LOTS OF GREAT THINGS TO READ!!!

Welcome! I first started starting this page in July 1997, when I was briefly in a great book group with my friends Rebecca Wink & Tom Barnes, and was inspired by some of our discussions to start keeping track of what I thought of the books I was consuming. I am one of those odd people who reads very fast (a family trait), and can therefore barely recall anything about the book a week later (unless I re-read it, which I often do with books I like) -- so writing these comments helps me remember what I liked and why. I should note that I read way too much -- I really should spend more time on my school-related reading (a fellow grad student & I recently observed how odd it is that while as students, we have to read stuff for a living, yet one of our primary "hobbies" is also reading). But there's SO many great books out there, I just can't resist. I won't bore you with my academic readings here, this is only for the fun stuff.

Please note that there is a cumulative Big List of all the things I've written about -- they're adding up fast, so if you could care less what I've read recently but would like to see what I think of some of your favorites, or just looking for a recommendation, go check it out!

It's been fascinating, the number of people who have written to me from out of the blue since I've had this page up, saying they'd done a web search for some author & stumbled across this site. So if you're one of these folks, or anyone else, & you have any comments or recommendations you'd like to share, or arguments you'd like to raise, PLEASE email me! I'd love to hear from you.

First, A Word About Bookstores:

Recent Stuff I've Read:

• Joshua Slocum: Sailing Alone Around the World -- the classic progenitor of the solo circumnavigation genre! Slocum left Boston in April 1895, at a time when no one had ever gone around the world without crew, on his homemade 36-foot sloop Spray, which he discovered would self-steer if he set the sails and tiller just so -- apparently a lot of people at the time refused to believe that this was even possible, and accused him of being a fraud. But he made quite an impressive journey, over roughly three years, first sailing from Boston across the Atlantic to the Azores and Gibralter. After being chased by pirates off the coast of Africa and barely escaping (thanks to a wave that dismasted the pirates but not Spray), he decided instead to turn and cross the Atlantic AGAIN, sailing down the South American coast to Cape Horn, where he passed (twice!) through the Straits of Magellan, sailed north to Robinson Carusoe's island of Juan Fernandez, and then crossed the Pacific, via Samoa, to Australia, South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then home fairly quickly, skipping most of the Carribean. The first part of his voyage was fascinating, through the trip around Cape Horn -- but as he becomes more comfortable with his boat & his voyage, he gets a bit dull; the second half of the book lists a lot of names of fancy people he visited, but not as much adventure or liveliness. But the first half is fantastic: his episode of getting sick on Azorean plums and cheese in the midst of a big storm and hallucinating one of Columbus' sailors joining him on the Spray is one of the best-known tales, but my favorite line comes just after the storm has cleared: "Early the next morning, August 4, I discovered Spain." Columbus in reverse!
• Bernard Moitessier: The Long Way -- I remembered that the guy my friend Craig sailed from Hawaii to Samoa with, Laurent, a very charming and certifiably crazy Frenchman, had LOVED Moitessier, so I finally read this book -- and absolutely LOVED it. Thanks for the tip, Laurent! Moitessier is similarly charming and insane, having departed England as a competitor in the 1968 Round the World Race, which would be the first non-stop single-handed circumnavigation in history -- if anyone succeeded! Moitessier sailed his trusty Joshua, a 39-foot steel ketch, down the Atlantic and then east around in the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean, but then once back in the Atlantic, decided he was not out on the ocean alone for the sake of the race, but for his own sake -- and so he kept going around (hence the title), passing the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Leeuwin a second time before ending his voyage in Tahiti, among friends, after 10 months at sea without once touching land. His writing style is incredibly distinctive (you can tell Laurent admires him, as his sailing log reads very similar), overflowing with enthusiasm and emotion and amazement at the world around him. You wouldn't think a book about one guy out on the sea for a year non-stop would manage to remain interesting, but it's fascinating. He rants on and on about how marvelous the waves are, the seabirds and seals are his friends (throwing them camembert & canned butter to snack on), stays fit by doing yoga on the boat, and relishes his solitary life, taking delight in storms and feeling a strong kinship with both his boat and the sea. In the process, he forms a tremendously close relationship with his environment -- truly AMAZING is his tale of dolphins directing him away from a dangerous reef, which I won't spoil by recounting here -- and one of my favorite passages finds him again feeding cheese to some shearwaters, during a calm in the Indian Ocean (p. 79): "I wanted to caress them, at least to try. But I did not dare; maybe it was too soon. With a clumsy and premature gesture I risked breaking something very fragile. ... You can spoil everything, trying to go faster than nature." His willingness to become one with his surroundings (or at least as close to that as he can), and his vivid exuberance for life, made this book an instant favorite of mine, most highly recommended.
• Robin Lee Graham: Dove -- my friend Jason has a sister-ship of the second Dove, an Allied 33 named Manukea, so he of course encouraged me to read this one. It is quite an amazing tale, as Graham started his single-handed circumnavigation when he was only 16 (finishing five years later), but it's not quite as engaging a book as Moitessier's. Particularly in the second half, when Graham seems to only want to finish the voyage and get home in time for his first child to be born (he falls in love and gets married along the way, although he faithfully keeps his circumnavigation solo, only meeting with Patti at stops between long legs of sailing) -- his disconnect from the adventure rubbed off on me. Still, it's a classic well worth reading, and certainly gave Manukea even more of an air of adventure! Graham apparently still lives in rural Montana (Jason has spoken to him by phone), having never sailed again after his solo trip around the world.
• Peter Nichols: A Voyage for Madmen -- this book chronicles all nine participants in the 1968 Round the World Race, which Moitessier was originally a competitor in, and it really is an incredible story. It's hard to believe that the first solo non-stop circumnavigation was completed only a few months before the first walk on the moon -- but it was a goal just about as unreachable, or so it seemed. Frightening how ill-prepared some of the contestants were, and all but one dropped out: the only sailor to complete the race was Robin Knox-Johnston (Moitessier likely would have won if he had finished the race in England, but of course didn't stop & kept going around another half-turn). And impressive to have done all the navigation with only a sextant, compared to these days of GPS and satellite phones and etc. The book is well-written, focusing individually on each of the nine men through their preparation and sailing journeys, and exploring what about their psyches compelled them to take on such an extreme challenge (or, in one case, try to cheat). These days, sailing races like the Vendee Globe or Jules Verne can go around the world (by the same Southern Ocean route) in 90 days or less, but this is a wonderful exploration of those earlier times not so long ago.
• Tania Aebi: Maiden Voyage -- Aebi was an 18-year-old troublemaker in New York City when her father gave her an ultimatum: go to college, or sail around the world alone in a 26-foot sailboat. Seems like an odd challenge, but she took the boat and spent two and half years making the trip. When I bought my first sailboat, countless people recommended this book to me (I suppose because I'm also a woman), but I found it almost painful to read: not that I'm any great expert, but Aebi set out knowing almost nothing about how to sail, and the fact that she survived is really quite astonishing -- but it seems more due to luck than anything, and so many of the hair-raising difficulties she finds herself in are the direct result of being so frighteningly ignorant, that I began to feel somewhat... unimpressed. Not for lack of guts, but it's hard to have sympathy for someone who continues to throw themselves into such challenging situations without taking the time or care to really prepare, and then finds themselves in over their head yet again. By the time she's painfully clawing her way across the Atlantic through horrific-sounding (but predictable) autumn storms, I found myself wincing at how stupid and pointless it seemed -- it's like she's just being careless, rather than adventurous -- just not really all that enjoyable to read. I now think of it as a compendium of how NOT to sail around the world.
• Thor Heyerdahl: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft -- the only non-solo circumnavigation book in this group, but wonderful nonetheless -- for some reason I'd thought it would be a bit dry, but not at all! In the late 1940s Heyerdahl was studying the possible migrations of primitive peoples, and theorized that the South Pacific had been originally populated by people traveling to the islands by raft from South America -- noting many similarities in cultural myths, statue carvings, etc. But no one could believe that a raft would survive that far across the Pacific. Pooh-poohed by everyone, Heyerdahl decided to prove them wrong, and got an expedition together, built a balsa-wood raft according to ancient methods in Ecuador and Peru, and proceeded to sail it successfully with five companions across the Pacific, unfortunately running aground on the Raroia reef before making it to Tahiti. Their relationship to the ocean is an incredibly intimate one, since they're so close to the surface all the time & only a small hut on the raft for real shelter -- wonderful descriptions of the fish following the raft (or jumping onto it, on occasion), and in general their commitment to proving the possible connection of cultures is impressive and inspiring.

Old Favorites:

(please note, I hope to slowly adding descriptions/comments on these books -- most of the books I have to re-read to refresh my memory! But to keep this page from getting too long, please look for those comments on the Big List.)

Contemporary Fiction:

• Anything by Italo Calvino, but especially CosmiComics (the first I read by Calvino), The Baron In the Trees (excellent novel), the beautiful Invisible Cities, and The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount
• Everything by Milan Kundera, especially The Unbearable Lightness of Being but also The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
• Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
• Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston
• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme
• Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Older "Classic" Stuff:

• Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright
• Just about everything by J.R.R. Tolkien, particularly The Lord of the Rings (but no, I'm not into Dungeons and Dragons)
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• A Room With A View by E. M. Forster
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• various poems by Dorothy Parker

Nonfiction:

• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
• Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon
• The Gastronomical Me by M. F. K. Fisher
• The Control of Nature by John McPhee
• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

"Kids" Books

• Laura Ingalls Wilder -- I actually thought I was her reincarnated soul when I was young (we have the same name, we both had bossy older sisters, and she was born almost exactly 100 years before me), and nearly memorized all her books. In 1990 I got to visit De Smet, South Dakota, where she spent her teen years - it was a surprisingly interesting tour that has stuck with me.
• C. S. Lewis -- Of the Narnia books, I'd recommend The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and A Horse and His Boy most.
• E. B. White -- All of his books are wonderful, and Charlotte's Web is the best known, but also check out The Trumpet of the Swan and Stuart Little.
• Beatrix Potter -- It seems that most people only read Peter Rabbit, but she's got a lot more, and some of them are downright weird.
• Roald Dahl -- James and the Giant Peach is getting the most press these days, but my personal favorite is Fantastic Mr. Fox. Also, look for a book of childhood memoirs by Dahl called Boy.
• Virginia Haviland -- she pulled together five- or six-story collections of fairy tales from different countries, each called "Told In (country name)". Many of these stories are classics, like Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, or Rapunzel, but she also includes less-known stories such as Vasilisa the Beautiful (from Russia), Billy Beg and the Bull (from Scotland), and The Twelve Months (from Czechoslovakia). As of 1973 (when the last book in my collection was printed) there were sixteen countries in the series: England, Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Russia, Poland, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Japan, Greece, Denmark, and India.
• Herge -- as mentioned on my main home page, I've been a devoted fan of Tintin since I was in 4th grade or so. Not exactly literature, but not exactly cartoons, either, these books are incredibly well written, with almost every page ending in a suspenseful moment, compelling you to keep turning them!
• L. Frank Baum -- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has long been both a favorite childhood book AND movie, but I fear more and more people only know it from the movie, which makes some pretty serious changes (those slippers were silver, not ruby! etc.) & leaves a whole bunch of stuff out. Go read it again & see for yourself.

Anti-Disney Rant:

Cool Magazines:

• The Big Takeover -- hey, I'm on staff! (volunteer editor) A truly incredible effort of one man, Jack Rabid (also a big sweetheart), to dig deeply into a lot of lesser-known music & provide honest opinions about it. If you only read one music magazine, this should be it.
• Uncut -- hard to find in the US, but I simply LOVE this British music magazine. Probably because they seem to have exactly the same taste in music as me. Plus each issue comes with a CD sampler -- how handy!
• The New Yorker -- I can't keep up with these, & so have a million old issues cluttering up the house, but WOW, you really can't find better writing or more interesting subjects. Definitely worth the effort to plow through.
• Comes With A Smile -- VERY hard to find outside the UK, but a beautifully-designed music magazine with great interviews and amazing photographs. Each issue comes with a CD sampler, too.
• New York Magazine -- I've never lived in NYC, but this magazine covers topics of national importance (with a NYC spin, of course) with far better writing than something like Newsweek. And has great movie reviews!