Dennis Lehane"s novels about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro provide many enjoyable hours of reading. I"d read them in order, beginning with the first, and still one of the best, Prayers for Rain.
And because sports are such a big part of the Boston zeitgeist, baseball fans shouldn"t miss Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series:The Triumph of America"s Pastime by Mark Frost, and basketball fanatics will thoroughly enjoy Michael Connelly"s Rebound!: Basketball, Busing, Larry Bird, and the Rebirth of Boston.
The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage is in my top five for all-time favorite novels. Set partially in Boston, it"s one of those t.i.tles that I keep wishing someone would reissue in a lovely trade paperback edition so I can replace the falling-apart old copy I picked up at some thrift store years ago.
BOTSWANA.
If Alexander McCall Smith didn"t exist, I suspect that the Botswana Tourist Bureau (a.s.suming there is one) would have to invent him.
It"s Smith"s collection of tales featuring Precious Ramotswe, who is, as she says, "blessed with girth rather than height," that brought this African country (bigger than California and smaller than Texas, located between Zimbabwe and South Africa) to readers looking for interesting characters and a setting that functions as much as a character as any of the other, two-legged sort. From The No. 1 Ladies" Detective Agency,Tears of the Giraffe, and on through Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, which is my favorite t.i.tle, Smith offers hours of pleasure reading.
After living for many years in New Zealand, Robyn Scott"s small-plane-flying physician father and ever-up-for-an-adventure mother returned to their Botswana home in 1987. In Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood, Scott describes what life was like in a deserted mining town far from any city of significant size.
A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley is the first mystery featuring a Botswanan policeman named David Bengu, whose fellow cops have nicknamed him "Kubu," which is Setswanan (a Botswanan dialect) for hippopotamus, thus successfully describing his appearance. This series (as I write this, there are only two-the other is The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu) is much grittier and faster-paced than Smith"s novels. They"re perfect to take on the plane as you"re heading off on safari (or just flying from Cleveland to Seattle, for that matter).
Whatever You Do, Don"t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide by Peter Allison is an awfully funny collection of essays about trying to herd human animals to safe viewing of herds of nonhuman animals. If this doesn"t make you want to sign up immediately for a trek with the Australian-by-birth Allison, I don"t know what will.
Bessie Head, born in South Africa of a white mother and black father (at a time when that was not only frowned upon, but patently illegal), moved to Botswana in 1964. One of her best-known novels is When Rain Clouds Gather. One librarian described it to me this way: "It"s about a community of exiles in Botswana as they try both to modernize (read, westernize) their way of farming while simultaneously holding on to their heritage."
BRAZIL.
In 1978, after he"s forced-due to failing health-to abandon his farm in Ecuador, Moritz Thomsen takes a journey through Brazil, making stops in Rio, Bahia, Recife, Natal, and Fortaleza, and ending with a longish sojourn on the Amazon River. I found his memoir of this trip, The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers, to be utterly enthralling. (Graham Greene once described travel as "the saddest pleasure.") Originally published in 1990 and now, alas, long out of print, it is much more than the story of Thomsen"s trip: indeed, the trip becomes a metaphor for his life. The book is filled with quotable lines: "I have become," he mourns, "that person who is of no interest to anyone and about whom no one will have the slightest curiosity. I have become to all intents and purposes invisible." On his flight to Brazil he changes planes in Colombia, and, watching the sun set there, says,"For a few moments corrupt, chaotic Colombia shines as magically beautiful as paradise." And he has a great comment about the whole tourist experience: "Famous sites seen by too many eyes are robbed little by little of their power to excite or dazzle; each pair of eyes has taken something away. Public things are diminished by lying helpless under the public gaze." And this: "There is no way to live with the illusion of being made happy by the things that one owns, especially in a country like Ecuador where a comparative handful of people own everything, without developing an armor of blindness that makes one not only insensitive but contemptuous of the overwhelming poverty through which one moves."
I encountered Thomsen"s memoir right after I read Paul Theroux"s Dark Star Safari, and was interested to find that Theroux wrote the introduction to Thomsen"s book, and, on their respective trips, both men read and reread the fiction of Joseph Conrad.
As Thomsen says in his memoir, Brazilian literature is dominated by Jorge Amado (Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands are the best known) but Eduardo Galeano"s Memory of Fire trilogy (made up of Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind) is a useful introduction to South American history and culture.
And mystery fans can rejoice in reading Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza"s complex novels featuring Inspector Espinosa.Try Blackout or Alone in the Crowd.
If you enjoy cerebral puzzlers, try Luis Fernando Verissimo"s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, a short and brilliant novel about a murder that occurs at a convention of Edgar Allan Poe scholars in Buenos Aires. Jorge Luis Borges is a central character, which should give you a hint of what you"re in for here. I simply loved it.
BURMESE DAYS.
This is the last section I wrote for Book l.u.s.t To Go, because it wasn"t until six weeks after the ma.n.u.script was done that I realized I had forgotten to include some wonderful books about the country. But I was torn about what to call the section. Any t.i.tle would be a political statement. In the end, I went with the t.i.tle above, rather than something like, for example, "Myanmar Musings."
Burmese Days is George Orwell"s more-than-somewhat autobiographical novel of a British ex-pat living in a fictional district in Burma in the 1920s, when the end of Empire was foreseen by smart Englishmen. Orwell worked for the Indian Imperial Police force for five years, beginning in 1922. (At that time Burma was considered a part of India.) When I discovered Emma Larkin"s fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, I was taken (as many have been, before me) by her description of Orwell"s more famous novels being a metaphor for most of twentieth-century Burmese history.To some Burmese, she tells us, Orwell is known as "the prophet." Larkin goes on to say:In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and 1984.
The book is a combination of biography and armchair travel, as Larkin visits all the places where Orwell lived and worked. I found it totally riveting and immensely well written.
"Emma Larkin" is a pseudonym for an Asian-born, Burmese-speaking American journalist; and try as I might, I haven"t been able to uncover more about her (or him). Her newest book is Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma, about the devastation wreaked by cyclone Nargis in 2008 in the southwestern part of a country that was already politically devastated. If you"ve never heard about Nargis, don"t fault your news-reading skills: the 100,000 or so deaths and a.s.sociated destruction were both under-reported and suppressed by the Burmese government.
Mac McClelland"s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma"s Never-Ending War is a memoir of the author"s time spent working in Burma with a group fighting the country"s dictatorship. Hard-edged and gripping, it"s journalism at its best.
Other required (by me, at least) nonfiction reading includes Justin Wintle"s Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma"s Prisoner of Conscience, a sympathetic portrait of the courageous 1991 n.o.bel Peace Prize winner who leads the resistance movement in Burma; Letters from Burma, a collection of Aung San Suu Kyi"s own writings from the six years she spent under house arrest beginning in 1989; and Karen Connelly"s Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story.
As for fiction, there are three novels too good to miss: Karen Connelly"s evocative The Lizard Cage was written before Burmese Lessons. It won the 2007 Orange Prize for New Writers and was one of the finalists for the Kiriyama Prize, which celebrates "literary voices of the Pacific Rim."
Amitav Ghosh"s The Gla.s.s Palace is a sweeping work of historical fiction that begins in 1885 and ends in the present day.The events of the novel occur primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India. Ghosh writes about the evils of colonialism better than almost anyone else I"ve ever read (except maybe Paul Scott), but you never feel hit over the head with his message or overloaded by facts and details. His writing is superb and the characters are unforgettable.
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason takes place at the same time Ghosh"s begins. It"s the story of Edgar Drake, who is sent to Burma to repair a grand piano that"s important to British colonial interests. Despite the event-filled plot, the main interest (and character) here is really the country itself. This is a great audio book for those of you who enjoy listening to well-read tales.
CAMBODIA.
Cambodia suffered through years of political terror and repression-who can ever forget the phrase "the killing fields"? The books that follow certainly offer a testament to the human spirit, but do yourself a favor by taking a break with a funny or at least happy book in between reading these.
Stunning use of language and an almost elliptical writing style mark Kim Echlin"s The Disappeared, the story of a young Canadian girl who falls in love with a Cambodian studying in Montreal.When the borders to his country are opened, Serey returns to Phnom Penh to try to locate his family. And more than a decade later, Anne Greves travels to Cambodia to find him. Echlin shows us that Anne"s heart-break and loss are not just due to the large political events in the world, but also to decisions made for other, more personal reasons.
Loung Ung"s two memoirs, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (life under Pol Pot"s regime in the 1970s) and Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind (which tells of her return to Cambodia in 1995), are moving and honest; both read like novels, albeit sad ones.
When Broken Gla.s.s Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him offers another perspective on childhood during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. It"s a heartbreaking and unforgettable read.
Dith Pran, the Cambodian photojournalist who was the subject of the film The Killing Fields, compiled Children of Cambodia"s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.
Other nonfiction books set during that chilling period-from 1970 to 1975, when two million Cambodians were killed-that are almost certain to break your heart are The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields by Nic Dunlop, a Thailand-based, Irish photojournalist; Francois Bizot"s The Gate; and River of Time by British journalist John Swain.
For a change of pace (and time period), try Norman Lewis"s A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, originally published in England in 1951.
There isn"t a lot of great fiction about Cambodia (or at least I haven"t found much beyond Echlin"s book) and what"s out there is also not particularly aimed at making you feel better about the world, but two more of the best are Christopher J. Koch"s Highways to a War, about a photojournalist who disappears in Cambodia in 1976, and John Del Vecchio"s For the Sake of All Living Things, about a pair of siblings who choose different paths during the era of the Khmer Rouge.
CANADA, O CANADA.
Because Miss Frances Whitehead, the children"s librarian at the Parkman Branch library in Detroit, was Canadian, I think I was inoculated with a love of Canadian writers. If the jacket of a book says that the author is Canadian, I"ll always pick it up and give it a try. Here are some you shouldn"t miss.
If Bill Bryson is one of your favorite armchair travelers and story-tellers, then I"m pretty certain you"ll enjoy Will Ferguson"s Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada, because he writes about his native country with the same sort of affection (and occasional exasperation) as Bryson does. Ferguson describes not only the places he visits and the people he meets from Victoria to Newfoundland, but also includes tales of early explorers like Samuel Hearne, who, in 1770, walked from Prince of Wales Fort, on the sh.o.r.es of Hudson Bay, to the Arctic Ocean, and back again, a distance of some 5,600 kilometers, looking for the Northwest Pa.s.sage and copper mines (and finding neither). Ferguson also describes his own experiences, such as watching polar bears from about as up close as anyone would want to get. Reading Ferguson"s often laugh-aloud essays, I was reminded of just how vast and varied our neighbor to the north is.
Another enjoyable choice for those who enjoy off-the-beaten-track accounts is Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada by Stuart McLean. It includes vignettes from eight towns all over Canada, including Maple Creek, Saskatchewan; Dresden, Ontario; St.-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec; Sackville, New Brunswick; Oxwarren, Manitoba; Nakusp, British Columbia; and Ferryland, Newfoundland. (I"d never heard of any of them, and trust most of you haven"t, either.) But as McLean hunkers down for a longish stay in each town, we come to know not just the residents of the place, but also its patchwork quilt, and how that history fits into the larger history of the times, including the separatist movement in Quebec, racial issues in Ontario, and more. McLean"s book, published in 1993, doesn"t reflect its age.
Anything that Jan Morris writes, I"ll read, because of her incisive descriptions, her grasp of history, and her ability to pick just the right examples for any point she chooses to make. Even though O Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country is now almost two decades old, the descriptions she offers of ten Canadian cities-St. John"s,Toronto, Montreal,Yellowknife, Banff, Saskatoon, Edmonton, St. Andrews, Ottawa, and Vancouver-will still make you want to go visit them.
Once I tell you the plot of The Girls by Lori Lansens, you might have to overcome a certain discomfort before you pick it up, but please don"t let the subject matter-the story of conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen-prevent you from reading what is one of the most humane, touching, and beautifully written books you"ll read this or any other year.
Tom Allen"s Rolling Home: A Cross Country Railroad Memoir is hard to find, but-especially if you"re keen on travel by railroad, as I am-worth looking for. It was published a few decades ago, but it"s still evocative, informative, and engaging.
Other books either by Canadians or about the country include those by Miriam Toews-my two favorites of her novels are The Flying Troutmans and A Complicated Kindness; for pure fun, take a look at Douglas Coupland"s three volumes of Souvenir of Canada in which you"ll find some iconic Canadiana by a native son: everything from "stubbies" to two-headed geese; two superb novels by Emily St. John Mandel-Last Night in Montreal and The Singer"s Gun; the works of Paulette Jiles, whose fiction is not set in Canada but whose ability to bring a place and characters to life shines through in such t.i.tles as The Color of Lightning (Texas) and Enemy Women (the America Civil War); mystery fans shouldn"t miss the gripping novels of Giles Blunt, all set in Northern Ontario-my favorite is Forty Words for Sorrow; and don"t forget Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robertson Davies.
CAVORTING THROUGH THE CARIBBEAN.
The first thing you"ll want to read before heading off to the land of sun and sea is the dictionary, to figure out how you"re going to p.r.o.nounce it: kar--b-n or k-ri-b-n. The first is widely used in the United States, while the latter is the preferred p.r.o.nunciation when you"re "in country." My advice is to pick one and stick with it, no matter where you are. I"ve gone with the second, for what it"s worth.
Here are the countries I"m including in this section-Antigua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Antigua.
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid is a lovely coming-of-age novel. Though Annie John grows up on Antigua, I think the feelings she experiences are universal. Most of Kincaid"s novels and short story collections deal with life in the West Indies.
Cuba.
When I read Three Trapped Tigers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante"s 1958 novel (and acknowledged masterpiece) in the one language I"m fluent in-English-I was sorely tempted to learn Spanish, just so I could read it in the original and experience it in situ, as it were, for so much of the wordplay and sense of fun must inevitably be lost in translation, no matter how excellent the translator(s)-in this case, Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine, in collaboration with the author. Even in English, though, the setting-pre-Revolutionary Cuba-came thoroughly alive. It"s a must-read for anyone interested in Latin American literature or Cuban history and literature, as well as for fans of Borges, Nabokov (particularly Pale Fire), and Luis Fernando Verissimo. In fact, anyone taken with verbal high jinks will find this a delight.
Other books-fiction or nonfiction-that help us get a feel for this country only ninety miles from our border that has played such a major role in our national psyche include: Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs"s riveting One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. Although there have been numerous books written about 1961"s Cuban Missile Crisis, it appears (from a nonscientific survey that I did recently among friends and family) that few people remember the details of an event that, along with the 1940s Berlin blockade and resulting airlift, demonstrated the political realities of a post-war, Cold War world.
Rachel Kushner"s multilayered novel Telex from Cuba offers a portrait of Cuba in the years culminating in 1958"s revolution, using a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints to describe the social and political realities during the decades-long setting of the American sun over the island. The writing, filled with memorable phrases and descriptions, carries the reader along effortlessly.
In 1970 Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto spent six months teaching modern dance in Cuba. Her story, told in Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, explores not just her life and career, but also the history of her "adopted" country and the revolution she supported.
NPR reporter Tom Gjelten"s fascinating history of Cuba is described through the experiences of five generations of the Bacardi (think rum) family in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause.
An excellent history of the early military involvement of the United States in Cuba can be found in Evan Thomas"s The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898.
Havana: Autobiography of a City is Alfredo Jose Estrada"s hymn of love to his native city.
Dervla Murphy (whose name you"ll encounter many times in the pages to come) describes her trips to Cuba in The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba.
And don"t forget Graham Greene"s unforgettable Our Man in Havana. It"s both an entertaining satire of the spy genre and a picture of pre-Castro Cuba.
Dominican Republic.
Julia Alvarez"s historical novel In the Time of the b.u.t.terflies is a heartrending, fact-based story of the Mirabal sisters during the dictatorial reign of Trujillo.You can watch my interview with Alvarez at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030606.
Junot Diaz"s Drown is a collection of harsh and beautiful stories set both in the D.R. and among the Dominican immigrants in New York; and you simply shouldn"t miss his utterly remarkable novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a New Jersey teenager dreaming of becoming the Dominican Republic"s J. R. R. Tolkien. If audio books are your thing, this is a good one to choose.
I don"t usually like true crime-too scary to think that these things actually happened-but I found an exception to be J. B. Mackinnon"s Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution, the story of the murder of the author"s uncle, a missionary in the D.R.
Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat"s memoir Brother, I"m Dying will likely bring you to tears, as it did me. Danticat opens the book with a day in 2004 when she learns that she is pregnant and that her father, Andre, is dying of pulmonary fibrosis. These two events, one happy and the other tragic, bracket Danticat"s story of two brothers-her father, who decided to leave Haiti for the possibilities of a better life in New York, and her uncle, Joseph, her "second father," who chose to remain in Haiti.
It"s not easy to find a happy book about Haiti, but Danticat"s After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti fills that particular bill.
While I don"t suppose you could call Tracy Kidder"s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World particularly cheerful, it is both insightful and inspiring.You can watch my interview with Kidder at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3031003.
If you want a little background, and/or have a particular interest in voodoo or Zora Neale Hurston, try her fascinating Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, an account of her experiences learning voodoo practices in those countries during the 1930s.
Jamaica.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson"s novels The True History of Paradise and The Pirate"s Daughter both offer compelling portraits of people living in this island nation.
The Jamaican American Colin Channer is a writer not to miss. I first discovered his work in Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction from Jamaica"s Calabash Writer"s Workshop, which he edited. Although The Girl with the Golden Shoes is set on a fictional Caribbean island, it"s pretty clearly Jamaica. The stories in his collection Pa.s.sing Through have a sultry beauty.
The Rastafarians by Leonard E. Barrett is an accessible history of the religious movement that began in Ethiopia and traveled to the Caribbean. It"s a valuable introduction for those of us unfamiliar with its history, influences, and practices. Even though I am not a particular fan of Bob Marley"s music (and he"s the one who is most responsible for bringing the religion to the attention of music lovers worldwide), I found Barrett"s book captivating.
And don"t forget all of Andrea Levy"s novels, including Fruit of the Lemon, Small Island, and her newest, The Long Song, set during the last years of slavery on the island.
Puerto Rico.
Steven Torres writes a great series of mysteries set in a small town in Puerto Rico. The first is Precinct Puerto Rico, but there"s no real need to read them in order.
I found The Noise of Infinite Longing: A Memoir of a Family-and an Island by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa to be a mesmerizing account of growing up not only bilingual, but bicultural.
Rosario Ferre"s early novels were written in Spanish, but she then turned to writing directly in English. Her second novel in English is Eccentric Neighborhoods; it offers a panoramic view of Puerto Rico as seen through the lives of one particular family.
Love and revolution in the 1950s are at the heart of Captain of the Sleepers, a novel by Mayra Montero. It"s translated by Edith Grossman, who"s one of, if not the, foremost translators of works from Spanish to English.
For those interested in Puerto Rico"s colonial past, don"t miss Edgardo Rodriguez Julia"s difficult (in the same way Borges is difficult) but exhilarating (in the same way Borges is exhilarating) novel, The Renunciation.
The lives of five generations of African Puerto Rican women are explored in Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa.
In Hunter S. Thompson"s The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel, we get an exuberant picture of the drinking life in Puerto Rico in the 1950s.