Book Lust to Go
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Paul Theroux is a connoisseur of long train rides as well. Many of his books are about train travel—the various trains he’s taken, the people he’s met along the way, and the experiences that ensued. My favorite is The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia, but others include The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas; Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China; and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar, which retraces his 1975 journey.
Andrew Eames’s The 8:55 to Baghdad not only describes his 2002 train journey from London to Iraq, but also offers a look back at the life of mystery writer Agatha Christie, who took the Orient Express on the same three-thousand-mile journey in 1928. (Fans of Christie’s book Murder on the Orient Express will find much to explain its genesis here.) Eames is a delightful travel companion—well read, personable, able to remain calm in the face of calamity, and willing to overlook rude behavior and bad food. He revels, as all real travelers seem to, in good company and interesting scenery.
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is a winsome novel about a young boy traveling from Wyoming to Washington, D.C., by himself, by train. (There’s a bit more about the book in the section “WY Ever Not?”)
Other books that will make you seek out any long-distance train journey still available include these:Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
Henry Kisor’s Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America
Terry Pindell’s Yesterday’s Train: A Rail Odyssey Through Mexican History; Making Tracks: An American Rail Odyssey; and Last Train to Toronto: A Canadian Rail Odyssey
William T.Vollmann’s Riding Toward Everywhere
And, of course, the following classic crime novels:Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and The Mystery of the Blue Train, and Graham Greene’s Orient Express
MALAYSIA
Just to offer a little background: Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Thailand is to its north, the South China Sea is to its east, and the Strait of Malacca is to its west, with the separate country of Singapore at Malaysia’s very southern tip. It’s composed of thirteen states: Johore, Kedah, Kelantan, Melaka (formerly Malacca), Negeri Sembilan, Pahang, Penang, Perak, Perlis, Sabah, Sarawak, Selangor, and Terengganu. Its capital city, Kuala Lumpur, and the island of Labuan are separate federal territories. Malaysia was established in September 1963.Whew.
It’s always good to get in at the beginning of the series, especially if it’s as promising as Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder.Traveling from his home in Singapore to KL (as Kuala Lumpur is called by those in the know) Singh must try to extricate a former model from death row for the murder of her ex-husband—a crime he’s sure she didn’t commit, although all the signs point to her guilt and the Malaysian police aren’t budging in their belief that their case against her is airtight.
The cartoonist (or graphic novelist) Lat is beloved in his native Malaysia. Some of his books are finally becoming available here. I read the first one, Kampung Boy, which is the story of his early years, and—surprisingly—I think I learned more about the country and its people from this graphic memoir than from almost anything else that I’ve read about the country.
Other books with a Malaysian setting include Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Joss and Gold and Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands; as well as The Consul’s File by Paul Theroux, a series of connected short stories that take place in the 1970s.
MARTHA’S VINEYARD
Martha’s Vineyard is an island in Massachusetts off of Cape Cod. It’s studded by the summer homes of many famous people, including the Kennedys. I’ve never been but am quite open to invitations to visit!
David Kinney’s lively The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish is an in-depth account of the annual thirty-five-day Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, a contest that takes place after the summer tourists have gone home; it pits teenagers against recovering alcoholics against hedge fund managers and charter boat captains out for a (long) busman’s holiday.
Jill Nelson’s Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island explores one of the most interesting aspects of that bucolic place: for centuries African Americans have lived there, in their own enclaves, either for a summer getaway or year round. In addition to her own memories of the importance of Oak Bluffs in her life, Nelson includes reminiscences from author and law professor Stephen Carter, film director Spike Lee, novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, and others.
In On the Vineyard: A Year in the Life of an Island, Jane Carpineto describes the varied people and places she encounters during her sojourn there.
Birders will both adore and mourn over the changes that have occurred since E. Vernon Laux wrote Bird News: Vagrants and Visitors on a Peculiar Island a relatively short eleven years ago, in 1999. It’s enough to make you want to travel back in time . . .
Philip R. Craig wrote nineteen mysteries set on Martha’s Vineyard, beginning with 1991’s A Beautiful Place to Die. His detective is Vietnam veteran, former cop, chef, and fisherman Jeff Jackson.
Other novels set on Martha’s Vineyard include Anne Rivers Siddons’s Up Island; Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman; and Dorothy West’s The Wedding, which is set among an African American community much like the one Jill Nelson describes. (Indeed, West is one of the writers who contributed to Nelson’s book.)
A MENTION OF THE MIDDLE EAST
As we all know from our newspaper reading, tensions in the Middle East seem never-ending. The history of the region is complex, emotions run high, and even choosing particular words when writing about the area is fraught with ambiguities.There are a great many titles to choose from, so without regard to fear or favor, I offer a list of books that are all certain to broaden your knowledge, increase your understanding of this part of the world, and be enjoyable (if sometimes uncomfortable) reads.
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin: A Novel
Rich Cohen’s illuminating and provocative Israel Is Real gave me much to think about.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s O Jerusalem!: Day by Day and Minute by Minute: The Historic Struggle for Jerusalem and the Birth of Israel
Alexandra Hobbet’s Small Kingdoms gives us a detailed and intimate word picture of the life of a Kuwaiti family in the period between the two Gulf Wars.
David Ignatius’s Agents of Innocence (spy novel aficionados should definitely seek it out)
Jim Krane’s City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism
Maliha Masood’s Zaatar Days, Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations Across the Middle East
Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness gives a gorgeous account of his life and that of his parents, who came to Palestine from Lithuania in the 1930s.
Hugh Pope’s Dining with Al-Qaeda is a culmination of all that he’s learned and experienced during thirty years of travel throughout the Middle East, beginning in 1980 when he went there to set up a news bureau for Reuters.
Matt Rees’s mysteries featuring Bethlehem detective Omar Yussef include The Bethlehem Murders, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, The Fourth Assassin, and The Samaritan’s Secret.
Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine are graphic accounts of two controversial incidents.
Jennifer Steil’s The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen
MESSING AROUND ON MALTA
This ancient archipelago located in the Mediterranean is one of Europe’s smallest and most densely populated countries. Here are some perfect novels to read before you visit the gorgeous, mythical islands:Caroline Harvey’s The Brass Dolphin (Harvey is the pseudonym of novelist Joanna Trollope)
Mark Mills’s The Information Officer
Nicholas Rinaldi’s The Jukebox Queen of Malta
Tim Willocks’s The Religion
MIAMI AND ENVIRONS
&
nbsp; Gerald Posner’s Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth, and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach describes the city that Posner calls “the last frontier, both utopia and dystopia.”
Mystery aficionados will appreciate these:
Award-winning journalist Edna Buchanan made a foray into crime fiction with her series starring Britt Montero, the Cuban American journalist who was introduced in Contents Under Pressure (if you enjoy that, there are many more available); Charles Willeford created an unlikely hero in Hoke Moseley, a Miami cop who first appeared in Miami Blues (he followed that up with other cases; another good one is The Way We Die Now); the Lupe Solano mysteries by Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, about a Cuban American detective who’s dealing with mayhem and murder in the heart of the city; and James Grippando’s Jack Swyteck thrillers, which are excellent choices for those who want adrenaline-fueled page-turners. Start with any of them, but I especially liked When Darkness Falls.
And check out these other works of fiction:
Never Through Miami by Roberto Quesada (detailing the immigrant experience); on a much more humorous note, Robert Kimmel Smith’s Sadie Shapiro in Miami (it follows Sadie Shapiro’s Knitting Book but takes the septuagenarian and her husband to the sunny south); Stanley Elkin’s literary novel Mrs. Ted Bliss (in which I ran across the wonderful phrase “schmutz-dread”— Mrs. Bliss dislikes schmutz intensely); Helen Yglesias’s The Girls; and Ana Veciana-Suarez’s The Chin Kiss King.
Nonfiction about the area abounds as well:
Journalist Ann Louise Bardach’s Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana (detailing the complicated relationship between the two cities); Joan Didion’s Miami (it has the same gorgeous writing as all her other books); Edna Buchanan’s The Corpse Had a Familiar Face; Joann Biondi’s Miami Beach Memories: A Nostalgic Chronicle of Days Gone By; We Own This Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football by Robert Andrew Powell (ever wonder why the Florida college teams are so consistently ranked at the top of the charts? This book helps answer why that’s so.); Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean by Florida native Les Standiford, who also wrote a bunch of suspense novels about Miami contractor John Deal; and Ann Armbruster’s The Life and Times of Miami Beach.
NAPLES
As a child, one of the most traumatic events of my reading life was discovering a book in the library about the death of a boy and his dog as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 B.C.E. It may have been based on Louis Untermeyer’s short story “The Dog of Pompeii,” but since I was too traumatized to have ever gone back to look for or at it, I can’t be sure. In any case, the idea of nature going ballistic (to mix a metaphor) and burying two towns beneath tons of ash has remained in a not-so-little corner of my mind. Not to mention all the other bits of information regarding the event that have seeped into my consciousness since—one being that Pliny the Elder refused to leave the area, as he was determined to garner every bit of scientific information that he could from the impending disaster. He died there. Which is all to explain why I—deliberately or unconsciously—have simply avoided reading books set in that part of Italy.
Avoided, that is, until I discovered prize-winning Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard (don’t miss her novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire). She fell in love with Naples, Italy, when she first arrived there in 1956 to work for the United Nations, at a time when the city was still marked by the bombings it took during World War II. Despite the time Hazzard spent in cities great and small around the world, Naples retained its central place in her heart. She wrote about it often; these brief essays are collected in a lovely little book, The Ancient Shore. The book also includes a long essay written for The New Yorker by her husband, scholar and writer Francis Steegmuller, about a traumatic occurrence in Naples that well describes both the best and worst of this chaotic and beautiful city situated in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
In Robert Harris’s Pompeii, set in the days leading up to the volcano’s great eruption, the author mixes heart-stopping suspense with fascinating tidbits of information about first-century life in the Roman Empire, with the result that this novel should please those looking for a classic thriller as well as fans of historical fiction.
Other grand novels set in Naples include these:
Shirley Hazzard’s early and most likely autobiographical novel The Bay of Noon is about a young woman coming to Naples to start a new life but finding it difficult to rid herself of the old one. It was originally published in 1970 but reissued in 2003.
Not only is Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (of which Naples was once a part), in love with volcanoes, he also falls rather desperately in love with, and marries, the beautiful Emma Lyon, his nephew’s mistress, who in turn falls in love (desperately) with Lord Horatio Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero. I’m exhausted just describing the plot. The Volcano Lover is historical romance for intellectuals, as you would no doubt expect from its author, iconic intellectual Susan Sontag.
NEBRASKA: THE BIG EMPTY
Except for the Cornhuskers football team, whom I loyally despised all the time I lived in Oklahoma, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, I never thought much about the state until I started reading some really wonderful books—both fiction and nonfiction—about it. And here they are.
Pamela Carter Joern’s writes exquisite works of fiction, including The Plain Sense of Things and The Floor of the Sky.
Ron Hansen’s Nebraska: Stories are terrific examples of a writer who can’t seem to write a bad sentence—not that I’d ever want him to, of course. The subjects here range from the past to the present, and each is worth a slow, intent reading.
Tom McNeal’s first novel, Goodnight, Nebraska, tells the story of a young man trying to find himself in a world that’s not often forgiving.
Ladette Randolph and Nina Shevchuk-Murray edited The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers, a collection of essays (and some excerpts) that offers a diverse look at people’s lives in the state at various times and under various conditions. Writers include both the well known (Ted Kooser and Ron Hansen) and those unfamiliar to most readers (Michael Anania, Delphine Red Shirt, and William Kloefkorn).
Polly Spence’s Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman’s Life is an amazingly unsentimental memoir of growing up in a small Nebraska town.
Roger Welsch’s My Nebraska: The Good, the Bad, and the Husker is a humorous love letter to his home state.
Other books set in Nebraska, or by Nebraska authors, include Stephanie Kallos’s lovely Sing Them Home, which takes place in a small Welsh community there; Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant; Jim Harrison’s Dalva and The Road Home, which continues the tale (once you meet Dalva, it’s nearly impossible to forget her—she’s that fully formed as a character. I still think these are Harrison’s best books.); George Shaffner’s In the Land of Second Chances (and all his other novels set in Ebb, Nebraska); The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (one of the author’s most brilliant and thought-provoking novels); and Timothy Schaffert’s Devils in the Sugar Shop (funny, raunchy, set in Omaha, and peopled by the participants in an erotic writing workshop).
NEW GUINEA
According to Wikipedia, New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world; it’s separated from Australia by the Torres Strait.Approximately half the island is the independent country of Papua New Guinea, while the other half is part of Indonesia. From my reading I can tell that it’s a place of great beauty (if you like jungles) and danger. For a goodly dash of both, take a look at these books.
James Campbell’s The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea—The Forgotten War of the South Pacific is a terrific account of a battle in World War II that is pretty much unremembered.
Tim Flannery’s Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea makes for wonderful readin
g and totally lives up to the charm of the title.
Samantha Gillison’s first two novels, The Undiscovered Country and The King of America
Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea
Kira Salak’s Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea and her novel The White Mary
Tobias Schneebaum’s Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea
David Yeadon’s Lost Worlds: Exploring the Earth’s Remote Places has a fascinating chapter on the island.
NEW YORK CITY: A TASTE OF THE BIG APPLE
There are, of course, a ton and more books about Manhattan and the other four boroughs. Here are a few that I’ve really enjoyed.
Joseph Berger’s The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York
Well-known mystery novelist and short story writer Lawrence Block edited Manhattan Noir and Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics. He’s faultless in his selections.
Mary Cantwell’s must-read memoir Manhattan, When I Was Young
Stephen Carter’s Palace Council offers readers a view of Harlem that we seldom encounter in the pages of a novel. (You can watch my interview with Carter at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030901.)
Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City includes four of the cartoonist’s graphic books: New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People
Pete Hamill’s Downtown: My Manhattan
Mark Helprin’s great novel, Winter’s Tale