Book Lust to Go

by Nancy Pearl

  But perhaps my favorite book about Berlin, set about a decade before World War II, when people in the know began to foresee what was coming, is Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, consisting of The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. It became, of course, the hit play Cabaret.

  BORNEO AND SARAWAK

  There aren’t a huge number of books about Borneo and Sarawak to recommend to would-be travelers, and the area does have a somewhat grisly reputation as being the home of all those head-hunting Dayaks, but for folks willing to take on the adventure of it all, try these wildly divergent books, all set in Borneo.

  Fair warning: Andro Linklater’s Wild People: Travels with Borneo’s Head-Hunters is not for the squeamish, but if you read the disturbing sections really quickly and linger over the others, you’ll get a good picture of the region.

  Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo by Eric Hansen could just as easily have gone in the section called “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”—I’m not sure anyone would really want to follow in Hansen’s footsteps, but it certainly makes for an unforgettable book.

  Kalimantaan by C. S. Godshalk supposedly has legions of devoted readers—yet I rarely meet anyone with whom I can discuss it. Kalimantaan is a big biographical novel about a young man named Gideon Barr who makes his way to Borneo in 1838, when it was just a little-known island in the South China Sea. It’s the kind of book that has a bit of everything and encompasses almost every issue the Victorians were dealing with: colonialism, a woman’s role in society, and racial issues.

  When people mention Judith Heimann’s The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen, and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II to me, they always use terms like “reads like a novel” or “page-turning.” They’re right. Not only is this is a treat for history buffs, it’s also a natural for fans of anthropology-for-the-layman books. And the best part is that what could have been an awfully depressing event ends happily.

  Among his variety of occupations,Tom Harrisson was one of the first anthropologists who showed a deep respect in his writing for the civilization of the cannibalistic cultures he studied in the New Hebrides. He wrote about his experience in Savage Civilisation, published in 1937 and long out of print. But Judith Heimann’s biography—The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life—brings him to vivid life.

  Mountain climbing in Borneo? Yes indeed, as described most entertainingly in Sam Lightner’s All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo. Lightner and a few friends traveled to Borneo as a result of reading World Within, Harrisson’s memoir of his adventures in the country during World War II.

  Biruté Galdikas is one of the three women primate researchers who worked with Dr. Louis Leakey. She’s probably much less well known than either Jane Goodall (who studies chimpanzees) or Dian Fossey (who studied gorillas). Galdikas’s area of expertise is the orangutan, and she’s based in Borneo. Despite the fact that I rarely remember how to properly pronounce the word orangutan—I always somehow put an extra “g” at the end of it—I love reading about Galdikas’s studies of them in their natural habitat. I guarantee that after you read her memoir Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo, you’ll never look at an orangutan in a zoo the same way again.

  Agnes Newton Keith’s moving Three Came Home is the story of what she, her husband, and their young son experienced in a Japanese internment camp in Borneo during World War II. It was first published in 1946, when the events of their incarceration were still seared into their minds. I still treasure my copy of Keith’s book; I bought it way back in the early 1960s. I especially appreciate the relatively even-handed way she describes their Japanese guards and commanders.

  To me, one of the most interesting facts about Sarawak, one of the states on the island of Borneo, is how closely connected its creation was to Sir James Brooke, who became known as the Rajah of Sarawak in 1842. (The painting of him in London’s National Portrait Gallery by Sir Francis Grant portrays him as both charismatic and devastatingly handsome.) There aren’t any great current biographies about him (and it would be wildly unadmirable to admire him), but if you’re intrigued, try Emily Hahn’s James Brooke of Sarawak: A Biography of Sir James Brooke.

  BOSTON: BEANS, BIRD, AND THE RED SOX

  For a contemporary view of Boston, try The Good City, edited by Emily Hiestand and Ande Zellman, which includes both descriptive and personal essays on everything Boston from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to various sports teams, all written by a variety of authors. This should probably be required reading for anyone heading to Beantown.

  Boston appears to be an incredibly felonious city—particularly if you count the number of detectives and private eyes who operate out of it.

  Try Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series (one of the best is The Judas Goat, which is set relatively early in both Parker’s and Spenser’s careers).

  For personal reasons (which you’ll totally understand when you read the novel), my favorite of Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle series remains Cold Case. (You can watch my interview with Barnes at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030607.)

  I find Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli series—she’s a Boston homicide detective—to be a bit edgy and not for the faint of heart. If you’re up for it, start with the first one, The Surgeon.

  Dennis Lehane’s novels about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro provide many enjoyable hours of reading. I’d read them in order, beginning with the first, and still one of the best, Prayers for Rain.

  And because sports are such a big part of the Boston zeitgeist, baseball fans shouldn’t miss Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series:The Triumph of America’s Pastime by Mark Frost, and basketball fanatics will thoroughly enjoy Michael Connelly’s Rebound!: Basketball, Busing, Larry Bird, and the Rebirth of Boston.

  The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage is in my top five for all-time favorite novels. Set partially in Boston, it’s one of those titles that I keep wishing someone would reissue in a lovely trade paperback edition so I can replace the falling-apart old copy I picked up at some thrift store years ago.

  BOTSWANA

  If Alexander McCall Smith didn’t exist, I suspect that the Botswana Tourist Bureau (assuming there is one) would have to invent him.

  It’s Smith’s collection of tales featuring Precious Ramotswe, who is, as she says, “blessed with girth rather than height,” that brought this African country (bigger than California and smaller than Texas, located between Zimbabwe and South Africa) to readers looking for interesting characters and a setting that functions as much as a character as any of the other, two-legged sort. From The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,Tears of the Giraffe, and on through Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, which is my favorite title, Smith offers hours of pleasure reading.

  After living for many years in New Zealand, Robyn Scott’s small-plane-flying physician father and ever-up-for-an-adventure mother returned to their Botswana home in 1987. In Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood, Scott describes what life was like in a deserted mining town far from any city of significant size.

  A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley is the first mystery featuring a Botswanan policeman named David Bengu, whose fellow cops have nicknamed him “Kubu,” which is Setswanan (a Botswanan dialect) for hippopotamus, thus successfully describing his appearance. This series (as I write this, there are only two—the other is The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu) is much grittier and faster-paced than Smith’s novels. They’re perfect to take on the plane as you’re heading off on safari (or just flying from Cleveland to Seattle, for that matter).

  Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide by Peter Allison is an awfully funny collection of essays about trying to herd human animals to safe viewing of herds of nonhuman animals. If this doesn’t make you want to sign up immediately for a trek with the A
ustralian-by-birth Allison, I don’t know what will.

  Bessie Head, born in South Africa of a white mother and black father (at a time when that was not only frowned upon, but patently illegal), moved to Botswana in 1964. One of her best-known novels is When Rain Clouds Gather. One librarian described it to me this way: “It’s about a community of exiles in Botswana as they try both to modernize (read, westernize) their way of farming while simultaneously holding on to their heritage.”

  BRAZIL

  In 1978, after he’s forced—due to failing health—to abandon his farm in Ecuador, Moritz Thomsen takes a journey through Brazil, making stops in Rio, Bahia, Recife, Natal, and Fortaleza, and ending with a longish sojourn on the Amazon River. I found his memoir of this trip, The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers, to be utterly enthralling. (Graham Greene once described travel as “the saddest pleasure.”) Originally published in 1990 and now, alas, long out of print, it is much more than the story of Thomsen’s trip: indeed, the trip becomes a metaphor for his life. The book is filled with quotable lines: “I have become,” he mourns, “that person who is of no interest to anyone and about whom no one will have the slightest curiosity. I have become to all intents and purposes invisible.” On his flight to Brazil he changes planes in Colombia, and, watching the sun set there, says,“For a few moments corrupt, chaotic Colombia shines as magically beautiful as paradise.” And he has a great comment about the whole tourist experience: “Famous sites seen by too many eyes are robbed little by little of their power to excite or dazzle; each pair of eyes has taken something away. Public things are diminished by lying helpless under the public gaze.” And this: “There is no way to live with the illusion of being made happy by the things that one owns, especially in a country like Ecuador where a comparative handful of people own everything, without developing an armor of blindness that makes one not only insensitive but contemptuous of the overwhelming poverty through which one moves.”

  I encountered Thomsen’s memoir right after I read Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, and was interested to find that Theroux wrote the introduction to Thomsen’s book, and, on their respective trips, both men read and reread the fiction of Joseph Conrad.

  As Thomsen says in his memoir, Brazilian literature is dominated by Jorge Amado (Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands are the best known) but Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy (made up of Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind) is a useful introduction to South American history and culture.

  And mystery fans can rejoice in reading Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s complex novels featuring Inspector Espinosa.Try Blackout or Alone in the Crowd.

  If you enjoy cerebral puzzlers, try Luis Fernando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, a short and brilliant novel about a murder that occurs at a convention of Edgar Allan Poe scholars in Buenos Aires. Jorge Luis Borges is a central character, which should give you a hint of what you’re in for here. I simply loved it.

  BURMESE DAYS

  This is the last section I wrote for Book Lust To Go, because it wasn’t until six weeks after the manuscript was done that I realized I had forgotten to include some wonderful books about the country. But I was torn about what to call the section. Any title would be a political statement. In the end, I went with the title above, rather than something like, for example, “Myanmar Musings.”

  Burmese Days is George Orwell’s more-than-somewhat autobiographical novel of a British ex-pat living in a fictional district in Burma in the 1920s, when the end of Empire was foreseen by smart Englishmen. Orwell worked for the Indian Imperial Police force for five years, beginning in 1922. (At that time Burma was considered a part of India.)

  When I discovered Emma Larkin’s fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, I was taken (as many have been, before me) by her description of Orwell’s more famous novels being a metaphor for most of twentieth-century Burmese history.To some Burmese, she tells us, Orwell is known as “the prophet.” Larkin goes on to say:In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and 1984.

  The book is a combination of biography and armchair travel, as Larkin visits all the places where Orwell lived and worked. I found it totally riveting and immensely well written.

  “Emma Larkin” is a pseudonym for an Asian-born, Burmese-speaking American journalist; and try as I might, I haven’t been able to uncover more about her (or him). Her newest book is Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma, about the devastation wreaked by cyclone Nargis in 2008 in the southwestern part of a country that was already politically devastated. If you’ve never heard about Nargis, don’t fault your news-reading skills: the 100,000 or so deaths and associated destruction were both under-reported and suppressed by the Burmese government.

  Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma’s Never-Ending War is a memoir of the author’s time spent working in Burma with a group fighting the country’s dictatorship. Hard-edged and gripping, it’s journalism at its best.

  Other required (by me, at least) nonfiction reading includes Justin Wintle’s Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Prisoner of Conscience, a sympathetic portrait of the courageous 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner who leads the resistance movement in Burma; Letters from Burma, a collection of Aung San Suu Kyi’s own writings from the six years she spent under house arrest beginning in 1989; and Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story.

  As for fiction, there are three novels too good to miss:

  Karen Connelly’s evocative The Lizard Cage was written before Burmese Lessons. It won the 2007 Orange Prize for New Writers and was one of the finalists for the Kiriyama Prize, which celebrates “literary voices of the Pacific Rim.”

  Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is a sweeping work of historical fiction that begins in 1885 and ends in the present day.The events of the novel occur primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India. Ghosh writes about the evils of colonialism better than almost anyone else I’ve ever read (except maybe Paul Scott), but you never feel hit over the head with his message or overloaded by facts and details. His writing is superb and the characters are unforgettable.

  The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason takes place at the same time Ghosh’s begins. It’s the story of Edgar Drake, who is sent to Burma to repair a grand piano that’s important to British colonial interests. Despite the event-filled plot, the main interest (and character) here is really the country itself. This is a great audio book for those of you who enjoy listening to well-read tales.

  CAMBODIA

  Cambodia suffered through years of political terror and repression—who can ever forget the phrase “the killing fields”? The books that follow certainly offer a testament to the human spirit, but do yourself a favor by taking a break with a funny or at least happy book in between reading these.

  Stunning use of language and an almost elliptical writing style mark Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, the story of a young Canadian girl who falls in love with a Cambodian studying in Montreal.When the borders to his country are opened, Serey returns to Phnom Penh to try to locate his family. And more than a decade later, Anne Greves travels to Cambodia to find him. Echlin shows us that Anne’s heart-break and loss are not just due to the large political events in the world, but also to decisions made for other, more personal reasons.

  Loung Ung’s two memoirs, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (life under Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s) and Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind (which tells of her return to Cambodia in 1995), are moving and honest; both read like novels, albeit sad ones.

  When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him offers another perspective on childhood during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. It’s a heartbreaking and unforgettable read.

  Dith Pran, the Cambodian photojournalist who was the subject
of the film The Killing Fields, compiled Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.

  Other nonfiction books set during that chilling period—from 1970 to 1975, when two million Cambodians were killed—that are almost certain to break your heart are The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields by Nic Dunlop, a Thailand-based, Irish photojournalist; François Bizot’s The Gate; and River of Time by British journalist John Swain.

  For a change of pace (and time period), try Norman Lewis’s A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, originally published in England in 1951.

  There isn’t a lot of great fiction about Cambodia (or at least I haven’t found much beyond Echlin’s book) and what’s out there is also not particularly aimed at making you feel better about the world, but two more of the best are Christopher J. Koch’s Highways to a War, about a photojournalist who disappears in Cambodia in 1976, and John Del Vecchio’s For the Sake of All Living Things, about a pair of siblings who choose different paths during the era of the Khmer Rouge.

  CANADA, O CANADA

  Because Miss Frances Whitehead, the children’s librarian at the Parkman Branch library in Detroit, was Canadian, I think I was inoculated with a love of Canadian writers. If the jacket of a book says that the author is Canadian, I’ll always pick it up and give it a try. Here are some you shouldn’t miss.

  If Bill Bryson is one of your favorite armchair travelers and story-tellers, then I’m pretty certain you’ll enjoy Will Ferguson’s Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada, because he writes about his native country with the same sort of affection (and occasional exasperation) as Bryson does. Ferguson describes not only the places he visits and the people he meets from Victoria to Newfoundland, but also includes tales of early explorers like Samuel Hearne, who, in 1770, walked from Prince of Wales Fort, on the shores of Hudson Bay, to the Arctic Ocean, and back again, a distance of some 5,600 kilometers, looking for the Northwest Passage and copper mines (and finding neither). Ferguson also describes his own experiences, such as watching polar bears from about as up close as anyone would want to get. Reading Ferguson’s often laugh-aloud essays, I was reminded of just how vast and varied our neighbor to the north is.