Book Lust to Go Part 4

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, Fort.i.tude, 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 subt.i.tle, 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 Circ.u.mnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen; and A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca by Andres Resendez (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 a.s.sociation, 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 t.i.tle? (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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 h.e.l.l: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by William Trotter.

Monika f.a.gerholm's first novel, written after publis.h.i.+ng two collections of short stories, is Wonderful Women by the Sea, which takes place in her native Finland. I especially loved f.a.gerholm'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 Vaino 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.

Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch examines evolution in the light of the relatively rapid changes that take place in the beak size and shape of a species of bird known as Darwin's finches, found mainly in the Galapagos. It's wonderfully written, extremely readable, and a superb example of the best kind of popular science writing.

Three good novels featuring Darwin and/or the Galapagos are The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine (which is not about Darwin at all, but takes place in the Galapagos); Harry Thompson's Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel To the Edge of the World (the main characters are the captain of the Beagle and his most famous pa.s.senger, Charles Darwin); and Mr. Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald, a remarkable novel about the young man whom Darwin's biographer Janet Browne described as "the unacknowledged shadow behind every triumph." At fifteen, Syms Covington joined the crew of the HMS Beagle; now an elderly man, Covington is overcome by the guilt he still feels in being part of a life's work that will challenge humanity's view of itself.

And if you get really interested in Darwin and his life, don't forget that Irving Stone, the grandfather of biographical fiction (best known for his novels about Michaelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh), also wrote The Origin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin.

GUERNICA.

Guernica is a small town in the Basque region of Spain. What most people know about the place is Pablo Pica.s.so's magnificent painting, which depicts-as probably only Pica.s.so could-the brutal destruction of the town by German Luftwaffe bombs on April 26, 1937. Here are two novels in which Guernica plays a part:Dave Boling's Guernica Lawrence Thornton's Under the Gypsy Moon And here are two wonderfully readable works of nonfiction that describe the genesis of Pica.s.so's famous painting: Russell Martin's Pica.s.so's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World Gijs van Hensbergen's Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon GUERNSEY: HISTORY IN FICTION.

This British island located near France in the English Channel was occupied by the Germans during World War II. This event is a central plot point in these three excellent novels, all of which bring the island to life, especially during this particularly difficult time in its history:Tim Binding's Lying with the Enemy G. B. Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society HAIL, COLOMBIA!.

Colombia is, more than most countries, greater than the sum of its parts. What we hear about-murders, drug cartels, kidnappings, and government incompetence at best and wholesale law-breaking at worst-as well as other various and sundry unsavory events, do const.i.tute part of the country's past and present. These incidents are clearly the subtext of the books mentioned here. Nonetheless, there's more to Colombia than those things.

Colombia's greatest writer is, of course, n.o.bel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In News of a Kidnapping, an example of exemplary journalism, Garcia Marquez reports on the events following the U.S. signature on a treaty that allows for the extradition of Colombian citizens, when the leaders of the Medellin drug cartel decided to use extra-legal methods to change the minds (and the laws) of both governments. If after reading that book you want to learn more about Garcia Marquez, take a look at Living to Tell the Tale, the first of his projected three memoirs, as well as Gerald Martin's Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life.

Novels set in Colombia include Dalia Rabinovich's Flora's Suitcase , the story of a young married Jewish couple from Cincinnati who move to Colombia in the 1930s; Tales from the Town of Widows by James Canon; and two books by Colombian writers: Alvaro Mutis's The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll and Juan Gabriel Vasquez's The Informers.

As for nonfiction, try these: Ingrid Betancourt's memoir Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia recounts the events surrounding her attempt to become president of Colombia (which included being kidnapped and held for more than six years). In the process of describing her experiences, she helps readers understand her complex country. Although there have been books contradicting some of the material in here (especially her behavior during the kidnapping ordeal), I think it's a valuable read.

Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia by Garry Leech is set against the eleven hours he was "detained" by FARC, a guerilla group in Colombia.

I'll read anything by Mark Bowden-his writing is crisp and his subjects are fascinating. In Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, he describes the efforts of U.S. intelligence and other agencies to capture drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was at the time one of the most powerful cocaine traffickers.

Journalist Silvana Paternostro's My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind provides an excellent and personal narrative history of the author's native country.

HAWAII.

My father's brother served in the U.S. Army in Hawaii in the early 1930s, and to the end of his life talked about its physical beauty. It's true that the countryside could hardly have been more lush, but-as can be seen from the books described here-the history of the islands is filled with more than a little tragedy. So for a well-rounded picture of Hawaii, both its past and its present, take a look at these books.

Fiction.

James Michener's Hawaii is probably the first book that comes to mind when you're thinking of what to read about the islands, but it shouldn't be the last.

Earl Derr Biggers wrote only six Charlie Chan mysteries, but the Chinese American detective is an iconic figure in the mystery canon. Try House Without a Key, set in Hawaii, to get a sense of both the place and the detective.

Alan Brennert has written two vibrant novels about the islands. Moloka'i is the story of a young girl with leprosy who spends her life in exile on the island of Molokai. It's perhaps especially relevant now since Father Damien, a Belgian priest who devoted his life to working with Molokai citizens who had Hansen's disease, was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2009. (If you find the subject matter of this novel intriguing, take a look at John Tayman's moving and informative The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.) Brennert's second novel, Honolulu, is about a young Korean girl who comes to Honolulu as a "picture bride" in 1914.

Yos.h.i.+ko Uchida's Picture Bride also offers an excellent look at what life was like for the j.a.panese and Filipino workers on the island's plantation camps.

Other novels include Name Me n.o.body by Lois-AnnYamanaka (as well as her other works of fiction); Lee A.Tonouchi's da word (yes, no initial capital letters), a collection of short stories written in pidgin; Jessica K. Saiki's From the Lanai and Other Hawaii Stories; James Houston's Bird of Another Heaven; Randy Sue Coburn's A Better View of Paradise; and the novels of Hawaii-born Kiana Davenport. I've never forgotten reading her very first novel, Shark Dialogues, a history of Hawaii as seen through the lives of four generations of a family, and have found her later novels-House of Many G.o.ds and Song of the Exile-to be equally good.

Memoirs.

Isabella Bird's Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawai'i's Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes is a series of letters written in 1871 to her sister, full of wonderful descriptions of the world of Hawaii before western culture so dramatically altered it.

In Lucinda Fleeson's Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impa.s.sioned Life on an Imperiled Island, a journalist from Philadelphia takes a job with Hawaii's National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island of Kauai. This is an excellent choice for eco-readers.

Along with her own story, Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii, relates her country's tragic history in Hawai'i's Story. This should be required reading for anyone contemplating a trip there.

And don't neglect Garrett Hongo's Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i; Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance; Susanna Moore's Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i; and Tara Bray Smith's West of Then: A Mother, a Daughter, and a Journey Past Paradise.

HIKING THE (FILL IN THE BLANK) TRAIL.

These are books about those intrepid souls who attempt to go from one end of a long, long trail to the other, carrying their packs up and over mountain pa.s.ses, fording rivers, and subsisting on beef jerky and varieties of freeze-dried food. As I've learned from the books mentioned here, this group of hardy souls are known as "thru-hikers." You can usually tell who they are by their lean looks, their sometimes mildewed appearance (and odor), their insatiable hunger when they're taking one of their rare rest days, and, when it's all done, their well-deserved air of having finished a particularly onerous task.

The four major long-distance trails in the Americas are the Pacific Crest, the Appalachian, the Continental Divide, and the longest of all, the American Discovery Trail, which is more than 6,800 miles long and crosses fifteen states. How (or why) do people attempt these hikes? Read on.

When Dan White and his girlfriend, Melissa, decide to give up their newspaper jobs in Connecticut and walk the 2,650 miles of the formidable Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from Mexico to British Columbia, through desert and rain forest, they have no idea what they've let themselves in for. As described in The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind-and Almost Found Myself-on the Pacific Crest Trail, their friends can't understand why they're doing it and their parents fear that they won't survive the experience. After vicariously sharing the couple's experiences with-among other things-exhaustion, sunstroke, giardia, bears, equipment malfunctions, blisters, hallucinations, and a particularly painful and unusual encounter with a cactus, readers will simultaneously applaud their determination to keep going and probably question their sanity.

Barbara Egbert's Zero Days: The Real-Life Adventure of Captain Bligh, Nellie Bly, and 10-year-old Scrambler on the Pacific Crest Trail relates her family's seven months of adventures on the trail. I particularly enjoyed reading the excerpts she includes from her daughter's diary, which was written along the way. Take note of both the spelling and Mary's unquenchable exuberance. Mary (aka Scrambler) is the youngest person to ever have thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. She must be quite a kid. (Incidentally, "zero days" are those in which you're off the trail, was.h.i.+ng, showering, eating, and generally recharging.) Another entertaining (and exhausting) account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is Angela and Duffy Ballard's A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple's Trial by Trail, in which the couple takes turns describing their trek from Mexico to Canada.

Incidentally, if you find yourself intrigued by the Appalachian Trail, find a copy of Pick Up Sticks by Emma Lathen, a marvelously devious mystery set on and around the New Hamps.h.i.+re part of the trail.

HOLLANDAYS.

Though it's a small country, it's mighty (good) for readers. Here are my choices (both nonfiction and fiction) for the traveler to the Netherlands.

Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance David Liss's The Coffee Trader (a novel set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam) Margriet de Moor's The Storm (a wrenching novel based on a true event: the unpredicted 1953 hurricane that devastated the Netherlands and killed about two thousand people) Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever Simon Schama's The Embarra.s.sment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age David Winner's Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer HONG KONG.

Most of the books I've included in this section, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, have two themes: World War II and the j.a.panese invasion and resulting occupation of the island, and/or Hong Kong's long history as part of the British Empire (since the first Opium War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842), and the handover, in 1997, to mainland China. These are either the overt subjects of the books or the issues that flow just beneath the surface of the text.

In Janice Y. K. Lee's The Piano Teacher, Hong Kong is so well portrayed that it becomes one of the main characters of this first novel. All the ingredients for an addictive soap opera are here: love, death, honor, betrayal, secrets, and surprises, but Lee's a.s.sured writing takes this historical novel beyond its sudsy underpinnings. The novel moves back and forth between the 1940s/World War II and the 1950s/the war's aftermath, and focuses on how both have affected Will Truesdale, an enigmatic British chauffeur to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. Lee keeps the plot moving quickly while forcing us to consider the moral ambiguities that face people trying to survive during wartime, and to ask ourselves just how much we would compromise of our beliefs and our sense of right and wrong in order to live.

Mrs. Pollifax, the fictional (and under very deep cover: a dithery elderly woman with a penchant for unusual hats) CIA operative, arrives in Hong Kong to do some sleuthing in Dorothy Gilman's novel Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha.

The Honourable Schoolboy is the only book by John le Carre that I loved the first time around but have never been able to bring myself to reread (because of what I perceived as its desperate sadness). It's the more-or-less sequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and is set partly in Hong Kong during the height of the Cold War.

Gail Tsukiyama's Night of Many Dreams takes place both during the j.a.panese occupation of Hong Kong in the 1940s and twenty-five years later. It's the story of Joan and Emma Lew, who are fourteen and nine when the book opens.As with all Tsukiyama's novels, you come to care deeply for the fate of her characters.

James Clavell's n.o.ble House, the third (and maybe best) in a series that includes Tai-Pan and Gai-Jin, is an engrossing saga and a perfect way to get a sense of history with a fast-moving plot attached. Or a fast-moving plot with a lot of history included.

And definitely don't miss checking out these, as well: Jess Row's The Train to Lo Wu: Stories; Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong; Paul Theroux's novel Kowloon Tong; The Last Six Million Seconds, a thriller by John Burdett; Alice Greenway's White Ghost Girls (a novel); John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor; and Martin Booth's memoir Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood, set in the 1950s.

ICELAND.

One of the things I remember best about the 1960s is that the cheapest way to fly to Europe from the United States was on Icelandair. The benefit of flying with them was that you got to stop in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik. So I've always been on the lookout for books set there. Here are some I've enjoyed.

The mysteries of Arnaldur Indridason are fine examples of police procedurals. It's probably best to read them in order (or at least as much as we can, because not all of them have been published in the United States), beginning with Jar City. Unlike many police procedural series, we don't learn much about the personal lives of the detectives, but the main policeman, Erlendur Sveinsson, is (appropriately for the climate) generally dejected, and his relations.h.i.+p with his kids (with whom he evidently gave up all contact when he divorced) is awful (although it improves slowly throughout the series). Optimistic readers can see hope on the horizon (family-wise, if generally not for a society that seems on the brink of anger and despair) in The Draining Lake and Arctic Chill.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir is the author of another crime series:Last Rituals and My Soul to Take both feature lawyerThora Gudmundsdottir.

Bill Holm's The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland describes how a Minnesotan moves to Iceland (for a part of every year) in order to explore his Icelandic heritage.

Three other books set in Iceland include Halldor Laxness's early twentieth-century saga, Independent People and Iceland: Land of the Sagas by Jon Krakauer and David Roberts. Lawrence Millman's Last Places: A Journey in the North has a good chapter on Iceland (along with sections on Greenland, Labrador, and the Faraoe Islands). And don't forget the fictional travelogue, The Tricking of Freya, by Christina Sunley.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF . . .

If you're unsure of exactly where you want to travel, one way to decide is to pick a traveler of the past and follow in his or her footsteps. My thanks to these authors who did exactly that, and thus gave me many pleasurable hours of reading.

Any traveler with a good sole (sorry!) won't want to miss meeting one of the greatest travelers ever: Ibn Battutah, or more familiarly, IB. His full name is Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battutah. (You may see his very last name spelled without a final "h" in some of the books and articles about him.) He was born at the beginning of the fourteenth century in what is now Tangier, made his pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-one, and then simply never stopped traveling. In two of the most delightful books I've ever encountered, Arabic scholar and noted travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith recounts his journey following in the footsteps of the great traveler. The first is Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam's Greatest Traveler, in which Mackintosh-Smith duplicated the first half of IB's trip. These two travelers-Battutah and Mackintosh-Smith-separated by more than six hundred years and different cultures, are terrific companions: it appears that neither ever got bored, nor met someone he didn't enjoy talking with, and each approached every new day as a great adventure. The pleasure continues in The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah.

William Dalrymple describes how he traveled the same journey as Marco Polo-from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Xanadu, which was Emperor Kublai Khan's summer capital (a not-easy overland trek that covered, all told, about twelve thousand miles)-in In Xanadu: A Quest. What I most enjoyed was how Dalrymple wove Polo's accounts with his own experiences along the way.

Tim Butcher became obsessed (I don't think that's too strong a term) with African explorer H. M. Stanley, and decided to replicate his dangerous 1864 journey mapping the Congo River. In Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart, he not only describes the immediate problems he encounters on his trip (corrupt officials, a war that won't end, trouble in the adjoining countries that inevitably seeped into the Congo), but also gives the armchair traveler a history of this troubled nation, once known as the Belgian Congo, and now the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend, Patrick Symmes retraces Che's 1952 journey over the back roads of South America. While describing his own experiences-several crazily dangerous-Symmes also outlines the political development of one of the twentieth century's iconic figures.

Other "In the Footsteps of . . ." books that I've enjoyed a lot are In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan by John DeFrancis; One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley by Caroline Alexander (West Africa during the Victorian era); Tony Horwitz's Blue Lat.i.tudes: Going Where Captain Cook Has Boldly Gone Before; The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History by Justin Marozzi; Michael Woods's In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great; as well as Hal Roth's We Followed Odysseus and No Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey by Scott Huler. (I loved that Huler's journey was initiated by a book group dedicated to reading James Joyce's Ulysses.) And while Tim Severin's In Search of Robinson Crusoe is not exactly an "In the Footsteps of . . ." book, it's the perfect read for fans of Defoe's novel, which was based (somewhat loosely, we learn) on the adventures of Alexander Selkirk. Another view of the same events can be found in Diana Souhami's equally engrossing Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe.

INDICATIVE OF INDONESIA.

Very few countries have easy births or find their way to adulthood and independence a simple journey, but Indonesia's was perhaps more difficult than most. Dutch colonization began in the seventeenth century and continued for more than two hundred years, and the area was occupied by j.a.pan from 1942 to 1945. After years of negotiation with the Netherlands (and U.N. intervention), the country became independent in 1949, although its first free elections didn't take place until 1999. It's now the third-largest democracy in the world, and it also has the world's largest population of Muslims. It's composed of 17,508 islands, many spa.r.s.ely populated.

Following its independence, the appointment of Sukarno as president, and increasingly authoritarian rule, Indonesia has been plagued by wars both large and small. After a b.l.o.o.d.y coup in 1965-the best guess is that between five hundred thousand and a million people were killed-Sukarno was deposed and replaced with General Suharto, who headed the military at the time.

That's a very brief historical overview that will provide, I hope, the necessary background to get the absolute most out of these marvelous books that I describe here.

You need to begin your reading of Indonesian literature with the novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, especially his Buru Quartet, which is composed of This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Gla.s.s, all ably translated by Max Lane. They're set in the Dutch East Indies-now called Java (one of the provinces of Indonesia)-and give us a nuanced and powerful picture of colonialism and its discontents. For many years, Toer's work was banned in Indonesia; in fact, Toer memorized the first two books of the quartet when he was in a prison camp and denied all writing materials.

Although they're not particularly current (1981 and 1999, respectively), there are useful chapters about Islam and Indonesia in V. S. Naipaul's Among the Believers and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples.

Twenty-one vignettes make up Rob Goodfellow's entertaining collection The Green Iguana, all centered around his life as an Australian expat in Bali and Java.

Sabine Kuegler describes her childhood in the 1980s and '90s, living among the primitive Fayu peoples of Indonesia with her missionary parents in Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds. She paints a memorable picture of a girl growing up in a culture that is totally foreign to most western readers.

Thriller fans will want to track down Christopher J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously, set during 1965, Indonesia's especially turbulent year. When I was reading this, I felt that I needed gla.s.s after gla.s.s of something cold-iced tea, Pepsi, water-to counteract the heated atmosphere of the setting. And the movie based on the novel is also terrific. And those who love both magic realism and character-driven novels shouldn't miss Erick Setiawan's Of Bees and Mist.

A memoir of life in the brutal j.a.panese internment camps during World War II is The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage by Clara Olink Kelly.

Tash Aw's brilliant novel Map of the Invisible World takes place in 1965, during a particularly b.l.o.o.d.y crackdown on Dutch citizens in Sukarno's Indonesia. His first published work of fiction, The Harmony Silk Factory, provided a strong hint of his talents-and his second book confirms them. So, you read it here first: someday Aw will win a well-deserved n.o.bel Prize for Literature.

INSIDE THE INSIDE Pa.s.sAGE.

Few journeys give the traveler an immediate sense of the vastness and sheer scale of our planet. The Inside Pa.s.sage, a thousand-mile trek from Puget Sound up the coast of British Columbia to southeast Alaska, is one of them. Whether you travel by cruise s.h.i.+p, ferry boat, or smaller craft you will be struck by the serene beauty of the channels and islands, as well as the majestic expanse of the unending forests.

In Pa.s.sage to Juneau Jonathan Raban follows the journey and journals from Captain George Vancouver's exploration of the Inside Pa.s.sage in the 1790s. To me, Raban is always at his best in a sailboat-his quiet observations, interactions with strangers, and evocation of simple pleasures capture what is unique about a boat journey.

Another small boat journey/memoir that captures the imagination is The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. The author began exploring British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands with her five children during the 1920s and '30s.You come away from this story envying their experience, and wis.h.i.+ng that all children could have such summer memories.

Most books about the Inside Pa.s.sage focus on the journey up to Alaska. The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig starts in Sitka and heads south. Based on an actual incident from 1853, Doig's novel describes the perilous trip of four indentured servants who escape a Russian work camp in a stolen canoe and manage to paddle over a thousand miles to Astoria, Oregon.

Another author who evokes the spirit of the Inside Pa.s.sage is Susan Vreeland; in The Forest Lover she imaginatively re-creates the world of Canadian artist Emily Carr. Carr spent her entire career trying to capture the spirit of the vast forests and native villages of British Columbia in her books and paintings.

Speaking of vast forests, don't miss John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, which relates the haunting true story of Grant Hadwin, a logger/activist in the Queen Charlotte Islands who during a bizarre rage destroyed a unique "golden" spruce that had been sacred to the Haida Indians. No other recent story I know evokes the majestic scale of the forests along the coast of British Columbia.

Many cruise s.h.i.+ps end their trips in Haines. For a good picture of what it's like to live in one of Alaska's smaller cities, try If You Lived Here I'd Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska and Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs: Family, Friends, and Faith in Small-Town Alaska by Heather Lende.