Recomended Reading List

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Reader's Recomendations

Randy McDonald's Picks

In Patagonia By Bruce Chatwin Fascinated by Patagonia ever since an early childhood lust for his Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Bruce Chatwin is intrigued by odd miners, Darwin, the Welsh, and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.

The Songlines By Bruce Chatwin The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books.

Travel Recomendations:

Come Back Alive: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Disasters, Kidnappings, Animal Attacks and Other Nasty Perils of Modern Travel by Robert Young Pelton Extreme traveler Robert Young Pelton described some his favorite death-defying vacations in the travel cult-classic "World's Most Dangerous Places." In "Come Back Alive," he's written an amusing survival guide for the rest of us.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away by Bill Bryson Bill Bryson, bestselling author of "A Walk in the Woods," has relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire, after two decades in England. In his new collection, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away," he holds up a mirror to U.S. culture, capturing its outrageous absurdities and the sweet side of small-town U.S.A.

Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France by Peter Mayle After four years away, Peter Mayle, bestselling author of "A Year in Provence" and "Toujours Provence," is back on his beloved French turf--this time with "Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France," a fascinating chronicle of his charming-but-complicated life in Provence.

Mali Blues : Traveling to an African Beat (Lonely Planet Journeys) by Joris Lieve, Lieve Joris, Sam Garrett (Translator) In Mali Blues, Belgian-born writer Lieve Joris travels to the West African countries of Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali--a region that to many Westerners seems obscure, even destitute and impoverished. Joris captures the strong will of West Africans, their enduring traditions and heritage, their thumping music, and their unmatched ability to carry on despite hardship and political turmoil. Joris's narrative is immediately captivating and personable; hers is an honest and inquisitive voice. At the journey's beginning in bustling Dakar, Senegal, on the Atlantic coast, Joris wonders, "How long would it take for New York to stop being a reference point for me?" As she absorbs the African cultural landscape, Joris exposes the tensions between a modern world and a traditional one, examining the many political battles among and within these countries. Like a skilled spelunker, Joris maneuvers into the caverns of the region, illuminating narrow conduits, previously unseen passages, and great rooms as she goes. She meets well-connected urbanites and those who live in remote rural lands, ultimately revealing a West Africa that balances, often precariously, between two worlds. But it is when Joris meets the Malinese blues singer Boubacar Traoré that her storytelling talents become fully orchestrated and most powerfully applied. Traoré's successful yet tragic story serves as a stunning testament to the spirit and struggles of the people of West Africa, a story that Joris conveys so well throughout these pages. --Byron Ricks

Science Fiction Recomendations:

Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright In London at the turn of the 20th century, H. G. Wells's time machine mysteriously appears--empty--in a squatter's flat. Whence did it come, and for what purpose was it sent? The answers to these questions--though not to an even greater mystery connected with the machine's appearance--are contained in a letter written by Wells on May 2, 1946, which falls into the hands of one David Lambert on the eve of the millennium. Lambert, an industrial archeologist, reads the letter foretelling the arrival of the machine and, half convinced the whole thing is a hoax, goes to the address Wells provides, where, at the appointed hour, the time machine materializes. Thus begins Ronald Wright's fine and fantastical novel A Scientific Romance. Romance can refer to an affair of the heart; it can also describe a heroic tale of extraordinary events. In A Scientific Romance, Wright plays on both possible meanings as he weaves a tragic story of betrayal and lost love into a larger narrative of time travel. Lambert, having lost the woman he loved, is reckless enough to test Wells's machine himself, catapulting 500 years into the future, where he finds London--indeed, all of England--a deserted, semitropical landscape. As David explores the future, he also sifts through his own past, creating in this Möbius strip of time and relationship a chilling cautionary tale about the limits of science and human ambition

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman Neverwhere's protagonist, Richard Mayhew, learns the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished. He ceases to exist in the ordinary world of London Above, and joins a quest through the dark and dangerous London Below, a shadow city of lost and forgotten people, places, and times. His companions are Door, who is trying to find out who hired the assassins who murdered her family and why; the Marquis of Carabas, a trickster who trades services for very big favors; and Hunter, a mysterious lady who guards bodies and hunts only the biggest game. London Below is a wonderfully realized shadow world, and the story plunges through it like an express passing local stations, with plenty of action and a satisfying conclusion.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis Set in near-future Oxford, where temporal dislocation is all part of an academic's workday, "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is the charming, witty tale of time-traveler Ned Henry's desperate attempts to locate a bizarre Victorian church relic, the bishop's bird stump, before discrepancies in the time net allow the Nazis to win World War II.

In the Garden of Iden: A Novel of the Company by Kage Baker "In the Garden of Iden" is the lively, funny tale of Mendoza, plucked as a child from the grip of the Spanish Inquisition and made immortal by the Company. Mendoza travels back in time to 16th-century England in an expedition that hovers hilariously near the brink of disaster as she strains the boundaries of ladylike behavior.

History Recomendations:

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians by Rudolph M. Bell Bestseller lists routinely include advice books instructing attentive readers on everything from how to create a life of material and spiritual abundance to how to delay the aging process. While addressing specific issues, such how-to books reflect larger social concerns that characterize a particular time period, and, as such, they can be read as sociological and historical documents. Rudolph M. Bell, professor of history at Rutgers University, takes the rare step of investing the genre--usually considered ephemeral or dismissed as "fluff"--with just such historical importance. "How to Do It" offers an insightful, frequently humorous examination of 16th-century middle-class Italian life as reflected in the abundance of advice books that circulated during the period.

The Year 1000 : What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium : An Englishman's World by Robert Lacey, Danny Denzinger, Danny Danzinger "August was the month when flies started to become a problem, buzzing round the dung heaps in the corner of every farmyard and hovering over the open cesspits of human refuse that were located outside every house." Although daily dangers were many, housing uncomfortable, and the dominant smells unpleasant indeed, life in England at the turn of the previous millennium was not at all bad, write journalists Lacey and Danziger. "If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000," they continue, "the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was--very much the size of anyone alive today." The Anglo-Saxons were not only tall, but also generally well fed and healthy, more so than many Britons only a few generations ago. Writing in a breezy, often humorous style, Lacey and Danziger draw on the medieval Julius Work Calendar, a document detailing everyday life around A.D. 1000, to reconstruct the spirit and reality of the era. Light though their touch is, they've done their homework, and they take the reader on a well-documented and enjoyable month-by-month tour through a single year, touching on such matters as religious belief, superstition, medicine, cuisine, agriculture, and politics, as well as contemporary ideas of the self and society. Readers should find the authors' discussions of famine and plague a refreshing break from present-day millennial worries, and a very stimulating introduction to medieval English history. --Gregory McNamee

Chronicles of the Barbarians: Firsthand Accounts of Pillage and Conquest from the Ancient World to the Fall of Constantinople edited by David W. McCullough "When a Scythian overthrows his first enemy," Herodotus tells us, "he drinks his blood; and presents the king with the heads of the enemies he has killed in battle; for if he brings a head, he shares the booty that they take, but not if he does not bring one. He skins it in the following manner..." Well, okay, perhaps we don't need to revisit *that* part of the classics just now. But if you have a hankering for ancient and early-medieval history, "Chronicles of the Barbarians" will take you straight to the source. Among the other Greek and Roman authors cited in this anthology are Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, and Julius Caesar; later sections provide eyewitness glimpses of Genghis Khan ("in the subjugation of his foes his rigour and severity had the taste of poison") and Tamerlane (who "loved bold and brave soldiers, by whose aid opened the locks of terror and tore in pieces men like lions and through them and their battles overturned the heights of mountains"). One caveat: Edward Gibbon's passages on the death of Alaric and the Vandal attack on Rome are very eloquent, but they are, properly speaking, out of place in a collection of firsthand reports.

The Jew of New York by Ben Katchor Whether chronicling the metropolitan peregrinations of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, or weaving together history and fantasy in 19th- century New York, Ben Katchor's comics, filled with scratchy figures moving through gray-washed streets, feel like the relics of a half- forgotten dream. The Jew of New York takes an obscure historical footnote--an attempt in 1825 to establish a Jewish homeland in upstate New York--and spins it into an intricate tale of a rapidly developing city and its diverse inhabitants, from one-legged actresses, to wandering Jews, to masked anti-Semites. The plot wanders from place to place, never predictable, but always fascinating. The result is a like a story by Paul Auster, rewritten by Charles Dickens, as Katchor gradually draws the reader into his bizarre but precisely imagined world. Weird conspiracies, religious fanaticism, and a plan to carbonate Lake Erie are just three of the threads which Katchor weaves together, creating a version of 1830's New York that captures the spirit of the times in a way that history cannot. The reader is never quite sure what is true, yet this powerfully imagined work is irresistibly compelling. Katchor's disturbing, deeply layered historical palimpsest transforms his collection of misfit characters and the city that they inhabit into something rich and strange.

The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 by Meirion and Susie Harries Meirion and Susie Harries describe World War I as the portal through which the United States stepped into the 20th century. As a relatively naive and still young nation, the United States entered the European war to defend ideals of democracy and self-determination. It emerged from the conflict not as a clear victor but as a nation transformed: militarized, nationalistic, rife with a hatred of "foreigners," and saddled by class and racial divisions. The Harries illustrate how mobilization for "total war" altered America, placing great emphasis on the growth of the federal government's role in American society and the often-maligned sacrifices made by Americans. The authors examined archival material from American, British, and French sources, lending complexity and originality to their work. "The Last Days of Innocence" is a challenging, at times controversial, revisionist account of America's involvement in the Great War and its lasting effects on American government and society.