Book Lust to Go Part 3

Trinidad and Tobago.

Noir mystery fans shouldn't miss Trinidad Noir, part of the Noir series published by Akashic Books. This one is edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason. Dark, dark, dark, or should I say to better effect: noir, noir, noir.

Earl Lovelace's Salt shows the effects of colonialism on Trinidadian society and explores the diversity of its populace. But this is definitely not a humorless treatise-it's instead a novel that's alive with people and ideas; a must-read for anyone interested in Trinidadian history and culture.

Trinidad's n.o.bel Prize-winning writer V. S. Naipaul turns to nonfiction in The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History. Fiction readers won't want to miss Naipaul's novels that are set in his birthplace-The Mystic Ma.s.seur and A House for Mr. Biswas are my two favorites of his early novels.You might want to read his own writing before you tackle his biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. I usually think it's better to get to know a person's writings before you meet him or her in person.

I've also enjoyed the novels of Elizabeth Nunez, especially Bruised Hibiscus and Anna In-Between.

And the Others . . .

Don't forget the other Caribbean Islands and their authors, including St. Lucia's Derek Walcott, who won the n.o.bel Prize in 1992. Try Omeros, a retelling of Homer that is set primarily in the waters of the Caribbean. And Maryse Conde writes about her grandmother's life on the island of Marie-Galante, a dependency of Guadeloupe, in Victoire. The author calls this mix of family history and fiction a "reconst.i.tution." Whatever you call it-novel, biography, or a combination of the two-it's one of the best depictions of island life.

CHESAPEAKE BAY.

I went to college in Annapolis, Maryland, and still remember how beautiful the Chesapeake Bay area was. Here are some books that give you a sense of its appeal, as well as making clear that beauty is often only skin deep, and the ecology of the place (both natural and man made) doesn't make one sanguine about its future.

Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay by William Warner Chesapeake by James Michener An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake by Tom Horton, who reported on environmental issues for the Baltimore Sun newspaper Mason's Retreat, a novel by Christopher Tilghman Skipjack: The Story of America's Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White Song Yet Sung, a historical novel by James McBride The Tidewater Tales: A Novel and The Development by John Barth The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay by Tim Junkin CHINA: THE MIDDLE KINGDOM.

In the thirteenth century, the great traveler Marco Polo supposedly spent seventeen years with the emperor Kublai Khan. In Polo's memoir, The Description of the World, he describes Kublai Khan's magnificent palace. Or at least some scholars think he is describing what he saw-others believe that Polo was never really in China at all and simply concocted his description from merchants and others that he met along the Silk Road. We don't have to decide here whether or not Polo actually went to China and wrote about it-enough other people did to keep us reading for years, if not decades and lifetimes. In fact, books about the Middle Kingdom could probably fill Book l.u.s.t To Go, so I had to be very picky about what I included. Here then, in alphabetical order by author (and including both fiction and nonfiction, old and new), is where I'd begin my reading.

Joe Bennett's Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy (I've also seen editions with a slightly different subt.i.tle.) Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and Among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (gut-wrenchingly painful subject, handled with dignity) Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China Da Chen's two memoirs: Colors of the Mountain and Sounds of the River Shen Congwen's Border Town (a novel set before the Chinese Revolution and originally published in 1934) Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (great cover, too) Gretel Ehrlich's Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist Emily Hahn's China to Me Peter Hessler's three marvelous books: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present; and Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (It's in the latter that Hessler coins the phrase "sinomapped" for those frequent times when his out-of-date book of driving maps led him to dead ends, nonexistent roads, and other untenable situations.) Ha Jin's stories, collected in Ocean of Words and A Good Fall Lincoln Kaye's Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha: And Other Encounters in China and Tibet Yiyun Li's The Vagrants Jen Lin-Liu's Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China Rosemary Mahoney's The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil Zachary Mexico's China Underground Kirsty Needham's A Season in Red: My Great Leap Forward into the New China Jiang Rong's novel Wolf Totem Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China, a solid yet readable history of the country that covers the sixteenth century to 1989 Jonathan Tel's The Beijing of Possibilities is a collection of stories set just before the 2008 Olympic games that-despite their surrealism and Italo Calvinoist tendencies (that's a compliment, actually)-depict Beijing in all its contradictory glory and shame.

Among the other plusses of Colin Thubron's Shadow of the Silk Road-an intricate weaving of history, sociology, philosophy, and contemporary events along a seven-thousand-mile journey-there's one brilliant sentence that I felt summed up modern China-that is, China of the twenty-first century: "All at once the future had grown more potent than the past." Those dozen words lead one in so many different directions: the Cultural Revolution, the life and death of dynasties, Islam, Buddhism, the Internet; they offer so much to think about. And don't miss Thubron's other great travel book about this country, Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China.

J. Maarten Troost's Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, Or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries (set in the T'ang Dynasty), especially The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Maze Murders Simon Winchester's The River at the Center of the World: A Journey up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time Jan Wong's Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found Lijia Zhang's "Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China For a readable account of the Great March, which ultimately led to the victory of the Chinese Communists against the Nationalist army, take a look at Dean King's Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival.

If you're willing to add a little fantasy to your historical fiction, check out Guy Gavriel Kay's most wonderful Under Heaven, which takes place during the period of China's T'ang Dynasty from 618 to 970.You can watch my interview with Kay at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=7030813.

CLIMB EV'RY MOUNTAIN Most of these t.i.tles could have been placed in the first section of this book, "A Is for Adventure," but it seemed that since there are so many excellent books on mountain climbing, they deserved their own section. I do have to say, though, that of all my virtual travel moments, these were among my most emotionally draining reading experiences.

Edward Whymper, who was the first person to summit the Matterhorn, called what he did "mountain scrambling." He tells of his success (at long last: there were several failures that preceded it) in Scrambles Amongst the Alps: In the Years 1860-69. Somehow "scrambling" brings the whole idea of ascending a mountain a little closer to the realm of possibility. Possibly.

Another book that re-creates the past in the world of mountain climbing is Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers. In it, Daniel Arnold retraces famous climbs-from 1864 to 1931-in the Sierra Nevadas. Part memoir, part biography, part nature study and adventure travel, this book is filled with an appreciation of the achievements of early climbers, whom we know about (if at all) by the mountains that bear their names.

A memoir that also explores the history of mountain climbing is former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's Of Men and Mountains.

For anyone interested in the whys, whens, whos, and hows of climbing in the Himalayas, Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver is the book to choose. Although I didn't find it dry reading, this is not really a book for the casual reader, but rather for someone really consumed by the topic.

Ed Viesturs, mountain climber and writer, joined forces with prolific author David Roberts to write K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain. K2, located in the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan, is known among climbers as "the holy grail of mountaineering," and Viesturs and Roberts have compiled stories from six of the most intense and riveting climbing seasons in the mountain's relatively recent history-1938, 1939, 1954, 1986, and 2008.

Another book about K2 that I thoroughly enjoyed is Jennifer Jordan's Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain . It's somewhat awe-inspiring (and more than somewhat scary) to read about the sacrifices these women made to fulfill their dreams of climbing K2.

James Salter is one of the twentieth century's best (and probably these days, most under-read) writers. If by chance you happen to meet another Salter fan, it's a sign that the friendship was meant to be. Although I was dazzled by the writing of both Light Years (fiction) and Burning the Days (memoir), I found his novel Solo Faces to be a fascinating character study and probably the best mountain climbing novel I've ever read. In it, he says: The rock is like the surface of the sea, constant yet never the same. Two climbers going over the identical route will each manage in a different way. Their reach is not the same, their confidence, their desire. Sometimes the way narrows, the holds are few, there are not choices-the mountain is inflexible in its demands-but usually one is free to climb at will.

When John Harlin III was nine years old, his good-looking, fearless father, known among the mountain climbing community as "the blond G.o.d," died on the north face of the Eiger, one of the Swiss Alps. Breaking a promise to his mother not to follow in his father's climbing footsteps, John realized that he had to at least attempt to conquer the mountain on which his father died. The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father won't disappoint those who enjoy true adventures and climbing memoirs.

Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit explores in fluid, evocative prose what motivates climbers (including the author himself) to climb a mountain-almost any mountain.

In Georgina Howell's riveting biography, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (mentioned in the Arabia Deserta section), there's a pulse-pounding account of one of Bell's ascents in the Alps.

Bree Loewen spent three years as a climbing ranger on Mount Rainier; she recounts the triumphs and tragedies in Pickets and Dead Men: Seasons on Rainier.

COMICS WITH A SENSE OF PLACE.

Comics, with their blend of image and text, can create a strong sense of place. The emphasis on images gives birth to landscapes, dress, details of buildings, and a range of perspectives. The focus on text brings to life speech patterns and quick shots of brief and vivid descriptions. While the visual nature of comics demands that landscape is always part of the picture, sometimes comics become all about location, bringing a place to visual and textual life. Here are some fantastic comics that transport readers to another locale.

Much of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic takes place in Bechdel's family home (which she vividly details in her photo-realistic style), but the comic is also set, in part, in New York City, and Bechdel brings fine-grain detail to the skyline and streets.

From h.e.l.l, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Eddie Campbell, allows us to step into a vividly re-created world of London during the time of Jack the Ripper. Campbell's seething streets and watery lights can easily evoke pure terror in the jittery reader.

John Porcellino divides Th.o.r.eau at Walden into four seasons so that we can see Walden Pond in a series of clear and elegant lines. The impressionistic text and images combine to evoke Th.o.r.eau's philosophy and the landscape that helped shape it.

Greg Rucka's two volumes of Whiteout are mysteries featuring U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko, set in Antarctica. The ill.u.s.trations are by Steve Lieber.

Joshua Neufeld introduces us to a variety of people in his splendid graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. It's viscerally moving and intellectually satisfying.

Using the medium of the graphic novel to great effect, Jason Lutes's Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke offer a history of the city in a way that's accessible and yet mind-opening. All the benefits of a good novel are here: three-dimensional characters, a dynamic plot, and a well-drawn setting, and the pictures expand the story most satisfyingly.These two volumes were originally part of his ongoing comic book series, called, quite simply, Berlin.

Bryan Talbot's dazzlingly brilliant Alice in Sunderland explores the connections between Sunderland, Talbot's beloved hometown in the northeast corner of England, and another of his great loves, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. He offers up a vivid history of the place from Roman times to the present; the accompanying ill.u.s.trations include drawings, photos, and reproductions of newspaper articles, letters, and much more. Reading this was one of the richest experiences of my life.

Another author/ill.u.s.trator to check out is Guy Delisle. His books include Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,Burma Chronicles, and Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China.

CONGO: FROM COLONIALISM TO CATASTROPHE.

My reading has not turned up too many native Congolese writers whose works are easily available in English. The one I found-whose writing is nicely reminiscent of Graham Greene-is Emmanuel Dongala (see below). But there are many good books available about this Central African nation whose history is bleak and violent, and whose present does not lead one to an optimistic view of its future.

Larry Devlin's Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone Emmanuel Dongala's Little Boys Come from the Stars (one of two novels on this list) Che Guevara's The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo Pagan Kennedy's Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson's The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Through the Congo Bryan Mealer's All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo Redmond O'Hanlon's No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness W. T. Tyler's The Consul's Wife (the other novel on this list) Vanessa Woods's Bon.o.bo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo (animal lovers will really enjoy this) CORFU.

Who hasn't dreamed of running off to some sun-drenched island? Corfu is certainly a popular destination for dreamers.

One of the best reasons for making Corfu your island destination (especially if you're a reader) is that it's the setting of one of the funniest books ever written: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. Its sequels, while maybe not up to the joyful perfection of the first book, are no slouches, either: Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the G.o.ds definitely carry on the humor.

But don't miss these other t.i.tles: while they may not have the bestiary that characterize Durrell's books, they all have their special charms.

Lawrence Durrell (yes, Gerald's sibling, although seemingly far less attached to animals than his brother) wrote Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (a little of it fiction, a little bit of it nonfiction).

Emma Tennant's A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece and Corfu Banquet: A Memoir with Seasonal Recipes will please both homebodies and foodies.

And how could I not include Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic? It's the best sort of romantic suspense, the kind that only Stewart could write. And, of course, it's set in Corfu.

CORNWALL'S CHARMS Cornwall is at the southwestern tip of England, and for such a relatively small place it's a treasure trove for literarily inclined readers (perhaps especially romance readers).

Daphne du Maurier set many of her gothic novels in and around Cornwall, including My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca. I'll never forget the first lines of the former: "They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though." Those sentences still send a shiver up my spine.

Malcolm MacDonald's The Carringtons of Helston is a good choice for readers who enjoy family sagas.

If what you love is a series of historical novels, you can't do much better than Winston Graham's Poldark series.These twelve novels are set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.They need to be read in order, beginning with Ross Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall 1783-1787 and ending (many months of reading later, I'm sure) with Bella Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall 1818-1820.

The evocative romance novels by Rosemary Aitken that I've read are all set in Cornwall, many of them in the village of Penvarris, including The Silent Sh.o.r.e and Stormy Waters; I'd also suggest The Granite Cliffs.

The plot of Wings of Fire, the second of the Charles Todd mysteries featuring World War I-veteran Detective Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard, has Rutledge traveling to Cornwall to investigate some suspicious deaths.

Other Cornwall-set fiction includes the delightful Harnessing Peac.o.c.ks by Mary Wesley; any in Philippa Carr's Daughters of England series-the ones I liked best (for no particular reason) are The Gossamer Cord and We'll Meet Again, numbers 18 and 19, respectively; Penhallow, a mystery by one of my very favorite novelists, Georgette Heyer; Penmarric by Susan Howatch; Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt; The Little Country by Charles de Lint (some of it set in Cornwall, anyway); and Jill Paton Walsh's The Serpentine Cave. You might as well throw in the Arthurian saga by Mary Stewart, since many scholars believe Arthur was born in Cornwall: The Crystal Cave,The Hollow Hills,The Last Enchantment, and The Wicked Day.

As for nonfiction, Daphne du Maurier's Vanishing Cornwall is a winsome word picture of her adopted home. It is a must-read for any visitor.

CORSICA.

The Mediterranean island of Corsica is probably best known as the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, but here are some selections of Corsica-centered t.i.tles that have nothing to do with Napoleon.

There's a chapter on Corsica in Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. Here's how he describes the island: Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor-the herbaceous whiff of the maquis-lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. . . . It smells like a barrel of potpourri, it is like holding a bar of expensive soap to your nose. The Corsican maquis is strong enough to clear your lungs and cure your cold.

Brian Bouldrey's Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica is much more than a travel book-there are sections on his life as a gay man, his family, and all the various and sundry folks he meets as he traverses the roads of the island.

In The Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica, John Hanson Mitch.e.l.l describes the six months he spent in 1962 living on the island and working in a small cafe. As we meet the cafe's staff and its regular customers, we begin to learn-as Mitch.e.l.l did-their varied experiences in World War II. Reading Mitch.e.l.l's book is a way of reminding ourselves that the past is never really forgotten, never really gone, and seldom ameliorated.

DEFINITELY DETROIT.

One of the best memoirs I've read about growing up in Detroit is Paul Clemens's Made in Detroit. Born in 1973, the year that Coleman Young became the first black mayor of the city, Clemens writes movingly and honestly about his experiences as a member of the ever-dwindling white minority in a rapidly collapsing city.

Loren Estleman's Amos Walker mystery series is set in Detroit. No need to read them in order: the most recent, and probably easiest to find, is Sugartown.

Detroit native Jeffrey Eugenides has a talent for knock-your-socks-off first lines. His wonderful first novel The Virgin Suicides, set in an exclusive suburb of Detroit, opens this way: "On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese-the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the bas.e.m.e.nt from which it was possible to tie a rope." And Middles.e.x, his second novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, begins: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

In The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma, Alex Kotlowitz explores issues of race and justice in two cities in the southwest part of Michigan: Benton Harbor and St. Joseph. Although this isn't, of course, exactly a Detroit book, it's such a terrific account (and I am such a Kotlowitz fan) that I had to include it here.

For anyone who grew up in Detroit, as I did, The Art Student's War by Brad Leithauser offers a way to travel back in time to the period during and after World War II, when the city hummed with energy and importance. And Leithauser's writing is magical.

Many of Elmore Leonard's thrillers take place in Detroit. And with a Leonard novel you're a.s.sured a bit of grit, a lot of snappy dialogue, and an appealing (if sometimes flawed) hero. Introduce yourself to his work with City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit.

Much of Philip Levine's poetry reflects his working-cla.s.s Detroit roots. The collection of his that I most enjoy is What Work Is, but you can't go wrong with any of his collections.

Joyce Carol Oates set her National Book Award-winning novel Them in inner-city Detroit. It's the story of the Wendall family, from the post-Depression 1930s to the race riots of 1967.

EGYPT.

Egypt's long and storied history has led to much good reading: Three especially useful and entertaining works of popular history about the region include Brian M. f.a.gan's The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt; Nina Burleigh's Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt; and Barbara Mertz's Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt.

One of the best finds of all my reading for Book l.u.s.t To Go was Florence Nightingale's Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849-1850. I am always hooked by books in the genre I call "letters home," and this was no exception. If reading these letters makes you want to find a really good biography of Nightingale (as it did for me), try (as I did) Mark Bostridge's Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon.

Another account of life in Eqypt is Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt: A Memoir, which tells the story of his eccentric family of Sephardic Jews from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.

A bit narrower in subject, but just as interesting, is Janet Soskice's The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels.

As for fiction, of course the first author you have to read is Naguib Mahfouz. I'd begin with the Cairo Trilogy, made up of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. You could spend some serious reading time just perusing this n.o.bel Prize-winning author's novels.

Among newer t.i.tles, I very much enjoyed The Blue Ma.n.u.script, in which the author, Sabiha Al Khemir, weaves together the past and present as she portrays the history of a ma.n.u.script-from the scribe who produced it, to the archaeologists determined to locate it, to the collectors who covet it.

ENTERING ENGLAND.

There were four sections in Book l.u.s.t To Go that I kept putting off writing until the last possible moment because they seemed so daunting to me. There is so much material to include on England (with or without including London), India, New York (city and state), and the Middle East that I remained unable to choose what to include until the ma.n.u.script-delivery deadline was edging dangerously close. And there were so many t.i.tles to choose from! I had to pick what I included very carefully indeed.

I discovered The Intelligent Traveller's Guide to Historic Britain: England, Wales, the Crown Dependencies by Phillip Axtell Crowl after I talked about armchair travel on the radio. Here's what a listener emailed me:Yes, the t.i.tle sounds a bit pretentious, but I have found it to be a great guidebook for finding all the little places that you would never find on your own, or even know to look for. The book presents its material in two formats, by its place on the map and its place in history. My travels around Britain tend to be fairly free form, so I tend to go by location. If I am going from point A to point B, I can look at the book to see what I might find along the way. My discoveries have included ancient Celtic burial grounds and Roman baths. You almost need an Ordnance Survey map to find some of the places. The good spots tend to be down some narrow back road with a path through some farmer's field to get there. They don't make it on the standard AA maps.

When I tracked it down (it's out of print but is relatively easy to find used, or perhaps at your local library-it wasn't available at mine) I saw exactly what my correspondent meant. Crowl also wrote books on historic Ireland and historic Scotland.

I loved Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century. Any history fan should also enjoy this unique way of animating the past. Even though when I finished the book I couldn't honestly say that I wished I lived in the fourteenth century (I value my Dial soap and iPhone a bit too much), I did wish I could pop back in time for a brief but enlightening visit.

A. A. Gill is a Scots-born columnist for the London Sunday Times. In The Angry Island: Hunting the English his essays are filled with biting, sometimes snarky commentary about the morals and mores of England.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd is required reading for any traveler to England's capitol. But be forewarned: it's a hefty tome. On the plus side (an enormous plus) is Ackroyd's entirely engaging writing-there's nary a dull page or anecdote. Among Ackroyd's other books of useful fiction or nonfiction for the Britain-bound traveler are Thames: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.

Some other excellent nonfiction t.i.tles include The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life by Virginia Woolf (the cover alone is worth the book's price); The Coast Road: A 3,000 Mile Journey Round the Edge of England by award-winning travel writer Paul Gogarty; Mustn't Grumble by Joe Bennett (native New Zealander wanders his adopted country); and An Audience with an Elephant: And Other Encounters on the Eccentric Side by Byron Rogers, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and Guardian papers-perfect for already-committed Anglophiles.

The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting by Adrian Tinniswood is an outstanding work of social history, made even better by the ill.u.s.trations. After reading it I felt quite comfortable that I would know exactly how to behave should I ever have occasion to spend some time as a guest in a country house. Rounding out the list are In A Fog: The Humorists' Guide to England, edited by Robert Wechsler, which includes essays by Art Buchwald, Mark Twain, Paul Theroux, and Robert Benchley, among others; and England for All Seasons by Susan Allen Toth, characterized by the author's idiosyncratic enthusiasms about the country she loves to visit.

Anglophiliacs who love fiction are fortunate. I often think that nearly every third book in a library or bookstore's fiction collection is likely by a British writer and/or set somewhere in England.

Sarum:The Novel of England, London:The Novel, and The Forest (set in the New Forest, in the southern portion of the country) by Edward Rutherfurd are sometimes dismissed as being too fluffy to convey you across the Atlantic. But in fact they're detailed, painstakingly researched, and filled with interesting characters.

Here's a diverse group of other t.i.tles that I've thoroughly enjoyed in the last few years. Like the divine writing of Georgette Heyer, author Julia Quinn brings the British Regency period to life in her sparkling romances, filled with dashing gentleman and bright, saucy women. My current tell-everyone-I-know-about-it is What Happens in London, but there are many other Quinn confections to choose from; Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, set in World War II London; Susan Howatch's Starbridge series including, among others, Glamorous Powers, Glittering Images, and Absolute Truths; The Road Home by Rose Tremain; and anything by Elizabeth Jane Howard, especially the Cazalet Chronicles, consisting of The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, spanning 1937-1938 through the end of World War II in the life of one British family.

ETHIOPIA, OR AS WE USED TO SAY, ABYSSINIA!.

Tahir Shah's In Search of King Solomon's Mines is armchair travel writing at its finest: interesting characters (especially Samson, Shah's sometimes unwilling travel companion, a Christian Amhari who totes an enormous Bible wherever he goes), nice-sized splotches of history and geography (both Ethiopian and biblical), and most important, an appealing writer whose sense of humor is apparent right from the beginning of the trip and continues through even the most trying of times (Shah is jailed as a suspected spy in Ethiopia). After a visit to the Middle East, Shah, a native Afghani who grew up in England, found himself compelled to locate the mines of the biblical King Solomon, a journey that eventually took him throughout Ethiopia into the mostly illegal gold-mining camps, following in the footsteps of the legendary Frank Hayter, who explored Ethiopia in the 1920s. Hayter's three memoirs, all published in the 1930s, include In Quest of Sheba's Mines, Gold of Ethiopia, and African Adventurer.

Cutting for Stone, an irresistibly readable epic novel by Abraham Verghese, begins right after World War II, when Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, travels from her home in Kerala, India, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and finds work in a mission hospital there. On the stormy and difficult sea voyage over, she saves the life of a British doctor named Thomas Stone, who also winds up at Missing, as the hospital is known to everyone in Addis. (Coincidences like this occur often in epic novels: they make the plot hum.) Although much of the book is set in New York (and narrated by Mary Joseph Praise's son, Marion), when I finished reading this, I wanted to take the next flight to Addis Ababa because the author brought the city to life as a dynamic and three-dimensional character in its own right.

Other books set in Ethiopia, both fiction and nonfiction, include:Tim Bascom's Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia Philip Caputo's powerful novel Horn of Africa Nicholas Clapp's Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen unravels the contradictory and complex tale of Sheba (of biblical Solomon and Sheba fame).

Thomas Keneally's novel To Asmara Maaza Mengiste's moving and poetic novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze, set just before the violent 1974 revolution that ended the reign of Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie Nega Mezlekia's Notes from the Hyena's Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Boyhood interested me because it's set not in Addis Ababa, but rather in Jijiga, a small town on the eastern border of the country.

Wilfred Thesiger's The Life of My Choice (The great explorer and desert-lover was born in the country when it was still Abyssinia.) Maria Thomas's African Visas: A Novella and Stories (Ironically, Thomas died while on a relief mission in Ethiopia in 1988.) EXPLAINING EUROPE: THE GRAND TOUR.

The Grand Tour was almost a rite of pa.s.sage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here are some twentieth--A- century t.i.tles that give us an overview of today's Europe. Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There recounts the backpacking tour around Europe more than two decades after Bryson and a friend traveled throughout Europe in the 1970s.

In Geert Mak's In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century, the well-read and knowledgeable Dutch journalist roams across Europe in the last year of the twentieth century to a.s.sess its health by looking at its past, its present, and its future.

Another look at Europe comes from British writer John Gimlette, winner of the Shiva Naipal Memorial Prize and the Wanderl.u.s.t Travel Writing Award, in Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace. Think of this and Mak's book as the perfect Grand Tour without leaving home.