Globe Corner Blogs

If you’re anything like us this time of year, you’re grumpy, tired, and sore from falling down so many times. To help you get through the last few months of winter we’ve prepared a list of authors that will get you out of the doldrums and into spring. What follows is an alphabetical list of some of our favorite make-you-laugh-out-loud authors.

1. Peter Allison

Allison’s books Whatever You Do, Don’t Run and Don’t Look Behind You take you into the surprisingly not-so-glamorous life of a safari guide. Every job has its challenges, but not many involve packs of hyenas and irritable hippos. Not to mention tourists in the wild.

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2. Bill Bryson

Bryson is perhaps best known for being a middle-aged white guy doing absurd activities for the sake of absurdity, and simultaneously finding the absurdity in the world around him. From A Walk in the Woods where he tackles the Appalachian Trail to In a Sunburned Country where he tries all things Australian, Bryson shows us the humor of living on this planet.

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3. Tim Cahill

Need a little adventure in your life? Try some books from the founder of Outside Magazine. His titles tell you all you need to know. Among others: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, A Wolverine is Eating My Leg, and Pecked to Death by Ducks. It’s probably all the excitement you can take for one sleepy, snowy day curled up on your bed reading.

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An Irreverent Curiosity - by David Farley

First and foremost, David Farley is a (self-proclaimed) awesome dancer. Secondly, Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity and has travel essays in Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing 2009, Travelers’ Tales Prague, and 30 Days in Italy–as well as in numerous magazines and newspapers. And wait, there’s more: he also writes for WorldHum.com. We had so much fun asking Rolf Potts some questions we decided to see if one of our other favorite travel writers would answer and even be up for our version of The Hemingway Challenge.  He was kind enough to respond.

1) Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Always the aisle. I like to move about the cabin whenever the spirit strikes me and if I’m sitting at the window, I’m stuck there, lest I want to pester the person sitting at the aisle (which I don’t). Extra special bonus lovely seat: the aisle seat in an exit row.

2) Have you ever pretended that you were Canadian while overseas?

Never. And I never will.

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Marco Polo Didn't Go There - by Rolf Potts

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is a collection of travel stories by Rolf Potts from a decade of writing for publications like National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and WorldHum.com. He’s also been selected for The Best American Travel Writing anthologies several times and is best known for his book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Each essay in Marco Polo is accompanied by  a “special commentary track” that gives the reader clarifications and anecdotes about each story. After Sarah and I read the book, we still had a few questions that we were dying to ask. Since his travel advice column for WorldHum.com is called Ask Rolf…we did.

1. Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain why.)

Aisle.  I have long legs, and it’s nice to stretch them out every so often.

I’d say the bag of peanuts I bought in the Siphandon region of Laos in 1999. There were rumors of a cholera epidemic in the area at the time, so I was avoiding restaurant meals.  I figured a bag of peanuts would be fine.

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Pint-Sized Ireland --by Evan McHugh

My telling green sweater and shamrock pendant will lead most to believe (correctly) that I have Irish in my blood. The people who (incorrectly) believe I want to be kissed because I’m Irish will be surprised to know that I scoff at most St. Patrick’s celebrations. Sure, I suppose it’s a great excuse to drink pint after pint of Guinness and wear bouncy green shamrock antenna things, but if you’re not really Irish, how can you know you’re doing it right?

For those who aren’t Irish (and I’m sorry about that) the best method for ensuring as traditional a St. Patty’s Day experience as possible is to do your homework. One may not be surprised to learn that there are many books about Ireland that center around drinking – both as an attraction for tourists and as a national past-time.

A Pint of Plain --by Bill Barich

A few suggestions one can find on the Globe Corner bookshelves include the newly released A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. When author Bill Barich moved to Dublin he wanted to find a real Irish pub of his own–an old watering hole where the barkeep knew how to pour a Guinness and musicians gathered to play traditional Irish music. Barich discovered finding this was a more difficult task than he imagined.

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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon -by Rebecca West

I have a confession: I have never completely read Rebecca West’s magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I am sure that this is not a big deal to most people, but I am a self-proclaimed Balkan junkie. If you have ever been in the store looking at the Croatia section, you have probably been subjected to hearing about my love of Dubrovnik, my favorite restaurants, the pros and cons of each guide book to the area, and the results of my extensive research on where to get the best and cheapest ice cream. I have read practically everything that I can get my hands on, except for what is considered to be the defining travelogue of the area.

My history with the book is long. I have lugged it across the Atlantic six times. I have started it about five times. It has a pretty cover, or did: during its sixth trip to Croatia it served as my night stand. Continue Reading »

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -by Haruki Murakami

Some time ago, while driving somewhere inconsequential, I found myself doing what I always do in the car: listening to NPR and day-dreaming about my future Talk of the Nation radio personality and all the insightful questions I’d ask my equally insightful guests. And so it was on this otherwise mundane day that I heard a particularly intriguing program about foreign novels: aired on the heels of Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio’s award for the Nobel Prize in literature, Day to Day hosts interviewed David Kipen. They discussed the choice of le Clezio for the Prize, why many Americans haven’t heard of him, and why in the words of a certain Nobel Committee member, America remains “too isolated, too insular” when it comes to literature.

While this accusation turned many (American) heads, I was more interested in what came next in the conversation.  See, for someone working in a bookstore, constantly surrounded by new releases and newly released editions, books with pretty covers and books with not-so-pretty covers, it’s sometimes hard to decide what to read next. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear Kipen’s list of “The Best Foreign Books You’ve Never Heard Of” and promptly added some to my To-Read list.

Out Stealing Horses -by Per Petterson

I was also happy to hear some titles that I was already familiar with (all thanks to the GCB’s wonderfully diverse Armchair Travel selection). Taken from Kipen’s list, I can only personally recommend three, but I recommend them all highly: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Norway), The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (Japan). We also have autographed copies of Antonio Lobo Antunes’ What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? (Portugal).

For the full list, visit this program’s online summary found on the NPR website. Also, feel free to tell us your favorite translated books so they can stop being unheard of and start being read… by us!

Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of South Pacific Literature

Everyone dreams of sitting on a white beach–hot sun, cool drink, palm trees bending over your head instead of looming responsibilities. If you’re like most of us and can’t get to a beach right away, try one of these books on a warm, exotic locale. In this mix of fiction and nonfiction, relaxing observation and thrilling adventure, everyone is sure to find something to fulfill their fantasy.

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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
by Tony Horwitz
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain’s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today’s Pacific.

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In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson lives to tell the story of his exploits in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed, prime ministers disappear into the surf, and cheery citizens coexist with the world’s deadliest creatures.

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The Songlines
by Bruce Chatwin
Part adventure story, part philosophical essay, this extraordinary book takes Bruce Chatwin into the heart of Australia on a search for the source and meaning of man’s restless nature.

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Tracks
by Robyn Davidson
A cult classic with an ever-growing audience, Tracks is the brilliantly written and frequently hilarious account of a young woman’s odyssey through the deserts of Australia, with no one but her dog and four camels as companions.

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Once Were Warriors
by Alan Duff
This hard-hitting novel is frank and uncompromising in its portrayal of Maori urban New Zealand society, a world of frustration, resentment, and waste. Duff is fearless in his depiction of a part of his own society that he knows well.

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Straying from the Flock: Travels in New Zealand
by Alexander Elder
An intimate and personal account of one passionate traveler’s visit to New Zealand’s mountains and beaches, fjords, rainforests, vineyards, and hidden eateries.

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The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is sentenced in 1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the terms of his natural life.

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The Bone People
by Ken Hulme
Set in the harsh environment of the South Island beaches of New Zealand, this masterful story brings together three singular people in a trinity that reflects their country’s varied heritage. Winner of the 1985 Booker-McConnell prize for fiction.

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The Last Grain Race
by Eric Newby
The Last Grain Race is Eric Newby’s spell-binding account of this time spent on the Moshulu’s last voyage in the Australian grain trade. A classic tale from one of the world’s best-loved travel writers.

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White Mary
by Kira Salak
Returning from a harrowing assignment in the Congo, Marika learns that a man she has always admired from afar, Pulitzer-winning war correspondent Robert Lewis, has committed suicide. But when Marika finds a curious letter from a missionary claiming to have seen Lewis in Papua New Guinea, she has to wonder, “What if Lewis isn’t dead?”

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Kiwi Tracks: A New Zealand Journey
by Andrew Stevenson
Andrew Stevenson made true on the dream many of us have of escaping from everyday life, tossing a few possessions in a backpack and traveling light in far-off lands. In a hiker’s heaven, he treks along the Milford Track, the Kepler Track, the Abel Tasman Track, and other famous walking routes.

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The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific
by Paul Theroux
Intrepid traveler Paul Theroux ventures to the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. He paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines.

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The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
by Maarten Troost
After racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs, author Troost decided the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the Earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better.

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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
by Christina Thompson
An extraordinary love story between a Maori man and an American woman, that inspires a graceful, revelatory search for understanding about the centuries-old collision of two wildly different cultures.

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Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of Canadian Literature

We have plenty of jokes about Canadians down here in The States, but there is nothing to joke about with their literature. Browse through fiction and nonfiction about our friendly neighbor to the north. Choices run from a romp through the Canadian Rockies in the early 20th Century to short stories written over a lifetime spent on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

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Choosing Wilderness: My Life Among the Ospreys
by Claude Arbour
Arbour documents his personal journey from high school dropout to noted ornithologist and conservationist, explaining how he goes beyond reintroducing birds into the wild to preserve a network of nesting sites in the lake region.

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Island of Seven Cities: Where the Chinese Settled When They Discovered America
by Paul Chiasson
The Island of Seven Cities proposes the existence of a large Chinese colony that thrived on Canadian shores well before the European Age of Discovery and unveils the first tangible proof that the Chinese were in the New World before Columbus.

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Sable Island
by Sheila Hirtle and Marq de Villiers
Sable Island is constantly moving, its beaches disappearing and reappearing in storms, its very body in slow motion to the east. Because of this, it is a metaphor for the way the planet governs itself and to understand the forces of entropy.

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The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore
by Robert Finch
Finch evokes a landscape of raw beauty in detailed essays that ebb and flow as we make the journey with him, straining to hear the waves. He also talks with Newfoundlanders and allows them to bring to life an island tucked between provinces, languages, and cultures, a land of ancient hardship and stirring beauty.

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Captains Courageous
by Rudyard Kipling
One of Kipling’s most enduringly popular works, this classic tale of the sea and fable of a boy’s initiation into the world of men is accompanied by a brand-new Introduction.

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Island: The Complete Stories
by Alistair MacLeod
The author’s short fiction–just 16 stories published over 33 years–deals intimately with life on his native Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

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In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies
by James Outram
First published in 1923, In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies is Outram’s record of his adventures and exploits in the early years of the 20th century among the massive mountains straddling the Alberta/British Columbia boundary.

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The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx’s story is about Quoyle, betrayed then widowed, looking to remake a life with his two daughters on the Newfoundland coast. He finds resurrection, and the hope for love “without pain or misery.”

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Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of Chinese Literature

This list contains literature by both Chinese authors and by Westerners living in China. Its mix of history, modernity, humor, and gravity reflects the contradictions in present-day Chinese life that so many of these books explore.

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Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
Ma Jian’s new novel is a powerful allegory of a rising China and is racked by contradictions. It’s also a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests.

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River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
by Peter Hessler
Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the ways of the town–and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling.

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Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China
by Peter Hessler
Today China has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time–the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country–is brilliantly illuminated by Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China’s transformation.

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I Love Dollars and Other Stories China
by Zhu Wen
I Love Dollars is a hilarious send-up of China’s love affair with capitalism by one of its most gifted new writers. Here, gleefully exposed, are the inanities of everyday life in contemporary China.

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Last Days of Old Beijing
by Michael Meyer
Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years through his narrative, Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present. The Last Days of Old Beijing brings this moment and the ebb and flow of daily lives on the other side of the planet into shining focus.

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Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China
by Jen Lin-Liu
Lin-Liu gives a memorable and mouthwatering cook’s tour of today’s China as she progresses from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant.

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Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
by Jennifer 8 Lee
In a compelling blend of sociology and history, Jenny Lee exposes the indentured servitude Chinese restaurants expect from illegal immigrant chefs, investigates the relationship between Jews and Chinese food, and weaves a personal narrative about her own relationship with Chinese food.

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China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power
by Rob Gifford
An acclaimed National Public Radio reporter Rob Gifford takes the dramatic journey along Route 312 from its start in the boomtown of Shanghai to its end on the border with Kazakhstan. Gifford reveals the rich mosaic of modern Chinese life in all its contradictions, as he poses crucial questions that all of us are asking about China.

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Empress Orchid
by Anchee Min
From a master of the historical novel, Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the splendid heart of the Forbidden City to tell the fascinating story of a young Chinese concubine who becomes China’s last empress.

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The Last Empress
by Anchee Min
In this volume concluding Empress Orchid, Min gives us a compelling, very human leader who assumed power reluctantly and sacrificed all to protect those she loved and an empire that was doomed to die.

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Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of British and Irish Literature

This list is a wide range of fiction and nonfiction titles by authors who are British or Irish or are simply fascinated with all things British and Irish. From The Kingdom by the Sea to Trainspotting to Dubliners, the list is quite varied and could be a great start for aspiring Anglofiles and Guinnessophiles.

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The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British
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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The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain
by Paul Theroux
After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey.

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Notes from a Small Island
by Bill Bryson
After nearly 20 treasured years in Britain, the author decided it was time to return to the United States. His last trip around the green and kindly isle resulted in a hilarious travelogue which coveys the glorious eccentricity of Britain.

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Londonstani
by Gautam Malkani
Hailed as one of the most surprising British novels in recent years, Gautam Malkanias electrifying debut reveals young South Asians struggling to distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation in the vast urban sprawl that is contemporary London.

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The Riddle of the Sands
by Erskine Childers
On a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two adventurers-become-spies discover a secret German plot to invade England. Written as a wake-up call to the British government, and praised as much for its nautical action as for its suspenseful spycraft, Childers’ 1903 novel is an indisputable espionage classic.

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The Crofter and the Laird
by John McPhee
When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors–Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland–a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two- or three-hundred years.

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Young Irelanders
by Gerard Donovan
The stories in Young Irelanders shine a fresh light on the New Ireland and how the Irish are coping with its rewards and pressures: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce, a lost sense of place and history, and of course, what to do with all that prosperity.

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Trainspotting
by Irvine Welsh
An authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating group portrait of blasted lives in Edinburgh that has the linguistic energy of A Clockwork Orange and the literary impact of Last Exit to Brooklyn. Rents, Sick Boy, and the others are as unforgettable a clutch of rude boys, junkies, and nutters as readers will ever encounter.

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Round Ireland with a Fridge
by Tony Hawks
A drunken bet led Tony Hawks to hitch-hike around the circumference of Ireland over one month–with a refrigerator in tow–which became what he calls the best experience of his life. Hawks shares his remarkable adventure that was emotional, inspirational, and downright silly at times.

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McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland
by Pete McCarthy
In this amusing and affectionate homage to Ireland, McCarthy recounts his rollicking adventures around the Emerald Isle in search of his Irish roots.

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Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce’s aim was to tell the truth: to create a work of art that would reflect life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, to reveal to the Irish their unromantic reality, which would lead to the spiritual liberation of the country.

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