Book Lust to Go Part 1

Book l.u.s.t to Go.

Nancy Pearl.

INTRODUCTION.

I am not an enthusiastic traveler. Let me lay my cards on the table, clear the air, call a spade a spade, and make something perfectly clear. I am barely a traveler at all. I would like to attribute this to "The Unexplorer," a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I read when I was about thirteen and deeply into poetry. It's from her collection called A Few Figs from Thistles and is a whole novel in six short lines, all about a young girl enraptured by the road outside her house.When she asks her mother about it, she's told that the road "led to the milkman's door." Millay concludes with the line: "(That's why I have not traveled more.)"

And then I've always feared that what Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Self-Reliance is true:Traveling is a fool's paradise . . . I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

But to blame that sort of literary disillusionment for my lack of travel would be romantic in the extreme, and also highly disingenuous. Here's why I don't travel: I am stymied by the very activities of planning a trip and figuring out an itinerary, choosing dates and what to pack. I am frustrated by my inability to speak any language except English. My high school French just won't cut it. You try finding a Laundromat in Tallinn without knowing Estonian and you'll soon discover that although everyone has a.s.sured you that all Estonians speak at least a rudimentary form of English, that doesn't really seem to apply to most people over thirty. I don't blame them for not speaking English; I blame myself for not speaking Estonian so I could explain that I just wanted to wash my dirty clothes.

I am also made anxious by the seemingly simple act of leaving my house. I can manage meeting friends for coffee, going for walks in my familiar neighborhood, and geocaching. But even that last activity, as much as I enjoy being with my geocaching buddies, is more often than not nerve-wracking in the extreme as we drive to and disembark in unfamiliar locales all around the city.That's about it, travelwise, for me.

In his book Between Terror and Tourism, Michael Mewshaw writes of arriving in a totally inhospitable desert locale: "The pleasure of being where I had never been before, doing what I had never done, bound for who knew what-I found it all thrilling. I always have."

And I have not, alas.

So in one way of looking at it, I am totally the wrong person to write a book about travel; on the other hand, I am absolutely the perfect person. I am, in fact, a virtual traveler, via books. I have always loved reading armchair travel books and accounts of das.h.i.+ng and daring explorers. I adore books-whether fiction or nonfiction-that give me a sense of being in another place and time. There are so many wonderful books that do exactly that; it was the impetus for Book l.u.s.t To Go. The first thing I did when I started working on this book was to purchase a large and up-to-date world map and put it up on the wall of the room where I write, so it was easy for me to get up from my desk, look at where a country or city was located, and understand its political and geographical context. It's probably one of the best purchases I've ever made.

Now for some information about what's in this book (and what's not).

First, as with the other three books in the Book l.u.s.t series, I've included t.i.tles that are both in print and out of print. Honestly, I wish they were all in print and easily available at libraries and bookstores. We're lucky in this age of the Internet that many out-of-print books are easy to locate and purchase online. And you can take advantage of the inter-library loan service most libraries offer their patrons.

Second, I've included my favorite armchair travel narratives, as well as biographies of explorers, memoirs, novels set in various countries around the world, and a smattering of history. I hope they'll become your favorites as well, whether you're a virtual or actual traveler.

Third, Book l.u.s.t, published in 2003, and More Book l.u.s.t, which came out in 2005, featured lots of t.i.tles that would have fit wonderfully into Book l.u.s.t To Go. If I had ever imagined that I would write a Book l.u.s.t series, I might have saved them to include here, but I never saw that coming (nor, I think, did anyone else). I have generally chosen not to repeat t.i.tles here, except when one seemed especially well suited for Book l.u.s.t To Go. So before you email me about a t.i.tle or an author that you're concerned I've omitted from Book l.u.s.t To Go, be sure to check my other books first!

One of my favorite discoveries while I was doing all of the preliminary reading for BLTG (as I affectionately refer to it) was reading Josie Dew's memoir A Ride in the Neon Sun. Here's what she says about traveling:Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were happened upon in a dusty, cobweb-laced attic containing immovable trunks full of sepia-curled daguerreotypes and age-discoloured letters redolent of bygone days. Others travel for anthropological, botanical, archaeological, geological, and other logical reasons. Some are smitten by a specific country brewed from childhood dreams. For others, travel is a challenge, a release, an escape, a shaking off of the shackles, and even if they don't know where they will end up they usually know where they will begin.

The very hardest part of writing this book was that I was unable to stop working on it. I kept reading even after the initial ma.n.u.script was turned in, discovering new t.i.tles and authors whose works I just couldn't bear to leave out. I even envisioned myself watching the book being printed and shouting periodically, "Stop the presses!" so that I could add yet another section or t.i.tle. But of course the day actually came when I knew I had to stop or there would never be an end to the project.And here is the result, in your hands right now.

So, before your next trip-either virtual or actual-grab a pen and begin making notes about the t.i.tles that sound good to you. And enjoy the journeys.

I'd love to hear from you. My email address is .com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Many people gave me great suggestions for books to include in Book l.u.s.t To Go. I want to give an especial shout-out to Martha Bayley, who actually kick-started the whole process of me really sitting down and writing up all my notes; in addition, she contributed both the "Inside the Inside Pa.s.sage" section and "We'll Always Have Paris." She is herself both a virtual and actual traveler, and over the years has recommended many terrific books.And Anna Minard, who initially organized my reams of random bits of paper-something I never could have done on my own-into a coherent arrangement.

And to all these folks for their help of many different sorts: Na.s.sim a.s.sefi; Jen Baker; Abby Ba.s.s; Colleen Brady; Brad Craft; Marilyn Dahl; Beth de la Fuente; Janneke Dijkstra; Jason Felton; Margaret Ford; Gitana Garofalo; Gail Goodrick; Andrea Gough; Alex Harris; Phyllis Hatfield; Jim Horton; Christine Jeffords; Linda Johns; Mark Kaiser; Kathleen Kinder; Bharti Kirschner; David Laskin; Mike Leber; Susan Linn; Lisa Lundstrom; Nancy McGill; Cindy Mitch.e.l.l; Gina Nahai; Hannah Parker; Eily Raman; Gayle Richardson; Matt Rowe; Cadi Russell-Sauve; Robin Pforr Ryan; Murray Sampson; Anne Schwendiman; Jake Silverstein; Kale Sniderman; Stephen and Marilyn Sniderman; Shoshana Sniderman-Wise; Dana Stabenow; Manya and Par Sundstrom; Martha Tofferi; Jason Vanhee; Agnes Wiacek; David Wright; Neal Wyatt (for the "Anglophile's Literary Pilgrimage," "Comics with a Sense of Place," and "Lyme Regis" sections, and who is always as excited about my books as I am); and Mich.e.l.le Young.

I apologize in advance if I've inadvertently omitted your name....

And all my thanks to the wonderful folks at Sasquatch Books-it takes a concerted togetherness to get a book from an idea to the printed page, and everyone at Sasquatch has been nothing less than supportive, especially Gary Luke, Sarah Hanson, Rach.e.l.le Longe, Tess Tabor, and Shari Miranda.

As always, love to my husband, Joe, to whom I owe more than I can say-he makes everything I do possible and makes possible everything that I do.

This book is dedicated to my granddaughter Jessica Pearl Raman, because it's her turn and I love her.

A IS FOR ADVENTURE.

Any sort of adventurous travel comes with an almost guaranteed risk: anything can-and often does-go wrong, whether it's bad weather, bad decisions, bad karma, or simply bad luck. In addition to the best-selling armchair adventure t.i.tles by authors like Jon Krakauer, Sebastian Junger, or Linda Greenlaw, try these riveting accounts.

In Adrift by Steven Callahan, the author must use his inflatable life raft after his small sloop capsized after less than a week out on the open waters of the North Atlantic. The seventy-six days at sea that he spent fighting for his life and his sanity make for a spellbinding tale.

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols is about the first Golden Globe Race in 1968, in which-as the book's tagline has it-"Nine men set out to race each other around the world. Only one made it back." I read with a growing sense of shock-and no little admiration-how these men, for various and sundry reasons, decided to risk their bodies (and their minds) to take part in a race sans GPS, sans mobile phones, and in boats that seemed all but guaranteed not to survive the trip. Chay Blyth, who had very little experience in open water sailing, describes the end of his race when his boat became unmanageable during an unseasonable gale:So I lowered the sails . . . and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in h.e.l.l with instructions.

Jeffrey Tayler's River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny and Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing both showcase the author's talents as a travel writer: powers of keen observation and an ability to convey his own palpable enthusiasm for exotic places and interesting people, even as danger is always just around the corner.

Many people make the choice to set off on an adventure, but the men described in Dean King's Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival merely ended up where they did by accident. In August of 1815, twelve crew members from the Connecticut merchant brig Commerce were s.h.i.+pwrecked off the western coast of Africa, enslaved by a Bedouin tribe, and forced to accompany their captors-by foot and by camelback-on a seemingly endless, desperately grueling, and bone-dry trek through the sands of the western Sahara desert (now part of Morocco). King based his book on two first-person accounts of the experience the men underwent; from these two works, King has constructed a gripping and page-turning narrative of survival and courage. The fact that as this story was unfolding alongside a parallel story of survival and courage in the face of dire circ.u.mstances-the abduction and enslavement in the "New World" of African native men, women, and children-makes King's book especially ironic.

Deep-sea diving off the coast of French Polynesia: could anything be more, well, um, adventurous? Not according to Julia Whitty in The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific.

James West Davidson and John Rugge's Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure chronicles the story of a failed exploration that was dogged with bad luck, as well as its complicated aftermath.

Mumbai to Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Holy Sites of Islam by Ilija Trojanow (his name is also spelled Ilya Troyanov-see the section called "Star Trekkers" for another of his books) is one of the bound-to-be-cla.s.sic travelogues: an account of the Hajj as seen through the eyes of a Western journalist sympathetic to Islam.

I enjoyed so many of the selections Lamar Underwood collected in The Greatest Adventure Stories Ever Told. They include both fiction and nonfiction, from an Arthur Conan Doyle non-Sherlockian short story and Tom Wolfe's account of Chuck Yeager's breaking the sound barrier, to a short story by Arthur C. Clarke and Joel P. Kramer's "A Harrowing Journey," which describes a trip (by foot and kayak) through New Guinea that seemed so desperately foolhardy I found myself wincing in sympathetic pain while I was reading it.

AFGHANISTAN: GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES.

As with many of the places I've included in this book, probably the only way we're going to get to visit Afghanistan (unless we're in the military) in the next few years is through the books we read. I somehow doubt that most of us will be making vacation plans to visit Kabul. But who knows? You may be far more adventurous than I.

The only positive outcome of the events of 9/11 that I can see is the proliferation of books-both fiction and nonfiction-set in a country that most of us never before paid much attention to. I wrote a whole section in More Book l.u.s.t that covers fiction and nonfiction about Afghanistan's past and present, and you might want to begin there. But, to quote Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" on the subject of oysters,"And thick and fast they came at last / And more and more and more." It's true, as all you observant readers have already gathered by now, that this is not a section that's going to provide a lot of laughs. On the other hand, most of these books are perfect selections for your book group. But do me one favor-read these in the spring (or summer) of the year. They aren't-for the most part-the best choice for gray and rainy days.

Nonfiction.

One of the best books I read in 2009 (although perhaps"experienced" is a better choice of verb) was the graphic novel The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre, and Frederic Lemercier. It's the powerful story of Lefevre's first a.s.signment as a photojournalist in 1986, accompanying a team of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) who were traveling through Pakistan to Afghanistan, during the long b.l.o.o.d.y conflict between the invading Soviet Union troops and the Taliban. The pictures include both Lefevre's original contact sheets (it's interesting to note that contact sheets of photos are not unlike strips of comics) and Guibert's drawings, while the text is reconstructed from discussions Guibert and Lefevre had about the journey. Graphic designer Lemercier a.s.sembled the book. (Lefevre's journals-mentioned in the book-were lost years before.) Other good reading choices:.

Saira Shah's The Storyteller's Daughter: One Woman's Return to Her Lost Homeland weaves tales that Shah heard growing up in Britain with her own impressions during a long sojourn in country. Shah is also a highly regarded filmmaker, whose doc.u.mentary Beneath the Veil: Inside the Taliban's Afghanistan is disturbing and necessary viewing for anyone interested in understanding the country. As is her book.

In his Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, Joel Hafvenstein describes the year he spent working with an American aid organization to try to help Afghani farmers raise crops other than those that have been their livelihood for generations.

Seth G. Jones's In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan provides an excellent history of U.S. involvement in the country.

One of the earliest books written about the battle between the Russian invaders and the mujahideen fighters is Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan. In 1984 Peregrine Hodson, a British freelance journalist, traveled with the resistance fighters throughout northeastern Afghanistan. His book is not, as Hodson makes clear in his introduction, an a.n.a.lysis of the war or the politics of the region. But reading it now, more than twenty years after it was originally published, one finds familiar names throughout, and the beginnings of stories that are not yet ended.

In The Places In Between, Rory Stewart describes a trip through Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban, early in 2002. Having spent much of 2000 and 2001 trekking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart decided to walk from Herat to Kabul. He followed the route of Babur, a fifteenth-century leader best known as the founder of the Mughal Empire, and took with him only his dog, who was named for this most famous emperor. Canine lovers take note: Babur is one of the best dogs in literature.

J. Malcolm Garcia's The Khaarijee:A Chronicle of Friends.h.i.+p and War in Kabul is the story of a middle-aged newbie reporter who cuts his teeth in the heat of Afghanistan following 9/11.

Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is the moving account of the great pro football player's death in Afghanistan. As with all of Krakauer's books, this is eminently readable.

Fiction.

Most readers are already familiar with Khaled Hosseini's two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. (In fact, those are the two works of fiction that probably introduced many readers to Afghanistan.) But don't stop there-here are others you shouldn't miss: Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil; Dan Fesperman's The War-lord's Son (especially good for John le Carre fans); James Michener's Caravans, which animates the 1940s and 1950s in Afghanistan quite marvelously; and Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone, which helps us understand the role and place of Afghani women. (The introduction to Rahimi's novel was written by Khaled Hosseini.) AFRICA: THE GREENEST CONTINENT.

I think it was Graham Greene who called Africa "the greenest continent." Given the size and complexity of the continent, I could probably do a whole Book l.u.s.t To Go volume on books about Africa, which would only befit a locale that is 11.7 million square miles and comprises, according to Wikipedia, sixty-one political territories and fifty-three different countries, many of which are probably unfamiliar to the western reader (or at least to this particular western reader). Books about Africa can be arranged into enough categories to make even the most discerning slicer and dicer content (or queasy). Many of the t.i.tles cross categories.

There are the BYH ("break your heart") books that range from history to cla.s.sic fiction (Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, for one) to contemporary mysteries (like Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die and Kwei Quartey's Wife of the G.o.ds).

There are the older but still good police procedural mysteries by James McClure, featuring the white Inspector Kramer and his Zulu a.s.sistant, Zondi, that take place in South Africa during the long years of apartheid; The Steam Pig is my favorite.

There are the RCG ("rose-colored gla.s.ses") memoirs (like Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa) and the DFCia.s.saCoO ("dysfunctional families come in all sizes, shapes, and countries of origin") autobiographies like Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller. (There's more by this author in the "Zambia" section.) I could go on for pages about the terrifyingly sad political accounts of bravery, pain, atrocities, and, unaccountably, hope, as they appear in recent nonfiction about Africa: Dave Eggers's What Is the What; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan by Alephfonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Banjamin Ajak; Emmanuel Jal's War Child; Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (you can watch my interview with Gourevitch at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030904); A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It by Stephen Kinzer; Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains (see my interview with him at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3031003); and Michela Wrong's It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower.

It's true that many of these books don't necessarily make you want to get up and vacation in any of the continent's war-torn and depleted countries like Sudan, Somalia, or Rwanda (although reading the charming novel Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin might change your mind a bit about Rwanda). Reading these books, I found myself weeping at the horrors, admiring the bravery, hoping for the best, and always feeling entirely grateful I was living in peaceful Seattle. But-let me emphasize-they are all absolutely worth reading.

There are also seemingly innumerable stories of exploration and discovery, mostly to be found in dusty sections of libraries and used bookstores. There are books galore on colonial Africa (much of what is in them is now totally politically incorrect). And there are the novels, literary and otherwise, in which Africa plays an important role: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, for one; and Green City in the Sun by Barbara Wood (historical fiction set in Kenya) for another.

To make it simpler for readers (and myself), I've tried to list books under their specific settings, while including the general Africa t.i.tles, or those that cover more than one country, in this section.

Basil Davidson was one of the first white writers to suggest that Africa had a history and culture (amazingly enough, this came as shocking news to many people). He wrote a ton of books and they're somewhat dated, but The Lost Cities of Africa and The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics together will give you a good grounding in African history.

Although I would count Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar as one of my all-time favorite books, I found that the later accounts of his travels expressed such a dyspeptic view of the people he met and the places he was visiting that I was disinclined to go on reading them. I hadn't picked up another book of his (fiction or nonfiction) after the somewhat ironically t.i.tled The Happy Isles of Oceania, published in 1992, until a trusted book-recommending friend suggested Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. In it, I discovered a hodgepodge of history, anecdotes, opinions, and description. I was immediately hooked by how Theroux begins his tale:All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the ma.s.sacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again.

In this book, Theroux seems to have recovered his emotional equilibrium and shed most of his grumpiness and petulance; all of his talent for discovering the unusual in the ordinary people he meets and places he visits is evidenced on every page, which was originally published in 2003. Here's another grand example of his writing, also from the first chapter:I . . . was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a ba.n.a.l subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

Theroux travels by nearly every sort of conveyance you can imagine: a variety of trucks, a ferry, train, bus, and dugout canoe (a particularly fascinating section). He talks to people-Africans and others-from all walks of life, such as missionaries, tourists, and aid workers from Western countries, which gives him (and us) a well-rounded portrait of a continent struggling to find itself. Incidentally, there's a very funny joke on page 123 of the paperback edition.

A heartwarming (but not soppy) book set in Malawi is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. In addition to being an inspiring memoir of a young inventor, it's also a testament to the importance of libraries and librarians.

David Ewing Duncan's From Cape to Cairo: An African Odyssey describes the bicycle trip he took in 1986 and 1987 in order to gauge the state of the continent. This is great reading for fans of two-wheeled travel.

Chimpanzee Travels: On and Off the Road in Africa by Dale Peterson is a winner: it's a fabulous story of one man's adventures across Africa to locate and then photograph chimpanzees.

In Betty Levitov's Africa on Six Wheels: A Semester on Safari, the author describes a three-month tour of Africa as the leader of a group of college students.

Tanya Shaffer takes readers to several African countries, most notably Ghana, in Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa.

The t.i.tle and subt.i.tle of Marie Javins's Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik: One Woman's Solo Misadventures in Africa says it all, except how engrossing the tale is.

Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure by Stuart Stevens is a wildly entertaining travelogue centering on returning a Land Rover to Europe, a goal that is complicated by killer ants, political unrest, and frenetic Peace Corps parties.

I think that any old excuse to read the exquisitely waspish Evelyn Waugh is to be taken (no matter how grungy the library copy is-and the copy of A Tourist in Africa I read was awfully grungy). I was totally charmed by his diary of a 1959 journey from Genoa to South Africa, via Kenya, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias (North and South), Mozambique, and Bechua.n.a.land, and then back to Southampton, England. Here's one of my favorite quotes, where he rues his age and how difficult it makes traveling:Nor is fifty-five the best age for travel; too old for the jungle, too young for the beaches, . . . There are few more fatiguing experiences than to mingle with the holiday-makers of the Jamaican North Sh.o.r.e, all older, fatter, richer, idler and more ugly than oneself. India is full of splendours that must be seen now or perhaps never, but can a man of fifty-five long endure a regime where wine is prohibited?

One of my favorite discoveries at a used bookstore where I was poking around for armchair travel reading was Peter Biddlecombe's French Lessons in Africa: Travels with My Briefcase Through French Africa. In often hilarious and sometimes merely very funny anecdotes, Biddlecombe brings Francophone Africa, from Benin to Zaire, alive for us. Although this was published in 1994, not much of what Biddlecombe observed then has changed-or at least not changed for the better. If you can forget that depressing aspect, reading this is a delight.

And for an excellent and useful selection of recent writing from Africa, take a look at G.o.ds and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman. It's filled with authors both familiar (like Chinua Achebe) and unfamiliar to most of us (like Alain Mabanckou-or at least he was to me, before I read his selection).

ALBANIA.

Should you find yourself planning an excursion to Albania, the perfect accompaniment to the trip is Dorothy Gilman's The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, the first of a series (each novel is set in a different country).Widowed and bored with her life as a suburban woman-of-a-certain-age, she goes to the CIA head-quarters and volunteers to become a spy.Through a series of comic mishaps and misunderstandings, she's sent to Albania to locate the whereabouts of an agent who has disappeared. In the process, you learn (painlessly) about the history, politics, and geography of a country that is typically regarded as a cipher to many people.

The major (and very prolific) Albanian writer-a poet and novelist-is Ismail Kadare, who won the Man Booker International Award in 2005, and some day, I believe, he'll win the n.o.bel Prize for literature. Try The Siege (a historical novel about the fifteenth-century war with the Turks) or Chronicle in Stone (World War II in the life of a small boy and his vividly described town). The latter is one of those books that make you wish you could go back in time to spend a few moments in the place Kadare is describing.

When I first saw the t.i.tle-Edward Lear in Albania-I was excited to find that one of my favorite nonsense poets (author of "The Owl and the p.u.s.s.ycat," etc.) had also traveled the wide world o'er. Then I looked more closely and read the subt.i.tle: 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 t.i.tles 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic 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 fis.h.i.+ng.

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 flouris.h.i.+ng and wealthy City of Z.