fair and Tender Ladies, but I still recall with great pleasure her first novel, Black Mountain Breakdown.

  Other works of fiction that help bring Appalachia to life include these:James Lee Burke’s To the Bright and Shining Sun

  Amy Greene’s Bloodroot

  Catherine Marshall’s Christy

  Robert Morgan’s family sagas, including The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek, and This Rock

  Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been

  Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories

  Roger Alan Skipper’s Tear Down the Mountain: An Appalachian Love Story

  ARABIA DESERTA

  Arabia was never really “deserta” in the sense of being completely empty—even in ancient times there were nomadic tribes living there. For the Romans, who gave it that name, it meant the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. Here are some exceptional books about the place.

  The granddaddy of writing about Arabia is a man who was a great lover of travel in general and the desert and its peoples in particular: the quirky and opinionated Wilfred Thesiger (1879-1961).The now classic Arabian Sands (about the lives and traditions of the Bedu peoples) is still essential reading for anyone heading out for Arabia’s legendary Empty Quarter, or Rub al Khali, which Thesiger crossed twice. In fact, on doing all my reading for Book Lust To Go, I discovered that it was almost a rite of passage (literally) for any writer going to Arabia to stop and pay their respects to Thesiger in his home in England before leaving on the journey.

  The Marsh Arabs covers the years 1951 to 1958, years that Thesiger spent in southern Iraq. The way of life of the marsh Arabs was almost entirely eradicated by Saddam Hussein, who drained the marshes in retribution for their support of a coup to overthrow his government.

  Here’s an oft-quoted passage from this book that probably best explains the author himself:My own tastes went, perhaps, too far to the other extreme. I loathed cars, aeroplanes, wireless and television, in fact most of o
ur civilization’s manifestations in the past fifty years, and was always happy, in Iraq or elsewhere, to share a smoke-filled hovel with a shepherd, his family and beasts. In such a household, everything was strange and different, their self-reliance put me at ease, and I was fascinated by the feeling of continuity with the past.

  Rory Stewart followed in Thesiger’s metaphorical footsteps (nearly everyone writing about Arabia did) in his book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, which recounts the year he spent as provincial governor in the south of Iraq.

  In a prose style that brings to mind lively storytelling, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton is the perfect choice for anyone interested in backgrounds and backstories: it is finely researched, tells us what is known and what can only be surmised, and keeps the author herself out of the story entirely.

  Gertrude Bell has been called both the female T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and the woman who invented Iraq. Both descriptions, as we learn from Georgina Howell’s riveting biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, are justified by the events of this remarkable woman’s life.

  Janet Wallach’s Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia is another biography of Bell that reinforces her importance to the fate of the Arab lands after World War I.

  And speaking of T. E. Lawrence, it goes without saying that any trip to Arabia should include reacquainting yourself with him, either by way of his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or via John E. Mack’s excellent biography A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence.