Book Lust to Go

by Nancy Pearl

  Other courageous rowers have written about their trips in these enjoyable and sometimes heart-stopping accounts:

  Both Challenging the Pacific: The First Woman to Row the Kon-Tiki Route and Across the Savage Sea: The First Woman to Row Across the North Atlantic by Maud Fontenoy are well worth your reading time.

  Jill Fredston’s accounts of her and her husband’s self-propelled journeys to some of the most remote places they could find are well told in Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge. (When they’re not rowing, Jill and her husband, Doug Fesler, research avalanches and train rescuers. Their experiences doing that would make another great book.)

  Between them, Colin and Julie Angus have written several books about their rowing experiences, both together and apart, including these two: Rowed Trip: From Scotland to Syria by Oar, which describes their trips to countries far and near, including an effort to rediscover their ancestral homes; and an account of Julie’s unaccompanied adventure, Rowboat in a Hurricane: My Amazing Journey Across a Changing Atlantic Ocean.

  In Roz Savage’s Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean, she writes about her experience as the only solo female contestant in the 2005 Atlantic Rowing Race, which she entered despite having little previous rowing experience. Here’s one of the best lines—or a least one that shows she maintained her sense of humor despite the pain and the dangers that beset her: “I loved the solitude, the wildness, the beauty. But the ocean and I would have got along better if she would stop trying to get in the boat with me.”

  I really enjoyed Rosemary Mahoney’s Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff both because of her writing style and the varied characters that she describes.

  An older title that is still great fun (partly because it’s filled with references to children’s books like Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows , and Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, especially The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle) is A. J. Mackinnon’s The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea. (I learned, through reading this book, that a “mirror” is a small, unimpressive in appearance, but hard-working and dependable dinghy/sailboat.)

  THE SAHARA: SAND BETWEEN YOUR TOES

  Before you start any of these books, I’d suggest that you have a big glass of water close at hand—otherwise your thirst might quickly get unbearable. I included Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle’s Sahara: A Natural History in Book Lust, but it does such a fabulous job of bringing the place alive—making the desert bloom—that I felt I needed to include it here, too. You’ll discover more than you ever probably imagined about the history, geography, legends, lore, and people of the great African desert, which was called “The Endless Emptiness” and “The Great Nothing” by early explorers.

  In a way, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert by William Langewiesche updates the de Villiers book—there’s more about contemporary travel (by roads and cars rather than by camels, for example) than the past. As always, Langewiesche’s writing is clear, concise, and a pleasure to read.

  The classic novel exploring the lure of the desert is Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, about three young ex-pats who slip past the veneer of civilization and are forced to see themselves in the light of a pitiless desert sun.

  Who would have thought that Monty Python co-founder Michael Palin could write a book about traveling through the Sahara Desert that is not only funny but also insightful? It’s true: take a look at his book Sahara.

  My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou . . . An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara by Jeroen van Bergeijk (and translated into English by John Antonides) surely wins the prize for best title in this section. Plus, this story of a three-month journey along the Trans-Sahara Highway is a delightful read. (Though it would be so cool to live in a place named Ouagadougou, I’m pretty sure a move there is not in my future.)

  Three other titles about the Sahara that I’ve enjoyed are:

  Fergus Fleming’s The Sword and the Cross is the story of Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine, Frenchmen who helped their country advance its dreams of expanding its colonial holdings into North Africa.

  And Jeffrey Tayler’s Glory in a Camel’s Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara (the paperback edition has a different subtitle: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert) and Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel. The latter is a thoughtful description of his (sometimes torturous) travel through the Sahel—the countries that border the Sahara desert, including Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Mali. His prose is fluent, his descriptions are powerful, and his accounts of the people he meets—both Muslim and not—are especially meaningful in our post-9/11 world.

  SAINT PETERSBURG/ LENINGRAD/SAINT PETERSBURG

  Leningrad, which returned to its traditional, pre-communist name of Saint Petersburg in 1991, underwent a terrible siege during World War II. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Germans and the Axis powers to bring Russia and its allies to their collective knees by starving out the residents of Leningrad in the fall and winter of 1941-42. Unsuccessful it might have been, but it was hell on earth for the people living in the starving city. Here are four books—three novels and the authoritative history—on the event, plus a new translation of a classic.

  In Debra Dean’s first novel The Madonnas of Leningrad, Marina works as a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum, where the staff, fearing the onslaught of German troops, begins to dismantle the museum by taking down the paintings but leaving their frames hanging.To hold onto her sanity while her life is almost quite literally deconstructing around her, Marina memorizes the holdings of the museum, room by remarkable room, to create her own personal “memory palace.” It’s to these memories that Marina returns as her grip on the present becomes ever more tenuous. After finishing the book I felt as though I’d had a long visit to the Hermitage, wandering through its unrivalled collection.

  Leningrad during the siege may seem to be a strange setting for a novel that is best described as a lively, good-hearted buddy tale, but there it is, and if you enjoy the élan of movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, here’s the novelistic equivalent. (When I told a friend how much I enjoyed reading David Benioff’s City of Thieves, he replied that he bet there was already a screen-play of it in the hands of the young actor Shia LaBoeuf. I can but hope that it’s true, because it would make a most enjoyable film.) The novel begins with a visit between the author and his grandfather. David Benioff presses his elderly relative for information about what happened to him during the siege; what follows the first chapter is his grandfather’s tale. But there’s a catch. How reliable is the older man’s story? When David tries to get answers to some of his specific questions, his grandfather tells him that since he’s a writer, he should just make it up. So how much is truth and how much fiction? Maybe ultimately it doesn’t matter.

  The Siege, Helen Dunmore’s sharply observed and painful story of a love affair set against the devastation wrought by the German advance on the city, is one of those unforgettable novels that knocks your socks off with its gorgeous writing.

  Harrison Salisbury’s comprehensive but very readable nonfiction account, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, will tell you all you ever wanted to know—and perhaps more—about its subject. Despite its age (it was published in 1985) it remains a valuable read.

  As for getting a sense of the city before World War II, try the glorious new translation of Anna Karenina by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is set in both nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  I am so happy that Chicago Review Press has begun reissuing Gwen Bristow’s historical romances. They’re just as good as I remember them being, back when I first read them eons ago. Calico Palace takes place in San Francisco in 1848, just before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the south fork of the American R
iver. The portrait of the city in its infancy is three-dimensional; the lives of the characters animate the various social classes and occupations in this city of only nine hundred (white) residents.

  One of the major events in San Francisco history is, of course, the great earthquake of 1906, and one of the best—if not the best—books about it is Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.

  John Miller edited San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City, an anthology that includes essays, poetry, and excerpts from longer works. Contributors include a wide range of names, from Jack Kerouac to Amy Tan to Randy Shilts, and very many different aspects of the city are covered. It’s a grand introduction.

  Randy Shilts wrote The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, which incorporates local history and politics, the biography of Milk, and an overview of the gay community in the 1940s and ’50s. (If you enjoyed the movie Milk, you’ll like the book a lot.) This was Shilts’s first book; it’s probably not quite as well known as his And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Shilts was a wonderful writer, and died much too young.

  One of Laurie R. King’s two mystery series takes place in San Francisco. Kate Martinelli is a San Francisco detective, and her cases range from investigating the death of a Sherlock Holmes fan to that of a homeless man. The first is A Grave Talent.

  Gus Lee’s China Boy is a great coming-of-age novel set in 1950s San Francisco.

  And don’t miss out on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. These you will want to read in order, so begin with Tales of the City and then go on to More Tales of the City.

  SCENES FROM SRI LANKA

  Michael Ondaatje called Sri Lanka “that pendant off the ear of India,” and here are some excellent books about the country for your reading pleasure. Adele Barker’s Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka describes the author’s Fulbright year teaching at the University of Peradeniya.

  Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Mark Stephen Meadows gives you a good sense of a beautiful country that has been wracked by thirty years of a complex civil war.

  In When Memory Dies by A. Sivanandan, three generations of a Sri Lankan family try to make sense of not only their personal relationships, but also what is happening to their country as it devolves into a tripartite, seemingly endless war.

  Pradeep Jeganathan’s At the Water’s Edge is a finely written collection of loosely linked stories that evoke the larger issues facing Sri Lanka through the everyday activities of the characters, who must navigate through a difficult present into an uncertain future.

  The main character in Roma Tearne’s Mosquito is Theo Samarajeeva, a writer who returns to his home in Colombo after the death of his wife and learns that even love can be a victim of war.

  I’ve always loved the fiction of Romesh Gunesekera, so it’ll probably come as no surprise that I just adored his fourth (and newest, as I am writing this) novel, The Match, which ranges over three different countries (England, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines) and thirty years. And while there aren’t a lot of novels in which cricket plays a major role, this one begins and ends with a cricket match.

  And don’t forget these: Anil’s Ghost, which is perhaps Michael Ondaatje’s finest novel, and Arundhati Roy’s simply glorious novel The God of Small Things.

  SCOTLAND: MORE THAN HAGGIS, KILTS, AND IAN RANKIN

  I think it was the Ian Rankin police procedural series that made readers familiar with Edinburgh. (Or at least familiar with a particular aspect of the city—grittiness and crime.) If you’ve never read Rankin and want to begin at the beginning, you’ll have to find 1987’s Knots and Crosses, which introduced Detective Inspector John Rebus to a soon-to-be adoring public. I’m not convinced they need to be read in order (though many would disagree) and I found Black and Blue to be an outstanding entry in the series. All of Rankin’s novels have complex plots, deal with contemporary issues, and are marked by the sort of crackling dialogue that keeps you hungry for more books by him. But you have to like grit....

  What a fabulous twenty-first birthday present: Adam Nicolson’s father gave him some six hundred acres of land on islands in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. And now Nicolson gives us an in-depth view of his possessions in Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides.

  David Yeadon also writes winningly on the same locale in Seasons on Harris: A Year in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

  Reading An Innocent in Scotland: More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters by David W. McFadden (he also wrote An Innocent in Ireland) will most definitely bring at least a smile to your face, if not a full-blown laugh. This is travel entertainment at its best.

  History fans and lovers of all things Scots will most definitely want to read Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, describing the eighty-three-day trip they took together in 1773.

  Call me silly or uneducated or both, but I never realized that Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotsman until I read Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons:The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. In spite of the fact that after a recent trip down the Oregon coast I came to the conclusion that if you’ve seen one lighthouse you’ve seen them all, I found Bathurst’s account of this eccentric, swashbuckling family totally interesting.

  You can’t take a trip to Scotland without knowing something about the most famous woman in Scottish history. Here are two excellent books about her, the first nonfiction and the second fiction: Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots (any of Fraser’s biographies are worth reading) and Margaret George’s Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (any of the fictional biographies and autobiographies by George are also worth reading).

  To get a sense of the wide range of Scottish fiction over the years, try these: Rob Roy (and others) by Sir Walter Scott (of course); Denise Mina’s Glasgow-based crime novels, such as Slip of the Knife (be forewarned: they’re dark); Val McDermid’s A Darker Domain, in which Cold Case Review Team Inspector Karen Pirie deals with two seemingly unrelated cases from the 1980s; Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers; A Scots Quair, a trilogy by Lewis Grassic Gibbon that includes Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite; The Citadel by A. J. Cronin; Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room; Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (not an easy book to read, because it takes a while to get used to the way Welsh adapts language, but many people believe it’s the most important Scottish novel of the twentieth century); Alexander McCall Smith’s two entertaining series set in Scotland, the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries (the first is The Sunday Philosophy Club) and the Scotland Street novels (the first is 44 Scotland Street); Sara Maitland’s Ancestral Truths, which mostly takes place in Scotland, although an important part is set in Zimbabwe; and Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Hotel World.

  I haven’t listed any of the many romance novels that take place in Scotland because there’s a whole book waiting to be written (but not by me) about stories of those hunky men, their kilts, and the women who love them. Let one name suffice for all: Diana Gabaldon. But if there’s a particular romance writer you adore, the chances are good that one or more of his or her books take place in Scotland. Ask your local librarian for help in finding them.

  SEE THE SEA

  I hope that I read this in a book and it didn’t really happen to me, but I fear it did. I should say at once that I have never understood what to do in a sailboat when the wind picks up, despite having it explained to me numerous times. When I was in college, one of my earliest experiences sailing was on the Severn River, and in very short order everything went wrong: big wind, boat capsizing, mast breaking. That’s the part I remember (or think I remember), but I have no memory of what came next, although I clearly lived to tell the tale. Not everyone is so lucky. Here are some books about sailors whose grasp of the fundamentals is much better than mine .
. . and many of whose outcomes were far worse.

  Always a Distant Anchorage by Hal Roth is the perfect choice for those who dream of one big voyage under sail.

  At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane and Flirting with Mermaids, both by John Kretschmer

  Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat by David Mercy (not a pleasure trip)

  Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

  Fair Wind and Plenty of It: A Modern-Day Tall Ship Adventure by Rigel Crockett is the tale of the crew and passengers of the Picton Castle, a threemasted tall ship, and its eighteen-month voyage around the world. It’s the story of two obsessions: that of the Nova Scotia-born author who grew up in a sailboat-fixated family, and of Captain Dan Moreland, who turned an almost seventy-year-old North Sea trawler into a tall ship in order to emulate the great sailing captains of the past.

  Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing by John Rousmaniere

  In The Greatest Sailing Stories Ever Told: Twenty-Seven Unforgettable Stories, edited by Christopher Caswell, you’ll find familiar and unfamiliar names and tales.

  Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi

  Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World’s Largest Ocean by Sharon Sites Adams with Karen Coates