Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood Moment and Reason Read online

  ARMCHAIR TRAVEL

  There are lots of good reasons to travel—uncharted horizons to explore and new friends to make among them—but there are also lots of good reasons to stay home—a comfortable chair, a good reading light, and a mug of hot tea among them. So why not combine the two alternatives and stay at home to read books about other people’s travels? Here are some great reads that will take you to Asia, Africa, India, and the far edges of North America.

  Three classics of travel literature with which to begin your journey are Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (in fact, everything by Newby is worth reading); Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands; and News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir by Peter Fleming.

  The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux is in some ways the granddaddy of contemporary armchair travel books. Although Theroux’s later travelogues display a kind of nasty, cynical view of the people and places he encounters, here his descriptions of his trip via such famed trains as the Orient Express, the Khyber Mail, and the Trans-Siberian Express come across as merely eccentric.

  Looking for Lovedu: A Woman’s Journey Across Africa relates the sometimes hilarious adventures of Ann Jones as she traverses the continent in an ancient Land Rover, from Tangier to the southernmost tip of South Africa, in search of the last Queen of Lovedu, and in the company—for the first half of the trip—of the incomparable Muggleton, a young British photographer. (Incidentally, the hard word in the title is pronounced low-bay-due.)

  In Colin Thubron’s In Siberia we accompany the author on his journey across this enormous and enormously mysterious land, from Mongolia to the Arctic Circle, as he travels by car, boat, train, bus, and on foot.

  Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban details a trip that is both exterior and interior: his voyage up the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau, on his 35-foot sailboat Penelope, and his ruminations on a wonderful diversity of topics.

  In 1983, Chinese dissident Ma Jian took a three-year walk throughout his native country, as related in Red Dust: A Path Through China.

  Another journey on foot—under much more fraught conditions—is Salvomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, in which he describes his 1941 escape from the Soviet gulag and his arduous hike to India.

  In Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge, Jill Fredston describes how she and her husband spend their summers making their way around the edges of the Arctic by rowboat and kayak. No four-star hotels and gourmet dining experiences, no splendor on the Orient Express for this couple. They are at sea for weeks at a time, encountering polar bears, mosquitoes, killer storms, and big winds.

  ART APPRECIATION

  Probably the best way (some would argue the only way) to appreciate a work of art is to immerse yourself in viewing it, not reading about it. But I’ve found that three of the books I’ve most enjoyed are books about the world of art and how we experience art.

  John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, originally written as part of a BBC television series on art and art criticism aired in the early 1970s, offered the public a Marxist interpretation of the making and popularization of visual artworks. Berger expanded his thinking on these topics in later books like About Looking and The Sense of Sight, but his first book gives the clearest exposition of his theories. After reading Berger I found that I looked at works of art in a whole new way.

  Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic, is a historian (he wrote a wonderful history of Australia, The Fatal Shore), cultural commentator (take a look at his spirited Culture of Complaint), and voracious reader with diverse interests. He brings all of his interests together in The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art—Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall (which, like Berger’s book, was the basis for a television series in the 1970s and which, unlike Berger’s, has a shocking misprint—“it’s” for “its”—on the front cover of the 1991 revised edition). Hughes’s book is filled with wonderful reproductions and insightful, thought-provoking commentary.

  Novelist, poet, and essayist John Updike turns his considerable talents to writing winningly and winsomely about art, in Just Looking: Essays on Art, covering such topics as the Museum of Modern Art, children’s book illustrators, Renoir, cartoonist Ralph Barton, and Andrew Wyeth, among others.

  ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCES

  When Putnam published Amy Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1989, the book immediately hit the best-seller lists and brought the Asian American experience to a wide audience. Prior to Tan’s novel there had been memoirs about growing up as a “hyphenated” American (most notably Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior), but nothing before had caught the imagination of American readers as Tan’s novel did, and her success opened the door to other Asian writers exploring what it’s like to grow up between two cultures.

  Here are some of the best examples of Asian American coming-of-age writings: Growing Up Asian American, edited by Maria Hong, a collection of more than thirty short stories and essays by Frank Chin, Garrett Hongo, Mary Paik Lee, Susan Ito, and others; Bone by Fae Myenne Ng; Wayson Choy’s autobiographical The Jade Peony, set in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1940s; Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging and Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers; Andrea Louie’s Moon Cakes; Donald Duk by Frank Chin; Shawn Wong’s Homebase and American Knees; Gish Jen’s Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land; Lydia Minatoya’s The Strangeness of Beauty; Gus Lee’s China Boy; Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker.

  ASTRONOMICAL IDEAS

  Authoritative” and (mostly) “comprehensible” (to the motivated but not scientific reader) are two adjectives that describe the pro lific science writer Timothy Ferris. His books range from a look at amateur stargazers (Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril) to a discussion of the way the mind works and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context) to an investigation of the concept of an expanding universe (The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe) to Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a fascinating overview of the history of astronomy, from ancient times to the present.

  Of course, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos should be high on everyone’s must-read list for this subject, even though the book is now more than two decades old. More than anyone before or since, Sagan turned “astronomy” into a household word. From its mind-catching opening sentence (“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”) to its last line, this makes for interesting, informative, and enlightening reading.

  In Stardust: Supernovae and Life: The Cosmic Connection, John Gribbin discusses the relationship between the creation of the universe (what scientists call “the big bang”) and the atoms and molecules that make up humankind.

  Two books trace the myriad myths and legends from all over the world that have evolved around the sun, planets, and solar system: E. C. Krupp’s Beyond the Blue Horizon: Myths and Legends of the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Planets and Catherine Tennant’s interactive The Box of Stars: A Practical Guide to the Night Sky and Its Myths and Legends.

  The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage by Chet Raymo (who also wrote The Dork of Cork, one of my favorite novels) is a bit off the scientific track, but these essays, which explore the links between science and religion, nevertheless offer much food for contemplation.

  Two wonderful coffee-table books about space are Ken Croswell’s Magnificent Universe, with many photos taken by the Hubble telescope, and Full Moon by Michael Light.

  AUSTRALIAN FICTION

  The text or subtext of much Australian fiction is both the vastness of the continent and its settlement by British convicts. Australian novels convey the idea that place somehow defines who and what you are. (Canadian fiction shares this sense of place to some degree.) Many Australian novelists write about journeys, road trips, people running away from their pasts or their presents (or their presence in their
own life), challenged by the terrain, the weather, the impossibility of leaving (and the equal impossibility of staying), their own history, and the inner demons that plague them.

  Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown; A Difficult Young Man; When Blackbirds Sing; and Outbreak of Love comprise a wonderful (and little-known) series written in the 1950s about an Australian family who move to England when things go wrong in Australia, and move back to Australia when things go wrong in England. The first two books are especially good.

  Other notable Australian novels include Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River and The Only Daughter; James Bradley’s Wrack; Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda; Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (first published in 1901 and still a delight to read); Nikki Gemmell’s Alice Springs; Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster; Thomas Keneally’s Woman of the Inner Sea; David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon; and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet; That Eye, The Sky; and Dirt Music.

  Novels set in Tasmania form their own subgenre within the broader category of “Australia.” Some of my favorites are Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping; Death of a River Guide; and Gould’s Book of Fish; and Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers.

  Two of the best novels set in Australia are by Nevil Shute: A Town Like Alice and The Breaking Wave (Requiem for a Wren is its title in the United Kingdom). Shute, who was born in England, moved to Australia when he was nearly fifty and dearly loved his adopted country.

  BABIES: A READER’S GUIDE

  These four books won’t tell you what to do when your child has a high fever, or how to identify a mysterious rash, or even how to get your baby to sleep through the night, but they all offer fascinating insights—and food for thought—on the emotional and psychological needs of children. Understanding those needs will almost inevitably lead to better parenting and better relationships between parents and their children. None of these books is new, but their wisdom is timeless.

  Although it’s generally accepted that in his personal life Bruno Bettelheim was not the nicest of men, his book A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing is a must-read for any new parent. What comes through in this book is Bettelheim’s profound understanding of children and his deep compassion and respect for them. Be forewarned: Bettelheim’s perspective is very psychoanalytic.

  Selma H. Fraiberg’s Every Child’s Birthright: In Defense of Mothering rests upon her belief that “our survival as a human community may depend as much upon our nurture of love in infancy and childhood as upon the protection of our society from external threats.”

  Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott offers concrete suggestions for dealing with daily situations and psychological problems faced by all parents. His focus is on parent-child communications, and he advocates giving a child choices rather than orders.

  Summerhill by A. S. Neill has become a classic in the literature of permissive (which was a good adjective in the 1960s, when this book was written) education and child rearing. It’s fun to read (lots of case studies of kids), even if you disagree with Neill’s extremely Freudian-influenced ideas.

  BALKAN SPECTERS

  There’s always trouble in the Balkans in the spring, as Rudyard Kipling (almost) said in The Light That Failed. This is an area of Central Europe where hatreds run deep, where memories are long, and where peace has nearly always seemed an impossible dream. These books, all of which are gut-wrenching and extremely painful to read, lay out the horrors and sorrows and complexities that have marked Bosnia’s history.

  A good background work on the region is Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, which provides context and history, that makes the book still relevant years after it was first published in 1941.

  Both Peter Maass in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War and Robert Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History expose the horror of life during wartime in the former Yugoslavia. Although there is inevitably some overlap between the two, it is surprisingly minimal, and both bear reading and rereading. Maass, a former war correspondent, is the more visceral writer (which is not meant to imply undisciplined emotion about his subject).

  British war correspondent Anthony Loyd’s troubled, honest, and unabashedly one-sided My War Gone By, I Miss It So compares the highs and the lows of war to his experiences with heroin, which might sound a bit off-putting but the metaphor actually works amazingly well.

  David Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Bosnia, and you can see why in Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II, his tragic account of a battle in which more than seven thousand Muslims were murdered.

  Bosnian novelists have frequently used issues of ethnic hatred as a subject for their plots. Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina describes the relationships between the various ethnic groupings in a small Bosnian town from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

  In S.: A Novel About the Balkans, her book about a Bosnian who left the war zone and lives in Sweden, Slavenka Drakulić sounds a chilling note (in the most dispassionate tone) about the brutality of war, particularly as it is visited on women.

  HAMILTON BASSO: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  Sadly all but forgotten now, New Orleans native Hamilton Basso was a relatively important Southern writer in the 1940s and ’50s. Although he spent most of his adult life in New York, where he was an associate editor at The New Yorker for more than twenty years, Basso’s major subject was the South. He wrote with great affection, but not uncritically, about the South, in particular about its attitudes toward race and what he saw as Southern ancestry worship.

  He wrote two novels still well worth reading: The View from Pompey’s Head and The Light Infantry Ball. They were intended to be part of a trilogy, unfortunately never finished, about a fictional town, Pompey’s Head, South Carolina.

  The View from Pompey’s Head was a best-seller in 1954. It’s the story of a New York attorney who goes home to Pompey’s Head to investigate a mystery surrounding a famous writer—in essence an exploration of Thomas Wolfe’s dictum that “you can’t go home again,” and what can happen when you do.

  The Light Infantry Ball, a finalist for the 1960 National Book Award for fiction, is a prequel to The View from Pompey’s Head. It takes place during the Civil War and introduces many of the families whose descendants play important roles in that novel.

  Basso’s last novel was also one of my favorites. A Touch of the Dragon is both a love story and a character study of a particularly self-possessed and wealthy young woman, someone who is, to quote the poet A. E. Housman, “too unhappy to be kind,” and who wanders in and out of the life of the narrator.

  Other novels by Basso (not nearly as good as these three) include The Greenroom; Sun in Capricorn; Days Before Lent; Court House Square; and Cinnamon Seed.

  BBB: BEST BUSINESS BOOKS

  Although these books don’t address specific issues such as how to run a company or what to look for when you’re buying mutual funds, they offer fascinating insights into American business and financial practices, circa the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and as such are perfect for literary readers who want to expand their knowledge of the arcane.

  Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (much of which appeared in The New Yorker magazine) explores the virus-like spread of ideas and products through society—for example, how best-selling books are made, not born; why certain television shows succeed and others fail, despite their similarities; and how rumors travel at the speed of light.

  You’ll look at your behavior in shopping situations much differently after you read Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by urban anthropologist Paco Underhill, an often troubling, always interesting analysis of what makes retail stores successful. (I found his message equally useful and valid for nonretail entities such as libraries, too.)

  Liar’s Poker: Rising Through th
e Wreckage on Wall Street by Michael Lewis is an up-close and personal (and very cautionary) view of the author’s experiences working for a big Wall Street investment firm.

  Two frightening books on the culture of avarice and greed in corporate America in the 1980s, as seen through the rise and fall of the king of the junk bond, Wall Street trader Michael Milken, are Connie Bruck’s The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders and Den of Thieves by Wall Street Journal reporter (now editor) James B. Stewart. (Incidentally, a very good novel about working on Wall Street around this same period is the semiautobiographical Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings.)

  BICYCLING

  In How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, Frances Willard (probably best known for her spirited work with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) describes learning to ride a bicycle when she was nearly fifty-four years old. She quotes an English naval officer who, having just mastered a two-wheeler himself, said to her: “You women have no idea of the new realm of happiness which the bicycle has opened to us men.” It’s this realm of happiness that comes across so wonderfully in these entertaining accounts of great bicycle adventures.