by Nancy Pearl
Among newer titles, I very much enjoyed The Blue Manuscript, in which the author, Sabiha Al Khemir, weaves together the past and present as she portrays the history of a manuscript—from the scribe who produced it, to the archaeologists determined to locate it, to the collectors who covet it.
ENTERING ENGLAND
There were four sections in Book Lust To Go that I kept putting off writing until the last possible moment because they seemed so daunting to me. There is so much material to include on England (with or without including London), India, New York (city and state), and the Middle East that I remained unable to choose what to include until the manuscript-delivery deadline was edging dangerously close. And there were so many titles to choose from! I had to pick what I included very carefully indeed.
I discovered The Intelligent Traveller’s Guide to Historic Britain: England, Wales, the Crown Dependencies by Phillip Axtell Crowl after I talked about armchair travel on the radio. Here’s what a listener emailed me:Yes, the title sounds a bit pretentious, but I have found it to be a great guidebook for finding all the little places that you would never find on your own, or even know to look for. The book presents its material in two formats, by its place on the map and its place in history. My travels around Britain tend to be fairly free form, so I tend to go by location. If I am going from point A to point B, I can look at the book to see what I might find along the way. My discoveries have included ancient Celtic burial grounds and Roman baths. You almost need an Ordnance Survey map to find some of the places. The good spots tend to be down some narrow back road with a path through some farmer’s field to get there. They don’t make it on the standard AA maps.
When I tracked it down (it’s out of print but is relatively easy to find used, or perhaps at your local library—it wasn’t available at mine) I saw exactly what my correspondent meant. Crowl also wrote books on historic Ireland and historic Scotland.
I loved Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century. Any history fan should also enjoy this unique way of animating the past. Even though when I finished the book I couldn’t honestly say that I wished I lived in the fourteenth century (I value my Dial soap and iPhone a bit too much), I did wish I could pop back in time for a brief but enlightening visit.
A. A. Gill is a Scots-born columnist for the London Sunday Times. In The Angry Island: Hunting the English his essays are filled with biting, sometimes snarky commentary about the morals and mores of England.
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd is required reading for any traveler to England’s capitol. But be forewarned: it’s a hefty tome. On the plus side (an enormous plus) is Ackroyd’s entirely engaging writing—there’s nary a dull page or anecdote. Among Ackroyd’s other books of useful fiction or nonfiction for the Britain-bound traveler are Thames: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.
Some other excellent nonfiction titles include The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life by Virginia Woolf (the cover alone is worth the book’s price); The Coast Road: A 3,000 Mile Journey Round the Edge of England by award-winning travel writer Paul Gogarty; Mustn’t Grumble by Joe Bennett (native New Zealander wanders his adopted country); and An Audience with an Elephant: And Other Encounters on the Eccentric Side by Byron Rogers, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and Guardian papers—perfect for already-committed Anglophiles.
The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting by Adrian Tinniswood is an outstanding work of social history, made even better by the illustrations. After reading it I felt quite comfortable that I would know exactly how to behave should I ever have occasion to spend some time as a guest in a country house. Rounding out the list are In A Fog: The Humorists’ Guide to England, edited by Robert Wechsler, which includes essays by Art Buchwald, Mark Twain, Paul Theroux, and Robert Benchley, among others; and England for All Seasons by Susan Allen Toth, characterized by the author’s idiosyncratic enthusiasms about the country she loves to visit.
Anglophiliacs who love fiction are fortunate. I often think that nearly every third book in a library or bookstore’s fiction collection is likely by a British writer and/or set somewhere in England.
Sarum:The Novel of England, London:The Novel, and The Forest (set in the New Forest, in the southern portion of the country) by Edward Rutherfurd are sometimes dismissed as being too fluffy to convey you across the Atlantic. But in fact they’re detailed, painstakingly researched, and filled with interesting characters.
Here’s a diverse group of other titles that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed in the last few years. Like the divine writing of Georgette Heyer, author Julia Quinn brings the British Regency period to life in her sparkling romances, filled with dashing gentleman and bright, saucy women. My current tell-everyone-I-know-about-it is What Happens in London, but there are many other Quinn confections to choose from; Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch, set in World War II London; Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series including, among others, Glamorous Powers, Glittering Images, and Absolute Truths; The Road Home by Rose Tremain; and anything by Elizabeth Jane Howard, especially the Cazalet Chronicles, consisting of The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, spanning 1937-1938 through the end of World War II in the life of one British family.
ETHIOPIA, OR AS WE USED TO SAY, ABYSSINIA!
Tahir Shah’s In Search of King Solomon’s Mines is armchair travel writing at its finest: interesting characters (especially Samson, Shah’s sometimes unwilling travel companion, a Christian Amhari who totes an enormous Bible wherever he goes), nice-sized splotches of history and geography (both Ethiopian and biblical), and most important, an appealing writer whose sense of humor is apparent right from the beginning of the trip and continues through even the most trying of times (Shah is jailed as a suspected spy in Ethiopia). After a visit to the Middle East, Shah, a native Afghani who grew up in England, found himself compelled to locate the mines of the biblical King Solomon, a journey that eventually took him throughout Ethiopia into the mostly illegal gold-mining camps, following in the footsteps of the legendary Frank Hayter, who explored Ethiopia in the 1920s. Hayter’s three memoirs, all published in the 1930s, include In Quest of Sheba’s Mines, Gold of Ethiopia, and African Adventurer.
Cutting for Stone, an irresistibly readable epic novel by Abraham Verghese, begins right after World War II, when Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, travels from her home in Kerala, India, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and finds work in a mission hospital there. On the stormy and difficult sea voyage over, she saves the life of a British doctor named Thomas Stone, who also winds up at Missing, as the hospital is known to everyone in Addis. (Coincidences like this occur often in epic novels: they make the plot hum.) Although much of the book is set in New York (and narrated by Mary Joseph Praise’s son, Marion), when I finished reading this, I wanted to take the next flight to Addis Ababa because the author brought the city to life as a dynamic and three-dimensional character in its own right.
Other books set in Ethiopia, both fiction and nonfiction, include:Tim Bascom’s Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia
Philip Caputo’s powerful novel Horn of Africa
Nicholas Clapp’s Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen unravels the contradictory and complex tale of Sheba (of biblical Solomon and Sheba fame).
Thomas Keneally’s novel To Asmara
Maaza Mengiste’s moving and poetic novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, set just before the violent 1974 revolution that ended the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie
Nega Mezlekia’s Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Boyhood interested me because it’s set not in Addis Ababa, but rather in Jijiga, a small town on the eastern border of the country.
Wilfred Thesiger’s The Life of My Choice (The great explorer and desert-lover was born in the country when it was still Abyssinia.)
Maria Thomas’s African Visas: A Novella and Stories (Ironically, Thomas die
d while on a relief mission in Ethiopia in 1988.)
EXPLAINING EUROPE: THE GRAND TOUR
The Grand Tour was almost a rite of passage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here are some twentieth--A- century titles that give us an overview of today’s Europe. Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There recounts the backpacking tour around Europe more than two decades after Bryson and a friend traveled throughout Europe in the 1970s.
In Geert Mak’s In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century, the well-read and knowledgeable Dutch journalist roams across Europe in the last year of the twentieth century to assess its health by looking at its past, its present, and its future.
Another look at Europe comes from British writer John Gimlette, winner of the Shiva Naipal Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award, in Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace. Think of this and Mak’s book as the perfect Grand Tour without leaving home.
For pure entertainment, try Tim Moore’s The Grand Tour: The European Adventure of a Continental Drifter and Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman.
Although they don’t write about twentieth-century travel, I can’t resist including Brian Dolan’s smart and stylish Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe, as well as one of the most loved books of the nineteenth century—it was in its twenty-fourth revised edition in 1860—Views Afoot; or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff by Bayard Taylor.What a fabulous adventure it would be to follow in his footsteps, almost 150 years later.
EXPLORERS
It takes a special kind of person to set off for the “here be dragons” section of the map. I’m not sure I’d like to spend much time with people of that personality type—that kind of one-directional determination makes me a bit anxious. It’s certainly a quality that real explorers must have in spades. But gosh, these men and women are fun to read about. Here are some of my favorite biographies; there’s nary a dull one in the bunch.
Barrow’s Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy by Fergus Fleming includes enthralling mini-biographies and backstories of many of the nineteenth-century explorers who filled in the blank places on the map and added to Britain’s empire. If you enjoy this, take a look at Fleming’s Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration.
Another book you won’t want to miss is Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition. Six vessels and hundreds of crewmen set out to discover all there was to know about the Pacific Ocean. These voyages, known more familiarly as the “Ex Ex,” added immeasurably to America’s scientific knowledge and almost incidentally brought back hundreds of artifacts (many of which ended up in the Smithsonian Museum).
Others to add to your reading list include Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers, Dea Birkett’s vivid account of stereotype-shattering nineteenth-century women like Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, Mary Gaunt, and Marianne North (neither of the last two I’d heard of before stumbling on this book in the travel section of a used bookstore a few years ago); Jason Roberts’s A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (despite the somewhat arguable subtitle, this tale of James Holman greatly merits reading); D’Arcy Jenish’s Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West, a readable history of the great mapmaker that makes use of Thompson’s journals and sketches to enhance the text; Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage That Redrew the Map of the New World by Douglas Hunter; Peter G. Mancall’s Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson, which offers a plausible explanation for Hudson’s disappearance; Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen; and A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca by Andrés Reséndez (a friend told me how difficult it was to put this down—she found it, as I did, a riveting tale).
There’s more: Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer by Bill Gifford (John Ledyard was a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s who left Dartmouth College, sailed with Captain Cook on his last trip, wandered through Siberia, and ended up pretty much unremarked and unremembered except by those who read Gifford’s book); and Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. The amount of infamy and fame surrounding the subject would have daunted all but the most determined—and excellent—biographer. (Jeal is both—you may want to check out some of his other books, as I did.)
Once you’ve finished the Jeal book, pick up Martin Dugard’s Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone and Anthony Sattin’s The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery, and the Search for Timbuktu, a history of the African Association, founded in 1788 with the sole purpose of filling in the map of Africa by locating Timbuktu, finding the source of the Nile, and exploring the course of the Niger River (among much else, of course). And don’t forget Giles Milton’s delectable The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World’s Greatest Traveller, in which the author tries to help the reader decide whether Mandeville accomplished all the great exploring feats he describes in his own writing or whether he is, quite simply, a teller of tall tales. Should there perhaps be a question mark at the end of Milton’s title? (Columbus took Mandeville’s words quite seriously, if that’s any help in coming to your own conclusion.)
Then there’s William Harrison’s enthralling novel Burton and Speke, which tries to answer the question of whether it was Richard Burton or John Hanning Speke who first found the source of the Nile. It was really an unfair contest, because Speke died mysteriously the day before he was scheduled to publicly debate the subject with Burton, and Burton’s reputation as an explorer made Speke’s claim seem a bit specious. And yet, we’ll never know ...
FROLICKING IN FINLAND
My older daughter spent her senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Finland—she lived with a family in Rovaniemi, the capital of Arctic Lapland. When she was there I started reading all I could find that was set in that country, which at the time was not much. While there are still not shelves and shelves of books either set in Finland or written by Finnish authors and translated into English, at least there are a few more now than there were back then. Here are some I’ve enjoyed a lot, although the descriptions of Finnish winters might freeze your blood.
The one true armchair travel book I found was Robert M. Goldstein’s Riding with Reindeer, which describes his solo bike trip from Helsinki to the Barents Sea.The maps are wonderful, and the photos—so often lacking in books of this sort—add to the book’s appealing conversational tone.
The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland by Barbara Sjoholm describes the history and lives of the Sami people, who have long made Lapland their home.
Two new mystery writers whose books are set in Finland are Jan Costin Wagner and James Thompson. Ice Moon is the first of Wagner’s three novels available in English. James Thompson’s first novel, Snow Angels, features Inspector Kari Vaara.
Techies will want to check out Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, Linus Torvalds’s memoir of growing up in wintry Finland, how he developed the Linux operating system and became perhaps the major proponent of open source codes for computers. (Even non-techies might enjoy this book—I certainly did, and I would never call myself one, although I do have a love of gadgets in common with the Finnish people. Did you know, for example, that there are more cell phones per capita in Finland than any other country in the world?)
To get an overall history of the bloody battle between Finland and the Soviet Union in the early years of World War II, the best book I’ve found for the general reader is A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by William Trotter.
Monika Fagerholm’s first novel, written after publishing two collections of short stories, is Wonderful Women by the Sea, which takes place in her native Finland. I especially loved Fagerhol
m’s writing style and the way she developed her characters. Her newest novel, The American Girl, also set in Finland, is another first-rate example of her capacious talent.
Books by Finnish writers that are available in English include The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna;Antti Tuuri’s The Winter War (a historical novel set in World War II; the author won the Finlandia Prize for Literature in 1997); and Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier, plus what are possibly his most famous books, a trilogy that includes Under the North Star, The Uprising: Under the North Star 2, and Reconciliation: Under the North Star 3.
Lastly, Maile Chapman’s Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto is both creepy and difficult to put down; it’s set in a convalescent hospital for women that’s deep in rural Finland.
GALLOPING THROUGH THE GALAPAGOS
It would be silly, I think, to take a trip to the Galapagos and not take at least a gander at Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (there’s an edition with a useful introduction by Steve Jones). Darwin visited the Galapagos in 1835, four years into his five-year journey. In his autobiography, written half a century later, Darwin declared that “The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career.”
In Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks , nature writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt offers a narrative account of the Beagle’s journey and how influential it was to Darwin’s later career—how it truly did, in fact, make him what he became.