Book Lust to Go

by Nancy Pearl

  In a hymn of joy and affection for the nomadic life, Carl Raswan’s Black Tents of Arabia describes the time he spent—between 1912 and 1934—living with a Bedouin tribe, whose possessions included seven thousand tents and three hundred and fifty thousand camels.

  ARMENIA

  I remember first learning about Armenia when I was at Hally Elementary School in Detroit in the 1950s, because the family of one of my friends, Andrea Sultanian, emigrated from there. I’ve been interested in reading about the sad history of that seemingly doomed nation ever since. Here are some books I can highly recommend:

  Winner of the National Book Award in 1976, Passage to Ararat by Michael J. Arlen is an exploration of his own cultural heritage and his family’s former homeland.

  Other books that will give you a good sense of the country include Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir; Joan London’s novel Gilgamesh, set just as World War II was beginning; Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s tragic novel Three Apples Fell from Heaven; and Vartan Gregorian’s memoir The Road to Home: My Life and Times.

  AUSTRALIA, THE LAND OF OZ

  I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time (with family, librarians, and readers) in Australia. It’s one of my favorite places not only to visit but also to read about. Some of my top picks follow.

  The Literature of Australia: An Anthology has an informative introduction by one of the country’s best novelists, Thomas Keneally. It’s a collection filled with excerpts from novels and works of nonfiction, as well as poetry. It also includes writings of the Aboriginal peoples (which sets it apart from many earlier collections). Because it’s arranged chronologically, I think you’ll find that it’s a good place to experience the development and range of Australian literature and get a sense of who you want to read next.

  Nonfiction

  Once there were two families, one Australian, one American: each family had a mother, a father who worked for his country’s foreign service, and two little girls. The older two girls were the same age, while the younger two—one of them Jane Alison, the author of The Sisters Antipodes, whose memoir this is—shared the same birthday, although Jenny was a year older. Jane describes the events that followed when the adults got divorced in order to exchange spouses: Jane was four, and her older sister, Patricia, was seven. In less than a year, it was all over: two divorces, two remarriages, new fathers, and a new life. Although this is less about Australia than probably warrants including it here, I couldn’t resist because I enjoyed it so much.

  Before she became a reporter and best-selling and award-winning novelist, Geraldine Brooks was a child growing up in Sydney. Her memoir of those years—which gives a good indication of the kind of adult she became—is Foreign Correspondence. My discussion with Brooks can be found at: www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030807.

  Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney:A Wildly Distorted Account is delightfully idiosyncratic. (But don’t miss his True History of the Kelly Gang—you can go to the State Library of Victoria and see Kelly’s unusual set of armor, as well as Carey’s manuscript for the novel.)

  Australian Tim Flannery is an incredibly prolific writer and editor. Two of his books that I’ve most enjoyed and that are especially applicable here are Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Creature and The Explorers: Stories of Discovery and Adventure from the Australian Frontier. Just looking at the cover of the former gives you a sense of the book:A kangaroo is reclining under a bright blue sky and hot Australian sun, his (or her) ears perked up, a bird perched on one flank, staring out at you from beneath hooded eyes, looking for all the world like a creature out of Alice in Wonderland. You can almost imagine her (or him) saying, “Welcome to my strange and wonderful world. Prepare to be amazed.” Not to accept that invitation is to miss out on one of the most delightfully informative books I’ve read lately. The latter book, edited by Flannery, is a collection of sixty-seven entries by men who were “flies on the wall” during a meaningful moment in Australian history. The entries range from 1606, when the first European saw the continent, right up to the twentieth century.

  Greater Nowheres: Wanderings Across the Outback is by two American writers and outdoorsmen. Dave Finkelstein and Jack London (not the same man who wrote The Call of the Wild) set out to find a man-eating crocodile known as the “deadly salty” and along the way encounter enough unusual sights, sounds, and experiences to make this book so enjoyable.

  Other fabulous nonfiction about the country includes The Dig Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Ill-Fated Burke and Wills 1860 Expedition by Sarah Murgatroyd; Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman’s Life Among the Aborigines by Julia Blackburn; The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins: Australia’s Unknown Hero by Simon Nasht, which is the story of a man who wore many hats: reporter, photographer, scientist, and spy; and A. B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, which is a memoir covering most of the twentieth century, set in small settlements in the outback. Despite Facey’s horribly difficult childhood, this remarkable work has no trace of irony at all, and the title must be taken quite literally. It makes for a moving and powerful book. Two other excellent memoirs are In Sunshine or in Shadow, Martin Flanagan’s moving account of trying to understand Tasmania’s past—and that of five generations of his own family—and Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, her story of walking across Australia’s desert accompanied by four camels in the 1970s.

  Fiction

  The sense of the city I got from The Unknown Terrorist (grungy and scary) seemed far removed from the Sydney I visited (and loved) in 2006 and 2007. But Richard Flanagan has written an amazing, if uncomfortable, novel (as all of his are) that’s totally in tune with today’s world of terrorism and paranoia. Flanagan, born in Tasmania, can’t seem to write a bad sentence; I always look forward to reading his books and seeing what he’s up to next.

  When I was in Australia, a fellow librarian and good friend suggested that I might like Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore, an emotionally powerful and complex thriller that takes place outside Melbourne. Through his main character, homicide detective Joe Cashin,Temple raises important issues about the seemingly endemic prejudice against the aboriginal peoples. Written in the style of Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos,Temple brings out the soul of Australia’s past and present.

  And more fiction that absolutely shouldn’t be missed includes all of Kate Grenville’s novels, especially The Secret River and The Lieutenant; anything by Helen Garner, such as The Children’s Bach (now rather old and somewhat hard to get a copy of) and Monkey Grip; the mysteries of Adrian Hyland, featuring a half-aboriginal amateur detective named Emily Tempest and set in the Australian outback—the first is Moonlight Downs and the second is Gunshot Road; Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, which caused a huge scandal when it was first (self-)published in 1950; and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Vera Wright Trilogy, comprised of My Father’s Moon,Cabin Fever, and The Georges’ Wife.

  AZ YOU LIKE IT

  Richard Shelton’s Going Back to Bisbee was the first book I encountered that made me think I might find that the Arizona desert has as much beauty as the Pacific Northwest’s forests and lakes. In the years since I first read his memoir, I’ve discovered other fine Arizona reads:

  Natural history buffs won’t want to miss any of the books by Craig Childs, wilderness and river guide, solitary wanderer, and obsessive desert lover. My favorite is The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, but since it’s not strictly Arizona-centric, try The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert instead. (There seem to be different subtitles on different editions or printings of the book, so sometimes it reads There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert:Thirst and Drowning.)

  Two enjoyable character-driven novels about trips down the Colorado River are In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde and Ambition by Lisa Michaels. Hyde’s novel tells of a group of strangers who come together for a multi-day raft trip that manages to chang
e the lives of all the participants. There’s an irresistible dog as well, which should please canine lovers. Michaels’ novel is the story of newlyweds whose 1928 honeymoon trip on the Colorado has unexpected consequences.

  JohnVernon’s The Last Canyon, a fascinating biographical novel about John Wesley Powell, would make a good reading companion to Edward Dolnick’s Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon. Each is eminently readable and describes, in very different ways, Powell and his crew’s great, grand, and dangerous adventure.

  There are many good reads, both fiction and nonfiction, about an important but bleak subject: the hazards of illegally crossing the Arizona-Mexico border. Two of the best novels I’ve discovered are Philip Caputo’s Crossers and Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. (Urrea is also the author of The Devil’s Highway, a true story of illegal immigrants trying to survive the brutalities of sun, thirst, and the U.S. Border Patrol in the part of the Arizona desert known as “the devil’s highway.”) All three are good choices for book groups.

  Mysteries set in Arizona are plentiful. They include Ross MacDonald’s The Blue Hammer (you can never go wrong with a Lew Archer thriller, no matter where they’re set); Louise Ure’s Liars Anonymous, featuring Jessie Dancing, who works for an emergency road service company in Phoenix; and New River Blues by Elizabeth Gunn, whose main character, Sarah Burke, is a detective with the Tucson Police Department.

  If you’re up for a bit of historical fantasy, try Emma Bull’s most wonderful Territory—a re-imagining of the events leading up to the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and others all make appearances. About Doc Holliday, Bull writes,“ . . . no amount of wanting would make Doc an upstanding member of the community. He was a fine dentist—he just wasn’t a fine person. And he was so good at being bad that it seemed like a genuine gift. One ought not to waste one’s gifts.” I was especially intrigued by the way Bull made use of the belief so prevalent among nineteenth-century men and women—that one can go west and reinvent him- or herself, which is a major theme of the novel. As one character explains to another, “You’re whoever you say you are, Millie. That’s the point of coming west.”

  THE BALTIC STATES

  The history of the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—is marked with disasters. It was annexed (and occupied) first by the Soviet Union (in 1939), then by Germany (1941-1944), and then again by the Soviet Union (1944- 1991). In fact, when I was in Estonia a few years ago, various people would remind me that for them, World War II didn’t end until the last Soviet soldier left the country in 1994.

  As a result, much of the writing from these three countries is not going to be particularly upbeat, and as readers we’re hampered by the fact that most books have never been translated into English. I kept asking my new Estonian friends what books I should read to help me understand their country, and the Baltic world in general, but not only are books quite expensive, most of what’s in the bookstores in Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) were translations of British and American best sellers. (Terry Pratchett and Jayne Ann Krentz were very popular on both library and bookstore shelves.)

  Here are some worthy books that I discovered after my all-too-short trip there had ended.

  Mati Unt’s experimental novel Brecht at Night is definitely not for those who like conventional narratives, but if you’re up for something a bit different, here’s the book for you. I loved the weirdness of it.

  Jaan Kross’s The Conspiracy and Other Stories, Treading Air, and The Czar’s Madman all deal with how fate (for which, I think, one can read “history”) has in one way or another denied the characters their well-earned futures.

  Sofi Oksanen is Finnish-Estonian, and she sets her novel Purge in Estonia; the book (the first of her writing to appear in English) ranges back and forth in time over the twentieth century and gives us—along with a good story—a solid grounding in the grueling history of Estonia.

  Life under the Nazi regime and then as a refugee in a “displaced person’s camp” is faithfully described in The Rings of My Tree: A Latvian Woman’s Journey by Jane E. Cunningham. It’s the story of her friend Mirdza’s experiences before, during, and after World War II.

  And these: Red Weather by Pauls Toutonghi, about a fifteen-year-old who moves with his family from Latvia to Milwaukee at the end of the Cold War; Henning Mankell sends his investigator Kurt Wallender from Sweden to Latvia in The Dogs of Riga; There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok by Yaffa Eliach; The Fire Escape Is Locked for Your Safety: On the Road in the Former Soviet Union by Molly J. Baier; The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz; Mark Kurzem’s The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood; Antony Sher’s Middlepost; Ticket to Latvia: A Journey from Berlin to the Baltic by Marcus Tanner; and Hillel Levine’s In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (in Lithuania).

  BALTIMORE

  Quite honestly, I can’t imagine a visit to Baltimore—either really going there or visiting from the comfort of my couch—without first watching the television program The Wire, co-created by David Simon. Simon is also the co-author (with Edward Burns) of the best nonfiction book about Baltimore that I’ve ever read—The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (which was the basis for The Wire). Simon also wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, also set in Baltimore (and became another top-notch television show). I’d also definitely rent Barry Levinson’s film Diner and watch that for another, less bleak, view of the city.

  When it comes to fiction, the majority of Anne Tyler’s novels are set in Baltimore—in fact, in a particular part of Baltimore: Roland Park—but setting isn’t Tyler’s thing (that would be character), so you don’t get much sense of the city. Of course, any time you have the opportunity to read an Anne Tyler novel (try Searching for Caleb) you should probably do so!

  You’ll get a better taste of Baltimore life by reading the mystery series by Laura Lippman (all featuring ex-Baltimore Sun reporter, now private eye Tess Monaghan), in which the city functions as almost another character. I’m not convinced you need to read them in order, although if you’re so inclined, the first is Baltimore Blues. One of my favorites is In a Strange City, in which Edgar Allan Poe, whose hometown is Baltimore and who is buried there, features prominently in the plot.

  Other good Baltimore-set reading includes:

  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood depicts the author’s life growing up on the tough streets of Baltimore. Who could have predicted he would become a well-known writer and blogger?

  The first time I saw Baltimore’s rebuilt Inner Harbor area, with its new restaurants and a fabulous aquarium, I couldn’t help remembering the glory years of Baltimore’s football team, the Colts. (What can I say? For many years I was a die-hard football fan.) This was during the 1950s and ’60s, two decades and more before the night of infamy—March 29, 1984—when owner Robert Irsay snuck the team out of Baltimore to its new home in Indianapolis. And that reminded me that if you have any interest in football at all, don’t miss Mark Bowden’s superb history, The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL. You’ll feel as though you were actually at the National Football League championship game, down on the field with Johnny Unitas, receiver Raymond Berry, and the other Colts, playing on a frigid day in Yankee Stadium. Even though the book (and the game itself) wasn’t set in Baltimore, it really fits into this section.

  BERLIN

  I spent not nearly enough time in Berlin last year, but I realized almost immediately that for any history buff, Berlin is the place to go—you’re surrounded by remnants of the past, from the charming walk/stop traffic signals in the former East Berlin and the references to Checkpoint Charlie, to the chillingly brilliant Memorial to the Murdered Jews
of Europe and the Daniel Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum. Here are some books you won’t want to miss reading, either before you go or after you return home.

  After wandering around the Alexanderplatz section of the city in the rain and cold on my visit there, I was moved to track down a copy of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf. What a pleasure it was to read.

  What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 is a collection of Joseph Roth’s newspaper columns; his incisive vision of the present and the future of Berlin (and Germany) is presented through his immaculate prose. (And Roth’s novels and short stories are spectacular, particularly The Radetzky March.)

  Zoo Station: Adventures in East and West Berlin by Ian Walker, published in 1988, gives a vivid picture of the fractured city in the period leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  There are many novels set during the period of the Cold War and the divided city, but two especially remarkable ones are Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (written before he became a household name) and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  The Australian writer and lawyer Anna Funder collected the stories of many East Berliners living during the Cold War. Their Orwellian tales are collected in Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall.

  You can’t get a better sense of Berlin between the wars than by reading Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s. It would be so interesting to use this as a guidebook to present-day Berlin.

  Three mysteries that noir fans will likely adore are Philip Kerr’s March Violets,The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem, set from the early 1930s to 1947 and all featuring detective Bernie Günter.