I asked Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly, what books set in Texas, or by Texas authors, are must-reads for anyone planning a real or virtual visit to the state. Partly I figured that if anyone would know the best ones to suggest it would be Jake, and I also wanted to see how many of his suggestions corresponded to ones that I had already read and knew I wanted to include. I"m pleased to say that there was some overlap, but I added many books to my own must-read list, and-after reading them-heartily concur with Jake"s choices. Here they are, with Jake"s original comments in quotes.
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke: "This thriller is set in Houston in the early 1980s, and deals with race and cla.s.s issues."
Brownsville by Oscar Casares: "Short stories. Vivid and lucid portrait of being lower-middle cla.s.s/poor and relatively isolated in Brownsville, Texas."
Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger: "Takes place in Midland/Odessa. High school football. Great nonfiction writing." (And the television adaptation is pretty wonderful as well.) The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer: "Sort of Texas"s All the King"s Men."
George Washington Gomez by Americo Paredes:"Set in 1914 in Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of the issues raised in the book are, alas, still issues. Also, his incredible book of folklore/ history/musicology With His Pistol in His Hand, one of the best nonfiction books about Texas you"ll ever read."
Horseman, Pa.s.s By and The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, followed by his slim book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave: "Reading this trio gives you a perfect sense of the transition from small towns to cities. And then there"s Lonesome Dove, of course, which is amazing." I would also add my three favorite McMurtry novels: Moving On; its sort-of sequel, Terms of Endearment; and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.
The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna by Dagoberto Gilb: "Set in the area in and around El Paso. Great Tex-Mex voice that slides between English and Spanish. Gilb is one of the best writers in Texas today."
Strange Peaches by Edwin Shrake: "For a sense of Dallas in the early 1960s around the time of the JFK a.s.sa.s.sination. Eye-opening."
The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton: "Cla.s.sic portrait of ranching life in the southern plains. Not the old-timey stuff of cowboys and trail drives, but the real deal: struggling to pay bills and keep things going through the terrible drought of the 1950s. Kelton was the son of a ranch foreman and an agricultural reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times for forty years."
Waterloo by Karen Olsson:"For a picture of modern-day Austin."
I"d also add that for a picture of frontier Texas in the last years of the Civil War, you don"t want to miss Paulette Jiles"s The Color of Lightning.
Incidentally, Jake was clearly too modest to mention his own book, set in the southwest (especially Texas and Mexico), Nothing Happened and Then It Did. It"s set in the present, and melds fiction and nonfiction so cleverly that it"s impossible to really be certain which is which. I"ll be interested to see where libraries and bookstores decide to shelve it: a novel or not?
THAI TALES.
I have to be honest and say that I really have no great desire to spend time in Thailand. What"s a bit odd about this fact is that several of my favorite thriller writers-John Burdett and Christopher G. Moore among them-happen to set their books there. On the other hand, the picture of Thailand (especially Bangkok) that these authors present is hyper-violent and utterly grungy. But gosh, for some reason that I really don"t care to explore, I really enjoy reading them, at least until they cross over that invisible line in my mind and the violence and grunge become more than I bear.
So if you like your suspense novels set in exotic locales; if you enjoy a sympathetic, all-too-human protagonist; and (this especially) if you don"t mind (or have a high tolerance for) grisly and gruesome crimes, you won"t want to miss John Burdett"s series beginning with Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo. Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep stars in these fast-moving more-or-less mysteries that are distinguished by smart (frequently witty) dialogue, a terrific depiction of place, and plot twists galore. The first involves jade smuggling, s.e.xually deviant behavior, and death by snake venom, while the second features the ghastly murder of a CIA agent; both crimes send Sonchai (who struggles to reconcile his Buddhist beliefs with his knowledge of humanity at its worst) deep into the criminal and s.e.xual underworld of Thailand"s biggest city. I was totally won over by the character of Sonchai as well as Burdett"s smooth writing.
The protagonist of Christopher G. Moore"s series is Vincent Calvino, a disbarred American lawyer who sells his services as a private investigator in Bangkok. Start with Spirit House, and work forward from there. Moore himself has lived in Bangkok for two decades or so, and the descriptions of the city are themselves worth the price of the book. Oh yes, and the plots are utterly compelling.
Since the first-person narrator in Mischa Berlinski"s Fieldwork is named Mischa Berlinski, readers might be forgiven for thinking that it"s actually a memoir about the author"s experiences living in Thailand. That you come away from the book feeling like you"ve learned a lot compounds that belief. But it is definitely a novel-and an absorbing one, at that. When his girlfriend gets a job teaching in northern Thailand, Mischa decides to go with her, spending his time (and earning a meager living) freelancing for an English-language newspaper. He hears from an old friend and fellow ex-pat about Martiya van der Leun, an American anthropologist who"s committed suicide in a Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Mischa"s interest (soon an obsession) in the mystery surrounding Martiya"s life and death leads him to the Walker family, three generations of missionaries working to convert the Thai hill tribes to Christianity, and to the Diyalos, the hill tribe that was the subject of Martiya"s PhD dissertation. For me, the novel worked on three levels. First, it"s a wonderfully written, satisfyingly complex why-dunit, as we follow Mischa in his attempt to understand why Martiya ended up in prison. Second, it"s a great character-driven novel, as Berlinski offers sympathetic portrayals of both the Walkers and the tribespeople they love, and whose souls they want to save for Jesus.The Diyalos in particular, although they are entirely a figment of Berlinski"s (the author"s, not the character"s) imagination, are presented so vividly that their customs, beliefs, and way of life seem quite real. Third, the novel is, despite Martiya"s ultimate fate, a tribute to anthropologists and the work they do. Reading Fieldwork made me wish I had taken more anthropology courses in college, and finishing it sent me to the library in search of many of the books mentioned in Berlinski"s notes on the sources for the novel.
Other works of fiction set in Thailand include Alex Garland"s The Beach; Lily Tuck"s Siam, Or the Woman Who Shot a Man; Dorothy Gilman"s Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle; Rattawut Lapcharoensap"s collection Sightseeing: Stories; and A Nail Through the Heart, the first of the Bangkok-set Poke Rafferty thrillers by Timothy Hallinan.
If you"re interested in non-fiction, try Karen Connelly"s Dream of a Thousand Lives: A Sojourn in Thailand, which won Canada"s Governor General"s Literary Award.
TIMBUKTU AND BEYOND.
I have a friend who went to Mali solely, she tells me, so she could tell people that she"d been to Timbuktu. She had a glorious time and I envy her adventurous nature a lot. Here are some excellent accounts of other travelers exploring that fabled land.
One of my favorite pa.s.sages from Mark Jenkins"s To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger is this:Strange things happen in Africa. Fantastic things. Things you can"t understand. You sense they portend something but you don"t know what. Africans are accustomed to it. For them strangeness is commonplace. They don"t try to decipher it. If they have a problem, they talk to a lawyer or an accountant or a shaman or a necromancer. Depends on the problem.
I love the matter-of-factness of it-the need, when you"re traveling, to take whatever you see, hear, or experience, without judgment. In recounting his attempt to discover the source of the Niger River and follow it into Mali, Jenkins, as he always does in his travel books, takes us along on the journey. (A good selection of his other travel writings can be found in A Man"s Life: Dispatches from Dangerous Places.) Another good read about a river journey to Timbuktu is Kira Salak"s The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu.
Marq deVilliers and Sheila Hirtle have written a fascinating book about the history and culture of Mali"s famed city in Timbuktu: The Sahara"s Fabled City of Gold.As the authors point out, one of the city"s treasures is a collection of four thousand ma.n.u.scripts in the Mamma Haidara Library, brought together and preserved by the leading families of the region and which offer their readers an invaluable look into the region"s past (some date back to the thirteenth century).
Kris Holloway"s Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali, which describes the author"s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote village, made me think about many issues-women"s lives in nonindustrialized countries, health care in the poorest areas of the world, and the human connections that cross age, ethnicity, and backgrounds. Rather inspiring, actually.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: NORTH AND SOUTH.
If I were going to the Arctic or Antarctic, the book I"d pick up first is The Ends of the Earth: The Arctic: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the North Pole, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert, which is bound with The Ends of the Earth: The Antarctic: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the South Pole, edited by Francis Spufford. Here"s where you can get a taste of what you might want to read next, which I hope will include some of these fascinating books.
Arctic.
The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic by Edward Beauclerk Maurice is the charming tale of a young man who apprenticed with the Hudson"s Bay Company in 1930 and stayed on because he fell in love with living so far from civilization.
Martin Frobisher, the fascinating main subject of Unknown Sh.o.r.e: The Lost History of England"s Arctic Colony by Robert Ruby, was a complicated individual-part pirate and part adventurer. He led three failed expeditions to locate the famed Northwest Pa.s.sage in order to set up a British colony for Queen Elizabeth I. Frobisher"s story is less well known than most of the other Northwest Pa.s.sage seekers, and that we know it at all is probably due to the second subject of Ruby"s book, the American Charles Francis Hall, who in 1860 traveled to the Arctic to do a series of oral histories with Inuits. Ruby does a wonderful job of showing us what those sixteenth-century explorers were up against: "Geography, like a distant lover, changed according to expectations and desires.... Every few years cartographers refashioned their maps."
Only the most dedicated and determined fans of Arctic exploration will know of John Rae, but after reading Ken McGoogan"s skillfully written Fatal Pa.s.sage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot, readers will recognize the important place in history that he deserves.As McGoogan puts it, Rae discovered "the final navigable link in the Northwest Pa.s.sage, at last connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the top of North America." But in addition, McGoogan tells us, Rae also solved the mystery of what happened to John Franklin"s 1845 Northwest Pa.s.sage expedition (cannibalism, not to mince words), and his discovery was not much appreciated by Franklin"s devoted followers in England. More to the point, it greatly displeased Lady Jane, Franklin"s wealthy widow, who brought the immensely popular Charles d.i.c.kens into the fray on Franklin"s side. This particular angle is deftly explored in Richard Flanagan"s novel Wanting. Lady Jane Franklin has her own say-and travels-in Ken McGoogan"s Lady Franklin"s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession, and the Remaking of Arctic History.
Which brings us to John Franklin himself. His importance in Arctic exploration is unchallenged, though he never succeeded in discovering what he set out to find. Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin"s Lost Polar Expedition by Scott Cookman is a very readable biography of the man, and your local librarian can probably find you more scholarly tomes to peruse if your interest is piqued by Franklin"s life. (He always shows up somewhere in every book about the search for the Northwest Pa.s.sage, as well. Personally, I"ve always found it fascinatingly grim that Franklin"s two ships were named the Terror and Erebus. How awfully prescient!) There"s a terrific novel by the prolific and multi-talented Dan Simmons that deals with Franklin"s expedition called, forebodingly, The Terror, and it lives up to its name.
Anthony Brandt"s invigorating The Man Who Ate His Boots:The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Pa.s.sage also makes good use of the myths (or truths) that have grown up around the disappearance of Franklin and all his men. It offers a great overview of the whole history of the attempts to find that dang Pa.s.sage.
To the End of the Earth: Our Epic Journey to the North Pole and the Legend of Peary and Henson by Tom Avery tries to answer one of the major questions of the early twentieth century:Was it really possible that U.S. Naval Commander Robert Peary and his team of dogs got to the North Pole in just thirty-seven days? Avery and his team set out to replicate Peary"s journey as closely as possible: part adventure and part history add up to a spellbinding saga.
There are a few writers whose books I always know I"ll read-no matter the subject. Fergus Fleming is one of those, and I was especially delighted with Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole.This outstanding history has something for everyone: questers, dreamers, and a story that can"t be beat.
Jennifer Niven"s Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic and The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk are amazing tales-well wrought and filled with captivating characters. They"re perfect for fans of Junger and Krakauer.
Other Arctic-related books that would fill the bill for armchair travelers are Farthest North: The Epic Adventure of a Visionary Explorer by the late nineteenth-century Arctic voyager and n.o.bel Prize winner, Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen; Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson by Peter C. Mancall; and Gretel Ehrlich"s In the Empire of Ice: Life in a Changing Landscape.
Antarctic.
To put it quite simply, I adore Sara Wheeler"s books. Her writing is filled with engaging humor, she does her homework before she visits a country, she"s fearless (more about that later), and she has the particular kind of luck that serious travelers (or, at least, travel writers) seem to have.They"re always meeting up with just the right people at just the right time, in order, for example, to hitch a ride (frequently in planes and helicopters) to an otherwise inaccessible place. And they"re always being upgraded to better hotel rooms. (That"s only happened to me once.) Wheeler"s masterpiece is, I think, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, which is partly an account of her own experiences as part of the American National Science Foundation"s Antarctic Artists" and Writers" Program, and partly a history of the exploration of the region. That history is made up of both wise and foolish decisions, luck (both good and bad), heroism, and the inevitable fatalities.
Now for the fearlessness: I have one very adventurous daughter, who, like Wheeler, has an amazing gift for friendship and instant closeness with nearly everyone she meets. At one time in her life she would drop whatever plans she had in order to go off rock climbing with a group of strangers, fax us updates on whatever was happening in her life on stationery from her new boyfriend"s place of employment (this particular one was a bodyguard for the president of a Spanish province that shall go unnamed), have her pa.s.sport confiscated on a train between Florence and Budapest, sleep on the couches of strangers, be out of touch for weeks on end, and generally keep my anxiety level sky high. So, all the time I was reading Wheeler"s wonderful books, I was feeling dreadfully sorry for her mother.
Wheeler is also the author of two great biographies: Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (you might remember him as Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa-he was the lover of both Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham) and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (one of the men who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott on the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1913).
One writer you"ll want to become familiar with is Roland Huntford, but when you read him, keep in mind that he was pretty pro-Amundsen and pretty anti-Scott. Here are the books of his that I"d suggest reading first: The Last Place on Earth (originally published in the 1980s as Scott and Amundsen), as well as the biography, Shackleton.
Stephanie L. Barczewski explores the differing trajectories of the careers and reputations of two major explorers in Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism.
As part of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Douglas Mawson (actually, Sir Douglas Mawson-he was knighted for his work there) spent years traversing the harsh landscape and enduring the frigid weather; he wrote about his experiences in The Home of the Blizzard: A True Story of Antarctic Survival.There"s also an excellent book about his 1911 trek to the South Pole: Lennard Bickel"s Mawson"s Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written.
TRAVEL TO IMAGINARY PLACES.
I don"t use the phrase "tour de force" very often (mostly because I"m always nervous that I"ll say "tour de France" by accident instead), but the books in this section all qualify for the correct phrase. They are A+ examples of how a vivid but disciplined imagination and splendid writing can combine to produce unforgettably wonderful books. When I read them I wondered if I (as well as the history books and atlases) had somehow missed the existence of these places. The odd thing is that some of these are shelved in the science fiction and fantasy section, while others are considered "literary." Still, no matter where they"re shelved, they"re all truly amazing-fiction that could almost be nonfiction. Try them and see if you don"t agree with me.
Jorge Luis Borges"s long short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
Peter Cameron"s Andorra and The City of Your Final Destination Michael Chabon"s The Yiddish Policemen"s Union Gabriel Garcia Marquez"s One Hundred Years of Solitude Ursula K. Le Guin"s The Wizard of Earthsea Stephen Marche"s brilliant Shining at the Bottom of the Sea China Mieville"s The City and the City Steven Millhauser"s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, set in a city that is New York, but not quite the Manhattan we know Jan Morris"s Hav, comprised of Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons Adam Thorpe"s Ulverton Evelyn Waugh"s Scoop (It"s totally politically incorrect and rollickingly funny. Don"t read it if you"re easily offended by racial or ethnic epithets.) Colson Whitehead"s The Intuitionist (I had the same feeling about this novel as I did about the Millhauser book.) TRAVELERS" TALES IN VERSE I couldn"t resist including some of my favorite poems that evoke in me (and, I hope, you) a sense of journeying, of leaving the familiar for the unknown.
Constantine Cavafy"s "Ithaca" (sometimes spelled "Ithaka")
Walter de la Mare"s "The Listeners"
Robert Frost"s "The Road Not Taken"
G. K. Chesterton"s "Lepants"
Rudyard Kipling"s "Mandalay"
John Masefield"s "Sea Fever"
Carl Sandburg"s "The Road and the End"
Sara Teasdale"s "The Long Hill"
W. J. Turner"s "Romance"
Henry Van d.y.k.e"s "America for Me"
TURKISH DELIGHTS.
Turkey is such a prime destination for travelers interested in its history and culture that there is much good fiction and nonfiction that lets us experience the country in all its complexity. Here"s an ortaya kark (hodgepodge) of t.i.tles for you.
Nonfiction.
A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat is author Jeremy Seal"s study of Turkish life, customs, and history in context as he attempts to understand the importance of the fez, a maroon felt hat, to Turkish sensibilities. In 1925, two years after Turkey became a republic, the great reformer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk outlawed the wearing of turbans. He made the fez the national hat. With humor, warmth, and great insight, Seal does an excellent job helping western readers understand how precariously placed Turkey is between the past and present, between the mores of Islam and those of Europe.
Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, edited by Anastasia M.Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen, is a collection of essays that examine Turkish life and traditions from the point of view of thirty-two non-Turkish women who moved there for adventure, work, or love.
Mary Lee Settle spent three years living in Turkey and wrote about her experiences in Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place, first published in 1991. In addition, an important part of Settle"s incandescent novel Celebration takes place in a small Turkish town.
Other nonfiction exploring the complex history of this country includes Giles Milton"s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, about the destruction of a city on the Aegean coast, along with thousands of its citizens, by Turkish troops under the leadership of Ataturk; and Freya Stark"s Alexander"s Path: A Travel Memoir.
Fiction.
One of the best novels I"ve ever read is Louis de Bernieres"s Birds Without Wings, which is set in a small coastal town in Anatolia during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. It"s narrated in dozens of voices, including those of the men and women of town, the rich and the poor, the n.o.bles and peasants, the Christians and Muslims, the Greeks and the Armenians-all ordinary people who have lived together for generations in peace, unnoticed and far from the seats of influence, until they"re swept up in the maelstrom of war and become simple p.a.w.ns of history, subject to the decisions of their misguided, often incompetent, and always dangerously power-hungry rulers. Along with the story of the residents of this one small town, de Bernieres tells of the rise of Kemal Ataturk, whose goal was to remake Turkey into a modern, secular country. These parallel tales play off one another brilliantly and together make for a particularly rich and satisfying novel.You can actually go to the ghost town (near Fethiye) where the novel takes place.
Jason Goodwin"s fascination with Turkey is evident in his entertaining mystery series set there in the 1830s, all featuring Yashim Togalu, a eunuch and a detective.They include, in order, The Janissary Tree,The Snake Stone, and The Bellini Card. I think you could probably pa.s.s many a Turkish history test with what you take in about the country while reading these. Goodwin also wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, which is both easy to digest and informative.
Three Turkish novelists of note are n.o.bel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk, Yashar Kemal, and Elif Shafak. Pamuk"s My Name Is Red and The Black Book are two good ones with which to begin. Set in the 1930s, Kemal"s first novel, Memed, My Hawk, was published in 1955 and is the beginning of a quartet about a boy coming of age in southern Turkey. Shafak"s The b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi make for engrossing reading. As for non-Turkish novelists writing about Turkey, try these: Maureen Freely"s Enlightenment; Barry Unsworth"s The Rage of the Vulture; Alan Drew"s Gardens of Water; Peter Ackroyd"s The Fall of Troy; and Dervishes by Beth Helms. If you"re looking for something a lot lighter in tone and mood that still gives you a sense of Turkish life and customs, don"t miss Dorothy Gilman"s The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax.
VENI, VIDI, VENICE.
From what I can recall, my first introduction to the city of Venice was in Betsy and the Great World, one of the -A- Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. Since I so strongly identified with Betsy, I felt as though there was no need for me to go since Betsy experienced it all for me. (And she fell in love with the devastatingly handsome Marco, besides, although she never forgot Joe Willard. What can I say, you have to be eleven and read it yourself.) Over the years I"ve read other books-both fiction and narrative nonfiction-that did make me want to visit that most unusual of cities. Probably the best book to read about the history of Venice as seen through its art and architecture is Mary McCarthy"s Venice Observed. Despite its age (it was originally published in 1956), it"s still in print and still valuable reading for any trip to the city.