Book Lust to Go

by Nancy Pearl

  Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum along with Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast are probably the classics of this genre.

  Sailing the Pacific: A Voyage Across the Longest Stretch of Water on Earth, and a Journey into Its Past by Miles Hordern, who sailed there and back from New Zealand to Chile in his twenty-eight-foot sailboat

  Sea, Ice, and Rock: Sailing and Climbing Above the Arctic Circle by Chris Bonington and Robin Knox-Johnston gives you two adventures for the price of one.

  Sailing buffs won’t want to miss Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles by Adam Nicolson.

  Ten Hours Until Dawn: The True Story of Heroism and Tragedy Aboard the Can Do by Michael Tougias is a Perfect Storm read-alike, written well before Junger’s book.

  In The Water In Between: A Journey at Sea, Kevin Patterson—brokenhearted and inexperienced with sailboats—decides to escape his life by sailing from Vancouver to Tahiti. Luckily, he recruits a partner who is sailing savvy (and also brokenhearted).

  And for fiction, don’t miss the novels by Herman Melville (no need to give titles here, I suspect), Patrick O’Brien, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, and C. S. Forester. Others include Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, which is a wonderful novel sadly overshadowed by the—it cannot be denied—excellent film, and the novels of Sam Llewellyn, who is to sailing mysteries what Dick Francis is to horse-racing thrillers.

  SERIESOUSLY . . .

  Here are several series of books that are absolutely perfect for armchair (or, I suppose, real) travelers, almost no matter where you plan to go.

  Best Travel Writing (annual)

  Cities of the Imagination series (real cities, not imaginary ones, including Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and Venice, among others)

  Crown Journeys series (various and sundry authors discuss a city that they love)

  The Penguin Travel and Adventure series, which includes ninety-six books published between 1936 and 1959—they’re all easy to identify because of their cherry-pink covers. (They’re far easier to identify in theory than to actually find.)

  The Travelers’ Tales series

  The Vintage Departures series (I’ve never read one of these that I didn’t enjoy.)

  The WPA Guides (published in the ’30s and ’40s)

  SHELTERING IN THE SHETLANDS

  If you want peace and quiet, the Shetland Islands, located about a hundred miles off the northern tip of Scotland, would seem like a perfect destination. But wait—these sea-swept and sparsely populated islands turn out to be a primo place to set a mystery. In fact, the majority of books I’ve most enjoyed that are set in the Scottish Shetlands happen to be—you guessed it—mysteries.

  So wait for a rainy night and curl up with these—you won’t regret it.

  S. J. Bolton’s first novel, Sacrifice, is creepy and riveting, with a strong and appealing heroine. Bolton’s second, which I also enjoyed immensely (despite its own particular brand of creepiness), is Awakening, which takes place in a village in Dorset, England.

  Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet explores murder most foul, with detective Jimmy Perez investigating. It includes Raven Black, White Nights, Red Bones, and Blue Lightning.

  For fans of real-life mysteries, there’s also a chapter on the Shetland Islands in Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum: To Shetland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard in Search of the Lost Land of Thule (sometimes just subtitled In Search of the Lost Land of Thule) that explores just where (and what) the Greek explorer Pytheas, traveling in the fourth century B.C.E., actually was describing when he claimed he found a totally new land some six days (by sail) from Scotland.

  SIBERIAN CHILLS

  Books about Siberia are almost inevitably going to at least touch on its reputation as Stalin’s dumping ground for perceived political enemies and common criminals. But as you will see from the list that follows, each of the authors felt that there was much else to appreciate about the eastern portion of Russia.

  Colin Thubron’s In Siberia allows readers to accompany the author on his journey across this enormous and enormously mysterious land, from Mongolia to the Arctic Circle, via car, boat, train, bus, and on foot. He takes us to the town where Rasputin was born, the place where the Czar and his family were brutally murdered, and the old Russian prison camps in the Gulag, as well as to museums, private homes, old hotels, and schools. Reading it is a good way to understand Russia after the fall of communism.

  In With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, Sandra Kalniete recalls a life that encompassed growing up in Siberia as the daughter of political prisoners, being allowed at last to move back to Latvia, becoming Latvia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002, and then, in 2004, being appointed the first Latvian Commissioner of the European Union. It’s a memoir that makes everything seem possible.

  There’s a great section in Canadian Colin Angus’s Beyond the Horizon about experiencing Siberia by bicycle. I have to confess that when I first saw the cover, I thought I had somehow picked up the wrong book. It looked so much like a science fiction novel, and reading the small print on the jacket—“A gripping story of danger, betrayal, and triumph”—confirmed that suspicion. Then I stared at the cover a little longer, shook my head in wonder, opened the book and started reading, and discovered an amazing (true) story. Angus, an experienced outdoor adventurer, decided to do what no one had done before (although a bit of Googling revealed that two other men were attempting it as well): he was determined to circle the world using human power alone. Here’s how he describes the plan that he and his travel partner,Tim Harvey, came up with: We would start on bicycle, heading north from Vancouver to Fairbanks, Alaska, where the roads ended. We would continue by rowboat down the Yukon River and then 400 kilometers (250 miles) across the Bering Sea to Siberia. We would trek or ski 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) of subarctic steppe until we hit the far eastern limit of the European road system, which, again on bicycle, we would follow westward to Portugal. From there, we would row across the Atlantic Ocean to North American shores, and then cycle the final leg back to Vancouver. We hoped to complete the 42,000 kilometers (26,000 miles) in less than two years.

  Naturally, nothing went smoothly, from a kidney infection that required Angus to abandon the trip and fly home to Canada for surgery, to interpersonal issues that caused him to end his travels with Harvey, as well as financial difficulties, and, of course, weather at sea and on land. And the cover image turned out to be Angus, dressed for his Siberian trek.

  When she was in her seventies, Dervla Murphy forsook long bike journeys to take a slow train through Siberia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, which she describes in Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals. This was actually her second trip there; her first was recorded in Through Siberia by Accident.

  Other Siberian true tales include these: Benson Bobrick’s East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia (probably the best history you’ll find); Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia; Mark Jenkins’s Off the Map: Bicycling Across Siberia; George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia: An Incredible Account of Siberian Adventure, Travel, and Survival (originally written in the 1860s and still a breathtaking read); Nikolai Maslov’s Siberia (a graphic novel); Peter Matthiessen’s Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia (with photographs by Boyd Norton); Jeffrey Tayler’s River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia’s Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny; Peter Thomson’s Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (former NPR environmental reporter quits job and travels to the other side of the world); and Piers Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia.

  As for fiction, try these:

  Amy Bloom’s Away; Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead (obviously one of the less well-known novels by the great Russian writer but still necessary reading for fans); Clair Huffaker’s The Cowboy and the Cossack (if there is only one out of print book that should be reissued by some publisher, somewhere, it w
ould be this brilliant novel); Stuart Kaminsky’s A Cold Red Sunrise, Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, and People Who Walk in Darkness are novels of a long-running series featuring one-legged Russian policeman Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov—in these outings, the good cop is dispatched to Siberia to uncover some evil doings; James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love; Martin Cruz Smith’s Polar Star (one of the series that began with Gorky Park); and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

  SICILY

  If you are wondering where to spend a vacation, you will have no doubts as to the benefits of flying to Sicily immediately after reading Sicilian Odyssey by Francine Prose. She describes—in luminous prose—just how important the country was in myth, legend, and history. I hadn’t known, for example, that Daedalus, after watching his son Icarus fly too near the sun and thus have his wax wings melted, retired to Sicily to nurse his sorrow at the death of his son.

  Other nonfiction about Sicily includes Norman Lewis’s classic In Sicily;Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb; Matthew Fort’s Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons (a particularly good choice for foodies); and for travelers interested in the history of a region, Nancy Goldstone’s totally readable The Lady Queen:The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily.

  Probably the classic Sicilian novel is The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, although when it was first written in 1988, it was deemed unpublishable. Set in 1860, when the unification of Italy was underway, the novel is the story of an astronomer who watches the dissolution of his world with the emotional distance of a scientist charting the night sky.The translation by Archibald Colquhoun is splendid. One of the most quoted lines from the novel (which I’ve found applicable to all sorts of situations) is, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

  Other novels set in Sicily include Andrea Camilleri’s The Shape of Water, the first of a mystery series featuring Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano, each one marked by a series of eccentric characters and a tangible sense of the country (at my last count, there were ten novels in the series—the most recent is The Wings of the Sphinx); Leonardo Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea; Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal; and The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello Hornby. One of the most amusing novels set here is Sicilian Tragedee, a loose—on many levels—retelling of Romeo and Juliet by Ottavio Cappellani, with a fine colloquial translation by Frederika Randall.

  SO WE/I BOUGHT (OR BUILT) A HOUSE IN . . .

  I don’t know anyone who at one time or another hasn’t dreamed of chucking it all: leaving, say, Ithaca, Tulsa, Ann Arbor, or Bozeman; and making a new life, with a new house, in, for example, rural France, Italy, England, Ireland, Spain, or Greece. Or acquiring a yurt in a small but charming Tibetan village. It doesn’t really matter where as long as it’s Away. And anywhere that you might want to hang your hat, there’s a good chance someone has already been there, done that, and met all the quirky neighbors.

  So if you’re dreaming about decamping and relocating, try these:It seems as though many people who visit Morocco end up falling in love with it and moving there. Australian Suzanna Clarke and her husband bought a riad (a traditional Moroccan house, with a garden in the middle) in Fez (aka Fes-el-Bali), a walled medieval city. The city itself is much less touristy than Rabat, Tangier, or Marrakesh, and for ecotourists it’s totally car free. It’s hard not to want to duplicate the Clarkes’ experiences by uprooting yourself and moving as close to them as possible; you can get reasonably close by reading A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco.

  Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel

  Judy Corbett’s Castles in the Air: The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists and a Crumbling Old Mansion

  Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden’s A Castle in the Backyard: The Dream of a House in France (the Perígord, in the Dordogne valley in Southwest France)

  Sally Gable’s Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House (What’s it like to live in a villa designed by famed Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio? Gable tells all. Or nearly.)

  Barry Golson’s Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico (The title precludes any annotation I might make.)

  Martin Kirby’s No Going Back: Journey to Mother’s Garden tells the story of his family (him, his wife, and two very small kids) moving from England to a farmhouse in Northern Spain.

  Binka Le Breton’s Where the Road Ends: A Home in the Brazilian Rainforest describes how she and her husband left their successful lives in Washington, D.C., to move to South America and embrace a new dream.

  Beverley Nichols’s Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn are only three of his charming books about redoing the house and gardens of several different homes in the British countryside.

  Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House describes the house his family bought in Morocco, which happened to have a most distinguished history (although it was, in the style of the genre, not in great shape when they bought it).

  Niall Williams and Christine Breen’s O Come Ye Back to Ireland (followed by When Summer’s in the Meadow and The Pipes Are Calling) depicts life in County Clare.

  SOJOURNS IN SOUTH ASIA

  It may not be politically astute (or correct) to link India and Pakistan in one category, but I’m counting on readers to forgive me for doing so.

  For a readable yet authoritative account of the founding of Pakistan and its terrible aftermath, read Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan.

  Probably the most popular book in the last decade about this area is Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time. The sequel, equally worth your attention, is Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  India

  The Opium Wars of the 1830s are the backdrop for Amitav Ghosh’s vivid and moving Sea of Poppies, which is filled with three-dimensional characters (including Calcutta); it manages the novelistic feat of showing the depredations of colonialism without coming right out and saying it.

  Justine Hardy’s In the Valley of Mist: Kashmir: One Family in a Changing World takes place against a backdrop of Calcutta and a sea voyage.

  John Keay’s The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named is dramatic indeed.

  Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir

  Norman Lewis’s A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India was published in 1991, but still opens the country up to readers.

  Octavio Paz’s In Light of India is a wide-ranging collection of essays based on Paz’s years spent with the Mexican Embassy there.

  Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is a memoir of growing up in 1980s Kashmir, and an inside look at the war between India and Pakistan and Hindus and Muslims that raged throughout the 1990s.

  Condé Nast Traveler named Ilija Trojanow’s Along the Ganges as one of the all-time top travel books; you’ll understand why when you read it. I felt as though I were there with the author as he makes his way down India’s greatest river.

  Indian fiction includes Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant—the first book in a series featuring Vish Puri, “India’s Most Private Investigator”—and the second book, The Man Who Died Laughing; Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (winner of the Man Booker Prize) and his collection of stories called Between the Assassinations;Six Suspects, a most unusual mystery byVikas Swarup (author of Slumdog Millionaire, which was made into an Oscar-winning film);Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games; Jaspreet Singh’s debut novel, Chef.

  Pakistan

  Azhar Abidi’s The House of Bilqis

  Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan

  Michael Gruber’s The Good Son, a riveting thriller

  Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exp
loding Mangoes offers a frenetic, frantic, satirical (and fictional) examination of a momentous event in Pakistani history (the violent death of Pakistan’s leader, General Zia, and several of his closest associates in 1988).

  Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders showcases the talent of one of Pakistan’s leading young writers.

  Nicholas Schmidle’s To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan is a journalist’s account of his stay in this frightening and beautiful country.

  Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker is a coming-of-age novel set in Lahore in the 1990s.

  Kamila Shamsie’s novels Kartography and Burnt Shadows

  SOUTH AFRICA

  For some reason that I can’t quite explain, South Africa has always fascinated me. It might be because one of the first “grown-up” books I remember taking off my parents’ bookshelves was Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton’s classic novel set in Johannesburg in the 1940s. It was the first book I read that explored the life of black South Africans (though Paton himself was white). I’ve always felt that it’s one of those books that everyone ought to read, and certainly it’s a great choice for book groups.

  I’ve never lost my interest in South Africa and its painful history, and I am always eager to see how contemporary writers deal with the many scars of its past. So here are some other excellent selections—fiction and nonfiction, thrillers and literary novels—in which South Africa and/or its history comes to vivid life.

  Fiction

  Malla Nunn’s moving A Beautiful Place to Die introduces Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, who returns to South Africa in 1952 following his service in World War II and has to negotiate the racial laws, the Special Branch of the police, and his own memories in trying to solve the murder of an Afrikaner police officer.