Globe Corner Blogs

I love walking through the travel aisle and finding a customer standing transfixed in front of our map browser, gazing at the brilliant colors of our Tyvek map, contemplating the World Upside Down, or pointing out a memory of a place on a map to a friend. Maps draw people in, ask for interaction, reflection, or simply admiration. While I walk by our browser fifty times a day, I gained a new appreciation for the art of cartography this past week at two different venues: the Boston Antiquarian Book Festival and the new map room at the Boston Public Library.

Walking through the rows upon rows of ancient and beautiful books, prints, and maps at the Antiquarian Book Festival at Hynes Convention Center, it was my turn to gawk. I squeezed between two tweed suits, through a cloud of must, and stood staring at the familiar shape of my home state. A German 1955 map of Iowa hung before me, surrounded by maps that showed our states divided into territories–a visual history lesson. I passed one map so old it depicted California as an island. I’d seen a similar map at the Boston Public the week before when I finally made it to the new Map Room there.

If you haven’t visited the Norman B. Leventhal Map Room, check it out on your next trip to the BPL. When I went, it was election week, and the walls were covered in red and blue U.S. maps, with plaques explaining the electoral college. I read the plaques; it still confuses me, but this was no fault of the exhibition. The current exhibit focuses on Boston’s public spaces. As you enter the map room there is a gorgeous mural of downtown Boston, overlooking the State House and Common. Inside, you can learn about the development of your favorite greens around town.

If you or someone you know is also an appreciator of the map as art, come check out the amazing travel-oriented gift books we have on display at Booksmith. From the Granger Collection we have a gorgeous book of Historic Maps and Views of Boston. After perusing these historic views of your favorite city, check out Mark Ovenden’s new Railway Maps of the World, which I happen to have on my coffee table at home. From Kim Je-hwan’s dizzying design of the Tokyo Metropolitan Railway System to a map of the United States covered with an intricate system hairline cracks that was the world’s largest railroad network at its peak in 1918, this book will stun, absorb, and amaze your guests.

And finally, when you’ve completely saturated yourself with these visual masterpieces,
pick up Robert D. Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography. Kaplan examines the history of the world through the lens of the map, exploring how climate changes, topography, and proximity all contributed to major events in the shaping of world history. All of these books make great holiday gifts, especially when paired with that tube-shaped package that can only be the wall map on their list.

While wandering through the Globe Corner Travel aisle at Booksmith this past week, you may have been drawn in, distracted, or blinded by a display of hot pink books. Could someone please tell me why India again and again gets classified as hot pink? From the Wallpaper Guide and the Love Guide to Delhi, to The Three Sisters Indian Cookbook, to Siddhartha Deb’s new book The Beautiful and the Damned, when it comes to India, book designers seem always to “think pink” (I spent Hurricane Sandy re-watching Funny Face).

Pink or not, if you’re looking for literature to guide you into India, we’ve got it. Our newest title on the Destination: India shelf is Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. Sethi is a young up-and-coming Indian journalist who delivers the fascinating narrative of Mohammed, a homeless man in Old Delhi. His book is endorsed by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, whose own book vividly evokes life in a slum near Mumbai. A different kind of underworld is explored by Suketu Mehta in Maximum City, a narrative that takes the reader from the lives of Hindu gangs in Bombay to behind the scenes of Bollywood.

If you didn’t catch Shuchi’s review of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (another pink book!!), scroll down or click here to
read about her travels to San Francisco to celebrate Ganesha’s birthday by sending him overboard on a journey from San Francisco Bay to his home on Mount Kailash. We recently got Dalrymple’s travel writing collected into a series of portraits of India in The Age of Kali. Dalrymple visits little-known areas of the subcontinent in his search for Kali Yug, an “age of darkness” prophesied by Hindu cosmology.

In addition to our vast array of Indian literature and travel narratives, we’ve got the guidebooks to help you get there. Whether you’re a solo backpacker looking for the Lonely Planet, or what Fiona Caulfield, author of our India Love Guides, calls a “luxury vagabond,” we’ve got the right guide for you. To read more about the enchanting India Love Guides, click here, or come browse our Destination of the Month display at Booksmith. You can’t miss it–just think pink.

As autumn breaks over us in rain showers and shivery weather, we’ve been transitioning from back to school to scary Halloween reads at Booksmith. Aside from seasonal changes, you might notice a few other shifts in our store: we’ve brought cookbooks up front and moved the cozy Writer’s Corner to a new nook. We’ve organized our art books into beautiful displays I can barely walk past without pausing to browse. And in the travel section, we’ve dedicated a shelf to a new Destination of the Month. This October at the Globe Corner Travel Annex, we’re traveling to Prague.

I’m still not sure why I decided that Prague would be our first destination. Perhaps it was simply that the one time I had the privilege to travel there was in the month of October. My memories of the city are bathed in the crimson and gold leaves of the rolling hills and rust-colored rooftops. I recall crisp October mornings on Charles Bridge, the warm rays of an autumnal sun causing the statues along the bridge to cast long shadows. If anyone is traveling to Prague, here is my tip: No matter how many pubs you visit, do what it takes to rise early on at least one morning to make it to the Charles Bridge before 8am, before the vendors set up their wares and the crowds cover the thoroughfare. The silent beauty and austerity of the city at that early hour made a vivid impression on me that has not faded.

The memory returns every time I pick up Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, and not just because the bridge is  featured on the cover, effectively inviting the reader to cross into its imagined world. “A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop,” writes Kundera. Another absolutely essential must-read for anyone traveling to the Czech Republic is the late Vaclav Havel. The playwright-who-became-president inspired many with his wise The Art of the Impossible, and we’ve got his most recent To the Castle and Back on display, right next to Bohumil Hrabal’s classic I Served the King of England.

In addition to our wide array of guidebooks to the city, we’ve culled an impressive collection of Czech literature that includes not only the Complete Stories of Kafka, which my husband is currently reading and highly recommending and making me listen to David Rakoff’s spoof on The Metamorphosis (which you can also listen to here), but also Gustave Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, which I cannot praise highly enough for its wit and wisdom. Janouch was an 18-year-old aspiring writer when he joined his mentor Kafka on walks around Prague, discoursing on matters both philosophical and commonplace.

Some perhaps lesser-known titles you will find on our Destination Prague shelf include Josef Skvorecky’s novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, a comic and
insightful journey of a Czech immigrant professor in Toronto. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin tells the story of Utz, a fictional Czech art collector who is tied to the Communist state by his affection for his ceramic collection, stored in a Prague apartment. And finally, our newest Czech title, Petr Kral’s In Search of the Essence of Place explores the domestic spaces of a home to the larger scenes of village life in the Czech Republic. The title itself perhaps embodies the purpose of our new Destination of the Month best: to bring together a rich variety of voices and guides that can help the traveler discover the essence of a particular destination.

With a statue of Ganesha.

I spent the end of September in the San Francisco Bay Area, there on self-imposed assignment, to cover the Fremont Hindu Temple’s Ganesha Chaturthi festival. Ganesha Chaturthi is an annual ten-day celebration around the Hindu god Ganesha’s birthday. During the festival, Hindus believe that Ganesha comes down to earth to bestow his presence upon his devotees. People buy an idol of Ganesha specifically for his birthday to keep in their home during the festival, and after a pran prathista (a prayer ceremony that infuses the god’s presence in the statue) the idol is seen as a form of Ganesha himself. He is prayed to nightly, offered sweets, a guest in his devotee’s home, and at the end he is immersed in water and sent back to his home on Mount Kailash. The temple in Fremont, a city near the Mission Hills about sixty miles from San Francisco where I spent most of my childhood, hosts one of the largest celebrations of the festival in the US.

I went to cover the festival partly as research for my novel. The myth of how Ganesha got his elephant head is part of the family curse that plagues my protagonist. I wanted to hear about the myths about Ganesha from those who were his most loyal devotees, who celebrated this festival each year. But I also went to the festival because I’ve been drawn to this place where I spent my childhood for some time. Mostly because of the landscape – I love the sandy hills, the bridges that connect the east bay to the coast, making the west feel so much larger and more vast than the east. I went there with my camera in hopes of turning the experience into a photo essay.

In preparing for this trip, and for a trip to India I hope to make sometime in the next year, I began reading travel writing. I am currently in the middle of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, a nonfiction book about Dalrymple’s one year stay in Delhi in the 1980s. He had been to Delhi as a seventeen-year-old and fascinated by the ruins, the mystical idea that Delhi is a city inhabited by djinns, by spirits, and that is why it rises up time and time again, through invasions, through colonialism. He returned, a newlywed, with the idea of writing a book about the city. A book that then took him five years to write. Dalrymple’s work was first suggested to me by my uncle, a doctor in India who is one of the most avid readers I know. I figured that if he was suggesting a British writer’s nonfiction books about India, then they must be good. Dalrymple is a wonderful writer. Thoughtful and lyrical, his divergences into Delhi’s history are always rooted in his travel narrative. You never forget that Dalrymple is there in Delhi, or there in England, searching for the history. He takes you into musty libraries, to visits with old British women leftover in Delhi from the colonial days, to the consulate where he has to obtain travel visas. I’ve been taking my time with City of Djinns because it goes through intense periods of history, and some sections, like when Dalrymple talks about the rampage against Sikhs after Indira Gandhi was assassinated, are harder to take in because of the content. But it’s a wonderful book.

The last day of Ganesha’s stay on earth, and of my stay in the Bay Area, I participated in the Ganesha immersion, or visarjan, one of the most important parts of the festival. The visarjan takes on a dual meaning. A literal sending back of the god to his home on Mount Kailash, the path through which is the water, the Ganesha also carries with him the misfortunes of the devotee’s past year, in hopes of leaving the devotee with better luck for the next one. Four hundred people boarded a cruise ship with their idols, along with tubs of over six hundred idols belonging to those who couldn’t participate in the send off. The day was unseasonably warm, uncharacteristically cloudless and clear for San Francisco. Our ship was supposed to take us under the Golden Gate but we changed route due to turbulent waters and stalled about twenty minutes out, the Oakland Bay Bridge to our south, the Golden Gate to our north. Some tossed their idol out as far as they could, as if launching Ganesha further would take him closer to home. Others, aware that the figure they held was an embodiment of a celestial being who was the central guest in their home all week, hung over the railing as far as they could and gently dropped their Ganesha. Children anxiously waited for their parents’ signal before they threw their miniature idols into the water. And nearly everyone had a moment of calm, looking on at the statue long after he was submerged.

Sending Ganesha home.

Towards the end of our time on the ship, one of the passengers on board asked me if I had sent off a Ganesha. I hadn’t. He handed me one from the tub and as I had watched others do, I said “Ganapati Bappa Morya” softly, painfully aware of my horrendous accent. In saying those words, I was asking him to come back next year. Darymple said in his introduction to the City of Djinns that it took him nearly four times as long as his stay in India to finish the book and I can see why. Traveling back to a place that is familiar yet not our own, and then having to write about it – how do you do this fairly, truthfully? Almost two weeks later and I’m still processing the trip. Hopefully, I will find a way to write about this journey home.

“Tut, Tut! Miss Lucy!” Eleanor Lavish cries in E.M Forster’s A Room with a View, “I hope we shall soon emancipate you from your Baedeker.” Lavish confiscates the innocent Lucy Honeychurch’s guide to Italy, perhaps leading her to look for a cicerone in other places, such as in the young George Emerson.

Baedeker travel guides were first published in Germany in 1830 by Karl Baedeker, whose sons and grandsons later took over the business, continuing the trusted voice that led Europeans into unknown lands. Baedeker’s were not the earliest guidebooks, in fact, John Murray’s Handbooks served as a prototype for them, but they soon became Europe’s favorite chaperon.

To “baedeker” eventually became a synonym for “to travel,” and when, in the spring of 1942, Germany began a series of attacks on particularly picturesque English towns, the siege became known as the “Baedeker Blitz” because it was thought that the targeted cities were picked from Baedeker’s guide to Britain. Baedeker’s had by then come up with the star system (introduced in 1846), assigning a number of stars to cities not to be missed. Those assigned two or more star’s in Baedeker’s Britain were bombed. The British responded by bombing Leipzig in 1943, destroying much of the Baedeker publishing house.

For those of you who thought Baedeker guides were a thing of the past, think again. This historic line of guide books was relaunched in 2005 in Germany, and are now available not only in the United States, but at your local bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.

While the appearance has changed since the first solid red Baedekers (there is now a blue stripe across the top and a nice full color photo of each destination on the cover), these guides are still crammed full of information, both practical and interesting. Each guide contains a Facts section, which includes a generous amount of literary and cultural history, politics, and geographic information; a Basics section, which keeps you up to date on accommodation, language, literature, etiquette, and food; there is a small section on suggested Tours, and a large alphabetical listing of Sights, complete with color photographs and stunning fold-outs, such as one of the Saga Museum in Iceland that actually made my co-worker Natasha squeal. In addition, each guide comes with a great city or country map tucked into its protective plastic cover.

Come check out our new selection of Baedekers at Booksmith, covering destinations from Paris to Sri Lanka. With our new Globe Corner Travel Annex at Booksmith crammed full of travel books and maps, you’ll never have to be emancipated from your favorite guidebook.

Many people view travel as time with family and friends, exploring unfamiliar areas, or an opportunity to relax from a persistant routine.  I recently returned from Africa, however it wasn’t under your typical label of “travel.”
 
I went with five others to volunteer to tutor street orphans (among other activities) who are taken in by an organzaition called Christ’s Hope.  In Mwanza, Tanzania specifically, this organization is able to take in street orphans and help them to be safe and teach self-sufficiency.  (They have to learn how to cook, do laundry, go to school, and so on.)
 
One of the best investments I had with me — at least bookwise — was Lonely Planet’s Swahili Phrasebook.  As my Swahili is nowhere near fluent yet and many of these kids struggle with conversational English (though it is required in school that they learn it), this book was a gem.  I could look up words and have a clear pronunciation guide in a pocket size book.
 
Sure, I  could have asked someone else with better English-Swahili skills to translate or tell me the word, but when one isn’t around or I’ve already bombarded them with questions, the phasebook was a vital tool. For example, one afternoon I was helping Rachel — who was probably around 6 — with her math. We worked on counting and writing numbers.  She couldn’t quite understand addition and often had trouble with double digit numbers. She also kept writing her sixes backwards.  Beyond numbers, I quickly looked up words such as “add,” “equals,” “great job,” and so on.  Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to help Rachel write her numbers better as well as improving her comprehension of number sequence above 10. 

I do not recall coming across any misused or mispronounciations within the Lonely Planetphrasebook either.  With hundreds of words at my fingertips it helped make tutoring and conversing a lot easier.  When next abroad I will definitly invest in whatever phrasebook language I need. I also love that this book had a small section on pronounciation of the alphabet and grammar — it was just enough to get me started and not feel overwhelmed as language books have a habit of doing. 

Beyond phrasebooks, please consider some sort of humanatrain approach to travel.  It is an experience you will not forget!  Not to mention the closer taste of culture that any hotel or tourist trap would not be able to provide for you. Don’t let travel simply be a taking experience.  Jump into the cuture and give.

In Peter Whitfield’s recent Travel: A Literary History, some of the earliest travel writing he chronicles are stories like Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, travelers’ tales we tend to think of as more myth than history, more fiction than fact. And yet the adventures of heroes like Odysseus move us like all quixotic quests, and Whitfield includes them in his survey, arguing in one interview with the New York Times, that “travel literature existed for centuries, but not in its own right. It was…always involved with other things—war and conquest, religion, history writing, commerce, science, poetry.” To do justice to the genre, Whitfield does not confine himself to categorical “true” stories, plumbing history and legend alike for stories of adventure, intrigue, and discovery.

Many of these early travel tales, like Homer’s Odyssey, were passed on orally before they were written down, a form of storytelling that in our culture may now manifest itself in pod casts. Storytelling, however, seems to me to be travel writing at its primitive, and perhaps best, form: the traveler returns and naturally has tales to relate to family and friends–on the ride home from the airport, or as she settles in around the dinner table. Maybe this is why it felt so natural for me, who rarely listens to audio books, to take in some travel writing through the ear.

The BBC recently released a compilation of travel writers reading their adventures or commenting on the nature of travel and travel writing in general. The Spoken Word: Travel Writers contains tracks from renowned writers such as Freya Stark, Peter Fleming, Wilfred Thesiger, and Jan Morris.

I listened in awe as Leonard D.A. Hussey described the makeshift shelter in which he and Shackleton’s crew took refuge when stranded on Elephant Island, Jan Morris transported me back to the shores of Trieste where time stands still and the sun hovers golden over the Adriatic, Rosita Forbes described her encounters with Arab woman in the 1930s, and Freya Stark explored what it means to be a true explorer. “In spite of all hardships, discomforts and sicknesses, the lure of exploration still continues to be one of the strongest lodestars of the human spirit,” Stark reflects, “and will be so while there is the rim of an unknown horizon, in this world or the next.”

To hear these wise and well weathered voices gathered together like some travel writers’ reunion around a universal campfire felt like a form of travel itself, transporting me across time and into distant lands, to the back of a camel, to the summit of a mountain, to the expanse of a sparkling sea, to a seat around a welcoming fire.

When I was ten, I decided I would never run a marathon. This may sound like a no-brainer for most people, but most people didn’t grow up in a family whose parents had medals and race posters from their four or five 26.2-milers a piece decorating the walls of their house. I eschewed the expectation that I would follow in their 26.2-mile-long footsteps for almost as long as I can remember. Somehow, I knew I would have to find my own ways to be brave. 

My older sister is different. She’d run her first marathon by the time she was 25. And when she and her husband turned 30 last year, they decided that to celebrate, they would hike the Appalachian Trail.   

The pleasures of armchair travel are many. Reading can not only take you to the places you long to go, but into experiences you never in your life would try outside of the covers of a book. Perhaps it’s the nature of the middle child to live vicariously through a more adventuresome older sibling. Maybe this ability to imagine myself into my sister’s shoes is what made me into such an avid armchair traveler.   

And maybe it was the admiring little sister in my that allowed me to immediately empathize with blister stories and tales of unbearable desert heat as I lay sweating comfortably in my apartment during the Boston heat wave last week with a fan oscillating a few feet away, reading Cheryl Strayed’s new book Wild, a travel memoir about her grueling emotional and physical journey along the Pacific Crest Trail.   

Cheryl Strayed is brave. But at the end of a harrowing day of solo encounters with the wilds of California, she inevitably crawls into her tent and opens a book, escaping from the challenges of her journey by way of someone else’s narrative. Each night, she burns the pages she read in her campfire, lightening her load. If I couldn’t identify with the aching muscles and blackened toenails of her hike, I understood this impulse (not the impulse to burn the books, but the impulse to read them). I also saw its influence in the very craft of her writing, in Strayed’s remarkable ability to tell her own dramatic story.   

There are many ways a book can find you. Yesterday a customer asked at the information desk not for Wild, but for Wildwood, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists fantastical young adult novel. As soon as I handed him the book, the customer began to flip through the pages, stopping midway with a cry of recognition. He had paused at an illustration by Meloy’s wife, Carson Ellis, of a badger pulling a rickshaw. “There it is!” he cried, explaining that he had bought this print at an art show a month ago for its own merits, ignorant of the fact that there was a book behind it. Now he was eager to learn just who this badger pulling a rickshaw was.   

Determining just who she is, finding a story to match the image of herself she once had before her mother’s death, is at the heart of Strayed’s journey through the wilds of the PCT. Even her name has changed since the loss of her mother, several affairs, a heroin addiction, and a divorce broke her from the person she thought she was. Strayed chose her name from a dictionary. “Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord:” she writes, “to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild.”   

As I contemplated the importance of names in the formation of our stories, I realized that it was the very name of Strayed’s book that had compelled me to read Wild. The week before, my sister had been visiting from overseas to introduce me to my nephew, born three months ago in Bangkok, just shy of nine months after the completion of her Appalachian hike. His name is Wilder.   

For those of us who can’t travel to Dublin every June 16th for the annual celebration of Bloomsday, a new biography of James Joyce has been released in time for your local celebration of the genius behind Ulysses. Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce introduces us to the life models that inspired Joyce’s most famous characters, including Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

On June 16, 1904 James Joyce asked his to-be wife Nora on their first romantic outing. He chose to set the entire work of Ulysses on that day, a decision which has been commemorated every year since 1954 on the streets of Dublin with public readings in the squares and re-enactments of the novel’s most famous scenes. Because Ulysses  is so geographically placed in the city, it is possible to follow the characters around each chapter, and many fans take guided tours through Dublin, tracing the route of Joyce’s infamous Leopold Bloom. For the brave and die-hard Joyce fans, a breakfast of organs starts off the celebrations. (Joyce’s character, Bloom, for whom the day is named, begins his June 16th with a tasty fried organ.)

I am one of those readers for whom a description of place, even a place name, is not enough. Once a work of literature has captured my imagination, I must travel to its source, to see the houses, streets, and landscapes that inspired my favorite scenes.  So in 2008 I flew to Dublin to participate in my first Bloomday celebration, and I’ve been marking the day ever since.

This year I had a quieter acknowledgement of Bloomsday. I didn’t even have it in me to walk to my local JP butcher, Meatland, to see if they had any organs on hand. Instead, I cooked up a “trinity” of three fried eggs, the breakfast Joyce’s other famous character, Stephen Dedalus, enjoys in the opening pages of Ulysses.  (I have had a long-standing fictional character-crush on Stephen for several years, and fried eggs are easier to stomach than fried kidney.) Then, after breakfast, as I do every year, I returned to the book itself for a private reading, and found myself suddenly transported without guidebook, map, ticket, or suitcase, onto the streets of Dublin.

 I’d already heard the  story of how Charles de Gaulle left France during an uprising and told his country to shape up (and they did) a few times from my boyfriend’s father, who lived in France at the time. But I’d never heard the slogan of that student revolution “La Beaute est dans la Rue,” or understood just what the riots of 1968 were about until I read John Baxter’s contribution to the Museyon Guide series, Chronicles of Old Paris , a guidebook that allows the reader to travel not only through the streets of Paris, but through time. Each of the twenty-nine chapters focuses on a specific person, invention, trend, or revolution (militaristic or artistic) that contributed to the development of the city of light we know and love and long to travel to today. And if you do travel there, a map to each significant site is included at the end of each segment.

Baxter admits the reader into the cellars of Garnier’s majestic opera house and behind the cork-lined wall’s of Proust‘s bedroom. Fifty Shades fans can learn about the appetites of the Marquis de Sade, and those with an appetite for the surreal can explore the movement’s beginnings with founder Andre Breton. I learned more about the guillotine than I wanted to know (such as why the block is called the mouton, French for “sheep”), and learned enough about French cinema to want to see more.

Museyon Guides are available for more than just Paris. We currently stock Chronicles of Old Boston, and Chronicles of Old London is due out in time for the Olympics in that city this summer. I chose to read Museyon’s Paris first, not only because I love the city, but because the author is a trusted guide through its streets. John Baxter has written several books on France, including the beloved The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, a memoir of his experience as a literary tour guide in Paris. In fact, Baxter includes several “walking tours” at the end of the Museyon Guide. And if his work experience and writings on Paris aren’t enough, Baxter also lives in the former residence of my hero: American expat and bookseller and publisher of James Joyce, Sylvia Beach. Reading his guide to the city he so obviously loves, one is forced to admit that once again, the French have it right: the beauty is in the streets.