Book Lust to Go Page 9

  Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch examines evolution in the light of the relatively rapid changes that take place in the beak size and shape of a species of bird known as Darwin’s finches, found mainly in the Galapagos. It’s wonderfully written, extremely readable, and a superb example of the best kind of popular science writing.

  Three good novels featuring Darwin and/or the Galapagos are The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine (which is not about Darwin at all, but takes place in the Galapagos); Harry Thompson’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel To the Edge of the World (the main characters are the captain of the Beagle and his most famous passenger, Charles Darwin); and Mr. Darwin’s Shooter by Roger McDonald, a remarkable novel about the young man whom Darwin’s biographer Janet Browne described as “the unacknowledged shadow behind every triumph.” At fifteen, Syms Covington joined the crew of the HMS Beagle; now an elderly man, Covington is overcome by the guilt he still feels in being part of a life’s work that will challenge humanity’s view of itself.

  And if you get really interested in Darwin and his life, don’t forget that Irving Stone, the grandfather of biographical fiction (best known for his novels about Michaelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh), also wrote The Origin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin.

  GUERNICA

  Guernica is a small town in the Basque region of Spain. What most people know about the place is Pablo Picasso’s magnificent painting, which depicts—as probably only Picasso could—the brutal destruction of the town by German Luftwaffe bombs on April 26, 1937. Here are two novels in which Guernica plays a part:Dave Boling’s Guernica

  Lawrence Thornton’s Under the Gypsy Moon

  And here are two wonderfully readable works of nonfiction that describe the genesis of Picasso’s famous painting:

  Russell Martin’s Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World

  Gijs van Hensbergen’s Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon

  GUERNSEY: HISTORY IN FICTION

  This British island located near France in the English Channel was occupied by the Germans during World War II. This event is a central plot point in these three excellent novels, all of which bring the island to life, especially during this particularly difficult time in its history:Tim Binding’s Lying with the Enemy

  G. B. Edwards’s The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

  Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

  HAIL, COLOMBIA!

  Colombia is, more than most countries, greater than the sum of its parts. What we hear about—murders, drug cartels, kidnappings, and government incompetence at best and wholesale law-breaking at worst—as well as other various and sundry unsavory events, do constitute part of the country’s past and present. These incidents are clearly the subtext of the books mentioned here. Nonetheless, there’s more to Colombia than those things.

  Colombia’s greatest writer is, of course, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez. In News of a Kidnapping, an example of exemplary journalism, García Márquez reports on the events following the U.S. signature on a treaty that allows for the extradition of Colombian citizens, when the leaders of the Medellín drug cartel decided to use extra-legal methods to change the minds (and the laws) of both governments. If after reading that book you want to learn more about García Márquez, take a look at Living to Tell the Tale, the first of his projected three memoirs, as well as Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

  Novels set in Colombia include Dalia Rabinovich’s Flora’s Suitcase , the story of a young married Jewish couple from Cincinnati who move to Colombia in the 1930s; Tales from the Town of Widows by James Cañón; and two books by Colombian writers: Alvaro Mutis’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers.

  As for nonfiction, try these:

  Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia recounts the events surrounding her attempt to become president of Colombia (which included being kidnapped and held for more than six years). In the process of describing her experiences, she helps readers understand her complex country. Although there have been books contradicting some of the material in here (especially her behavior during the kidnapping ordeal), I think it’s a valuable read.

  Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia by Garry Leech is set against the eleven hours he was “detained” by FARC, a guerilla group in Colombia.

  I’ll read anything by Mark Bowden—his writing is crisp and his subjects are fascinating. In Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, he describes the efforts of U.S. intelligence and other agencies to capture drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was at the time one of the most powerful cocaine traffickers.

  Journalist Silvana Paternostro’s My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind provides an excellent and personal narrative history of the author’s native country.

  HAWAII

  My father’s brother served in the U.S. Army in Hawaii in the early 1930s, and to the end of his life talked about its physical beauty. It’s true that the countryside could hardly have been more lush, but—as can be seen from the books described here—the history of the islands is filled with more than a little tragedy. So for a well-rounded picture of Hawaii, both its past and its present, take a look at these books.

  Fiction

  James Michener’s Hawaii is probably the first book that comes to mind when you’re thinking of what to read about the islands, but it shouldn’t be the last.

  Earl Derr Biggers wrote only six Charlie Chan mysteries, but the Chinese American detective is an iconic figure in the mystery canon. Try House Without a Key, set in Hawaii, to get a sense of both the place and the detective.

  Alan Brennert has written two vibrant novels about the islands. Moloka‘i is the story of a young girl with leprosy who spends her life in exile on the island of Molokai. It’s perhaps especially relevant now since Father Damien, a Belgian priest who devoted his life to working with Molokai citizens who had Hansen’s disease, was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2009. (If you find the subject matter of this novel intriguing, take a look at John Tayman’s moving and informative The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.) Brennert’s second novel, Honolulu, is about a young Korean girl who comes to Honolulu as a “picture bride” in 1914.

  Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride also offers an excellent look at what life was like for the Japanese and Filipino workers on the island’s plantation camps.

  Other novels include Name Me Nobody by Lois-AnnYamanaka (as well as her other works of fiction); Lee A.Tonouchi’s da word (yes, no initial capital letters), a collection of short stories written in pidgin; Jessica K. Saiki’s From the Lanai and Other Hawaii Stories; James Houston’s Bird of Another Heaven; Randy Sue Coburn’s A Better View of Paradise; and the novels of Hawaii-born Kiana Davenport. I’ve never forgotten reading her very first novel, Shark Dialogues, a history of Hawaii as seen through the lives of four generations of a family, and have found her later novels—House of Many Gods and Song of the Exile—to be equally good.

  Memoirs

  Isabella Bird’s Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawai‘i’s Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes is a series of letters written in 1871 to her sister, full of wonderful descriptions of the world of Hawaii before western culture so dramatically altered it.

  In Lucinda Fleeson’s Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island, a journalist from Philadelphia takes a job with Hawaii’s National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island of Kauai. This is an excellent choice for eco-readers.

  Along with her own story, Lili‘uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii, relates her country’s tragic history in Hawai‘i’s Story. This should be required reading for anyone contemplating a trip there.

  And don’t neglect Garrett Hongo’s Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i; Barack Ob
ama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance; Susanna Moore’s Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai‘i; and Tara Bray Smith’s West of Then: A Mother, a Daughter, and a Journey Past Paradise.

  HIKING THE (FILL IN THE BLANK) TRAIL

  These are books about those intrepid souls who attempt to go from one end of a long, long trail to the other, carrying their packs up and over mountain passes, fording rivers, and subsisting on beef jerky and varieties of freeze-dried food. As I’ve learned from the books mentioned here, this group of hardy souls are known as “thru-hikers.” You can usually tell who they are by their lean looks, their sometimes mildewed appearance (and odor), their insatiable hunger when they’re taking one of their rare rest days, and, when it’s all done, their well-deserved air of having finished a particularly onerous task.

  The four major long-distance trails in the Americas are the Pacific Crest, the Appalachian, the Continental Divide, and the longest of all, the American Discovery Trail, which is more than 6,800 miles long and crosses fifteen states. How (or why) do people attempt these hikes? Read on.

  When Dan White and his girlfriend, Melissa, decide to give up their newspaper jobs in Connecticut and walk the 2,650 miles of the formidable Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from Mexico to British Columbia, through desert and rain forest, they have no idea what they’ve let themselves in for. As described in The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind—and Almost Found Myself—on the Pacific Crest Trail, their friends can’t understand why they’re doing it and their parents fear that they won’t survive the experience. After vicariously sharing the couple’s experiences with—among other things—exhaustion, sunstroke, giardia, bears, equipment malfunctions, blisters, hallucinations, and a particularly painful and unusual encounter with a cactus, readers will simultaneously applaud their determination to keep going and probably question their sanity.

  Barbara Egbert’s Zero Days: The Real-Life Adventure of Captain Bligh, Nellie Bly, and 10-year-old Scrambler on the Pacific Crest Trail relates her family’s seven months of adventures on the trail. I particularly enjoyed reading the excerpts she includes from her daughter’s diary, which was written along the way. Take note of both the spelling and Mary’s unquenchable exuberance. Mary (aka Scrambler) is the youngest person to ever have thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. She must be quite a kid. (Incidentally, “zero days” are those in which you’re off the trail, washing, showering, eating, and generally recharging.)

  Another entertaining (and exhausting) account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is Angela and Duffy Ballard’s A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple’s Trial by Trail, in which the couple takes turns describing their trek from Mexico to Canada.

  Incidentally, if you find yourself intrigued by the Appalachian Trail, find a copy of Pick Up Sticks by Emma Lathen, a marvelously devious mystery set on and around the New Hampshire part of the trail.

  HOLLANDAYS

  Though it’s a small country, it’s mighty (good) for readers. Here are my choices (both nonfiction and fiction) for the traveler to the Netherlands.

  Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin

  Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

  David Liss’s The Coffee Trader (a novel set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam)

  Margriet de Moor’s The Storm (a wrenching novel based on a true event: the unpredicted 1953 hurricane that devastated the Netherlands and killed about two thousand people)

  Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever

  Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

  David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer

  HONG KONG

  Most of the books I’ve included in this section, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, have two themes: World War II and the Japanese invasion and resulting occupation of the island, and/or Hong Kong’s long history as part of the British Empire (since the first Opium War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842), and the handover, in 1997, to mainland China. These are either the overt subjects of the books or the issues that flow just beneath the surface of the text.

  In Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Piano Teacher, Hong Kong is so well portrayed that it becomes one of the main characters of this first novel. All the ingredients for an addictive soap opera are here: love, death, honor, betrayal, secrets, and surprises, but Lee’s assured writing takes this historical novel beyond its sudsy underpinnings. The novel moves back and forth between the 1940s/World War II and the 1950s/the war’s aftermath, and focuses on how both have affected Will Truesdale, an enigmatic British chauffeur to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. Lee keeps the plot moving quickly while forcing us to consider the moral ambiguities that face people trying to survive during wartime, and to ask ourselves just how much we would compromise of our beliefs and our sense of right and wrong in order to live.

  Mrs. Pollifax, the fictional (and under very deep cover: a dithery elderly woman with a penchant for unusual hats) CIA operative, arrives in Hong Kong to do some sleuthing in Dorothy Gilman’s novel Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha.

  The Honourable Schoolboy is the only book by John le Carré that I loved the first time around but have never been able to bring myself to reread (because of what I perceived as its desperate sadness). It’s the more-or-less sequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and is set partly in Hong Kong during the height of the Cold War.

  Gail Tsukiyama’s Night of Many Dreams takes place both during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in the 1940s and twenty-five years later. It’s the story of Joan and Emma Lew, who are fourteen and nine when the book opens.As with all Tsukiyama’s novels, you come to care deeply for the fate of her characters.

  James Clavell’s Noble House, the third (and maybe best) in a series that includes Tai-Pan and Gai-Jin, is an engrossing saga and a perfect way to get a sense of history with a fast-moving plot attached. Or a fast-moving plot with a lot of history included.

  And definitely don’t miss checking out these, as well: Jess Row’s The Train to Lo Wu: Stories; Leo Ou-fan Lee’s City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong; Paul Theroux’s novel Kowloon Tong; The Last Six Million Seconds, a thriller by John Burdett; Alice Greenway’s White Ghost Girls (a novel); John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbor; and Martin Booth’s memoir Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood, set in the 1950s.

  ICELAND

  One of the things I remember best about the 1960s is that the cheapest way to fly to Europe from the United States was on Icelandair. The benefit of flying with them was that you got to stop in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik. So I’ve always been on the lookout for books set there. Here are some I’ve enjoyed.

  The mysteries of Arnaldur Indridason are fine examples of police procedurals. It’s probably best to read them in order (or at least as much as we can, because not all of them have been published in the United States), beginning with Jar City. Unlike many police procedural series, we don’t learn much about the personal lives of the detectives, but the main policeman, Erlendur Sveinsson, is (appropriately for the climate) generally dejected, and his relationship with his kids (with whom he evidently gave up all contact when he divorced) is awful (although it improves slowly throughout the series). Optimistic readers can see hope on the horizon (family-wise, if generally not for a society that seems on the brink of anger and despair) in The Draining Lake and Arctic Chill.

  Yrsa Sigurdardóttir is the author of another crime series:Last Rituals and My Soul to Take both feature lawyerThóra Gudmundsdóttir.

  Bill Holm’s The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland describes how a Minnesotan moves to Iceland (for a part of every year) in order to explore his Icelandic heritage.

  Three other books set in Iceland include Halldor Laxness’s early twentieth-century saga, Independent People and Iceland: Land of the Sagas by Jon Krakauer and David Roberts. Lawrence Millman’s Last Places: A Journey in the North has a good chapter on Iceland (along with sections on Greenland
, Labrador, and the Faraoe Islands). And don’t forget the fictional travelogue, The Tricking of Freya, by Christina Sunley.

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF . . .

  If you’re unsure of exactly where you want to travel, one way to decide is to pick a traveler of the past and follow in his or her footsteps. My thanks to these authors who did exactly that, and thus gave me many pleasurable hours of reading.

  Any traveler with a good sole (sorry!) won’t want to miss meeting one of the greatest travelers ever: Ibn Battutah, or more familiarly, IB. His full name is Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battutah. (You may see his very last name spelled without a final “h” in some of the books and articles about him.) He was born at the beginning of the fourteenth century in what is now Tangier, made his pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-one, and then simply never stopped traveling. In two of the most delightful books I’ve ever encountered, Arabic scholar and noted travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith recounts his journey following in the footsteps of the great traveler. The first is Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam’s Greatest Traveler, in which Mackintosh-Smith duplicated the first half of IB’s trip. These two travelers—Battutah and Mackintosh-Smith—separated by more than six hundred years and different cultures, are terrific companions: it appears that neither ever got bored, nor met someone he didn’t enjoy talking with, and each approached every new day as a great adventure. The pleasure continues in The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah.

  William Dalrymple describes how he traveled the same journey as Marco Polo—from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Xanadu, which was Emperor Kublai Khan’s summer capital (a not-easy overland trek that covered, all told, about twelve thousand miles)—in In Xanadu: A Quest. What I most enjoyed was how Dalrymple wove Polo’s accounts with his own experiences along the way.