Part 3 (1/2)

Trinidad and Tobago.

Noir mystery fans shouldn't miss Trinidad Noir, part of the Noir series published by Akas.h.i.+c 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 piled 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ver 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.