Bestseller List: Spring 2009
Top Travel Narrative & Armchair Travel Books
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1. The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry
by Kathleen Flinn
In 2003, Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
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2. How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architectural Styles
by Carol Davidson Cragoe
This practical primer is a handbook for decoding a building’s style, history, and evolution. Every building contains clues embedded in its design that identify not only its architectural style but also the story of who designed it, who it was built for, and why.
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3. The Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Eric Weiner takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions: the pursuit of happiness. Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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4. Chinglish: Found in Translation
edited by Oliver Lutz Radtke
Chinglish offers a humorous and insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising. A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, Chinglish is now quickly becoming a cultural relic.
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5. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
In this enthralling international bestseller, two girls live inconspicuous lives in the center of an elegant Paris apartment building. It is only when a stranger moves into their building–and sees through the girls’ disguises–that Paloma and Rene discover their kindred spirits.
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6. The Flaneur: A Stroll Through The Paradoxes of Paris
by Edmund White
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians.
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7. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku – the curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations.
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8. Travels with a Tangerine
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Captivated by the great Arab explorer Ibn Battutah’s account of his journey, the Arabic scholar and award-winning travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out to follow in the peripatetic Moroccan’s footsteps.
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9. Three Cups of Tea
by Greg Mortenson
One man’s mission to promote peace…one school at a time. The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.
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10. Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake delivers eight dazzling stories that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
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11. White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life — having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
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12. The Travels of Ibn Battutah
edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Ibn Battutah set out on a 29 year long pilgrimage to Mecca from Morocco in 1325. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian, and occasional botanist and gastronome. Mackintosh-Smith brings to life these adventures in an abridged version of Battutah’s Travels.
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13. Travelers’ Tales the Best Women’s Travel Writing
edited by Lucy McCauley
From the Travelers’ Tales series. Stories told by women who traveled the earth to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves.
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14. The Enchantress of Florence
by Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their powers: the hedonistic Mughal capital and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance.
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15. The Grand Tour: Travelling the World with an Architect’s Eye
by Harry Seidler
Including many of the world’s most famous architectural structures, Seidler’s photographs illustrate the history and style of architecture in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Divided into chapters by country, each with a brief introduction outlining its architectural history, The Grand Tour offers the opportunity to browse the buildings of the world through one man’s photographs
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16. Postcards from Tomorrow Square
by James Fallows
Since December 2006, The Atlantic Magazine‘s James Fallows has been writing some of the most discerning accounts of the economic and political transformation occurring in China. The ten essays collected here cover a wide range of topics: from visionary tycoons and TV-battling entrepreneurs, to environmental pollution and how China subsidizes our economy.
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17. Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
by Chuck Thompson
From Bangkok to Bogota, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel. Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he’s had enough.
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18. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the English
by Sarah Lyall
Sarah Lyall, a reporter for The New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s. She came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), and found she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life.
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19. My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou…An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara
by Jeroen Van Bergeijk
This book captures more than the adventure: it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car culture.
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20. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
by Linda Colley
Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe than the vast majority of men. Her career illumines shifting patterns of Western power and overseas aggression. Yet the unprecedented expansion of connections across continents occurring during her lifetime also ensured that her ideas and personal relationships were shaped repeatedly by events and people beyond Europe.
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21. Yemen the Unknown Arabia
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Yemen is arguably the most fascinating and least known country in the Arab world. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean, and three millennia of history, Mackintosh-Smith reveals a land that, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. In Yemen: The Unknown Arabia we witness the extraordinary in the ordinary.
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22. Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
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23. A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes
by David Tanis
This is the book for anyone who wants to gather and feed friends around a table and nurture their conversation. It’s not about showing off with complicated techniques and obscure ingredients. Worlds away from the showy Food Network personalities, Tanis believes that the most satisfying meals–for both the cook and the guest–are invariably the simplest.
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24. The Prospector
by J.M.G. Le Clézio
Alexis loses his idyllic life with his family on the island of Mauritius upon the death of his father. Years later he becomes obsessed with finding the legendary Unknown Corsair’s treasure, and through that the lost magic and opulence of his youth.
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25. A Culinary Traveller in Tuscany: Exploring & Eating Off the Beaten Track
by Beth Elon
Elon takes us along the back roads and through the ancient hill towns to remote restaurants that are for the most part overlooked by tourists and known only to the locals. At each restaurant the cooks share their highly personal recipes for regional dishes made with local ingredients.
