Summer 2010 Bestsellers
Summer 2010 Bestsellers in Armchair Travel
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
An international publishing sensation, The 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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2. The Girl Who Played With Fire
by Stieg Larsson
Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, is the focus and fierce heart of the story. Mikael Blomkvist – crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium – has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
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3. 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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4. The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
by Neil MacFarquhar
In Media Relations, MacFarquhar shares a lesser known side of the region, the story he always wanted to file, showing the daily lives and attitudes of people frequently obscured behind the curtain of violence – the stories of chefs and sex therapists, bloggers and academics struggling to reform on their own terms.
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5. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
by Stieg Larsson
The third and final novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling trilogy. Lisbeth Salander–the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels–lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders.
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6. 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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7. La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language
by Dianne Hales
For anyone who has been to Italy, the fantasy of living the Italian life is powerfully seductive. But to truly become Italian, one must learn the language.A celebration of the language and culture of Italy, La Bella Lingua is the story of how a language shaped a nation, told against the backdrop of one woman’s personal quest to speak fluent Italian.
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8. City of Thieves
by David Benioff
During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a chance by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake.
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9. Eat, Pray, Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert
In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, Gilbert got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals.
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10. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner
The author takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions – the pursuit of happiness – or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” 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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11. The 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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12. Strange Maps: Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities
by Frank Jacobs
Spanning many centuries, all continents, and the realms of outer space and the imagination, this collection of 138 unique graphics combines beautiful full-color illustrations with quirky statistics and smart social commentary. The result is a distinctive illustrated guide to the world.
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13. Bicycle Diaries
by David Byrne
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them on tour with his band. The more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided.
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14. 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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15. Empires of the Indus
by Alice Albinia
One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks.
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16. 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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17. Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people.
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18. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
by John McWhorter
A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say “I am reading a catalog” instead of “I read a catalog”? Why do we say “do” at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
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19. Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
by Ruth Reichl
At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that “food could be a way of making sense of the world. . . . If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.” Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people, and the love of tales well told.
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20. Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole Clicqout Ponsardin defied convention by assuming the reins of the fledgling wine business she and her husband had nurtured.
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21. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens
by Jack Weatherford
The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story.
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22. Stories of the Sea: Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics
edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks, storms at sea, creatures from the deep and voyages that test human limits. Classic adventure stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith and J. G. Ballard.
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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 contracting 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, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
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24. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
by Dan Baum
Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world.
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25. The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English-language newspaper as they struggle to keep it–and themselves–afloat.
