Bestseller List: Summer 2009
Top Travel Narrative & Armchair Travel Books
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1. 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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2. 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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3. Morning Glory Farm: and the Family That Feeds an Island
written by Tom Dunlop, photographs by Alison Shaw
A beautiful and evocative look at this most traditional of farms, along with 70 favorite Martha’s Vineyard recipes. This is the story of the family that for thirty years has brought healthy, locally grown food to the island.
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4. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner
Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a beguiling mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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5. The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris
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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6. Netherland
by Joseph O’Neill
The author of the New York Times Notable Book Blood-Dark Track delivers a mesmerizing novel about a man trying to make his way in an America of shattered hopes and values, and the unlikely occurrences that pull him back into an authentic, passionately engaged life.
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7. 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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8. The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway
In a city ravaged by war, a musician plays his cello for twenty-two days at the site of a mortar attack, in memory of the fallen. Among the strangers drawn into the orbit of his music are a young father in search of water for his family, an older man in search of the humanity he once knew, a young woman, and a sniper.
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9. 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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10. 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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11. The Lazarus Project
by Aleksandar Hemon
Hemon has turned his talents to an embracing novel that intertwines haunting historical atmosphere and detail with sharp, shimmering and sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking contemporary storytelling.
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12. Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
by Jennifer 8 Lee
New York Times reporter and American-born Chinese, Jennifer 8 Lee traces the history of Chinese-American experience through the lens of the food in a compelling blend of sociology and history.
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13. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.
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14. 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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15. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami
An intimate look at writing, running, and the incredible way they intersect. While simply training for New York City Marathon would be enough for most people, Murakami decided to write about it as well. The result is a beautiful memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid memories and insights.
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16. 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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17. Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
by Benjamin Wallace
The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the true story of a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux–supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson–that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it. Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years? Or did it come from a secret Nazi bunker? Or from the moldy basement of a devilishly brilliant con artist?
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18. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Through crystalline examination of hard facts, Sachs predicts the cascade of crises that awaits this crowded planet and presents a program of sustainable development and international cooperation that will correct this dangerous course.
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19. The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious–And Perplexing–City
by David Lebovitz
Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city. He finally moved there, but soon discovered it’s a different world “en France.” From the ironclad rules of social conduct to the mysteries of men’s footwear, Lebovitz tells how he came to love the glorious and sometimes maddening city.
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20. The 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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21. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
by Linda Colley
This is a book about a world in a life. Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe than the vast majority of men. She was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive explorations in eastern and southern India.
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22. Travel As a Political Act
by Rick Steves
One of the world’s most famous travel writers shows how international travel can foster cultural understanding, peace, and help individuals tackle their own insecurities and fears.
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23. Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
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24. Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
by James Fallows
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. Fallows explains the economic, political, social, and cultural forces at work turning China into a world superpower at breakneck speed.
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25. My Life in France
written by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
This memoir of Julia’s years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence opens with Paul and Julia–a tall, wide-eyed girl from Pasadena who can’t cook and doesn’t speak a word of French–disembarking in Le Havre, and ends with the launching of the two Mastering cookbooks and Julia winning the heart of America as “The French Chef.”
