Category: Lust To Go

Under the Gypsy Moon

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Thornton, Lawrence. Under the Gypsy Moon. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Reason read: Federico Garcia Lorca was born in June (1898).

Despite being a little over 210 pages long, Under the Gypsy Moon packs a powerful punch. Magical realism flows in and out of historical events creating a spellbinding and dramatic love story. Joaquin Wolf becomes a politically motivated writer after the Spanish Civil War. He meets and begins a relationship with narrator, Ursula Krieger, who carries her own demons of war. Together they struggle against fascism using Federico Garcia Lorca as a their guide. His poetry is the symbol of courage they embrace, allowing them to rise above the despair.

Line I liked, “Poverty gnaws at the body before it feasts on the mind” (p 54).

Author fact: Thornton also wrote Imagining Argentina, also on my list.

Book trivia: Under the Gypsy Moon is short, barely over 200 pages. I read it in a weekend.

Nancy said: Under the Gypsy Moon is one of two fictions in which Guernica plays a part.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply “Guernica” (p 89).

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

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Lee, Laurie. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. New York: Atheneum, 1969.

Reason read: the Madrid Festival in Spain (obviously) happens in May.

Confessional: Once again I am reading books out of order! Dammit, dammit, dammit. When I planned to read As I Walked Out I had no idea Cider with Rosie was the first book in a trilogy memoir. No clue! Pearl does not make mention of the connection even though Moment of War (the third and final book of the memoir) is also included in Book Lust To Go. As an aside, Cider is listed in the index of More Book Lust. Again, I did not make the connection.

Laurie Lee left home in England to find, at the very least, fame and fortune as a musician. With mixed emotions he found he could make a dime on street corners but had to supplement his income with other vocations like construction work before moving on to his next adventure. At the heart of his journey was discovery; as he put it, “I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without a plan, in a place that still had no memories for me” (p 54). Most of his discovery takes place in Spain. As an aside, I loved his description of Madrid as an old lion with broken teeth and bad breath. As I Walked Out… ends with Lee being escorted out of Spain by a British destroyer and yet by summer he was fixated on getting back to Spain to join the war.

Quotes that gave me pause, “I was affronted by freedom” (p 6), “Such a narrow gap between consent and dispute” (p 45) and “Halfway up, in a recess, a small pale child sat carving a potato into the shape of all doll, and as we approached, she turned, gave us a quick look of panic, and bit off its little head” (p 93). What’s that all about? One last quote, “Fear lay panting in the street like a dog” (p 219).

Author fact: Lee was the youngest of twelve in his family. But probably the most fascinating fact about LL is that he met his wife when she was five years old and neither could understand the other’s language (she French, he English).

Book trivia: As I Walked Out… was illustrated by Leonard Rosoman. One of my favorite illustrations is on page 50.

Nancy said: As I Walked Out… is included in a list of books about Spain Nancy said should be tried (p 220).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter simply called “Spain” (p 218).

Lusitania

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Preston, Diana. Lusitania: an Epic Tragedy. New York: Walker & Company, 2002.

Reason read: on May 7th, 1915 the Lusitania was torpedoed on her 101th journey from New York to Liverpool, England. This reading is in honor of that horrific anniversary, 102 years later.

1915 – the year when everyone was in competition to see who could build the biggest, the fastest, the safest, the most stylish luxury ocean liner on the Atlantic. In the meantime, war was underway so another group was trying to build the fastest, the safest, the most stealthy and deadly underwater vessel called a U-boat. On May 7th, 1915 these two ocean vehicles would come together and make controversial history and spark one of World War I’s biggest mysteries. In 1915 the British vessel the Lusitania was the fastest passenger liner on the ocean. It was rumored to be able to outrun any U-boat enemy. However, what is fascinating about Diana Preston’s version of events is the amount of suspense she builds in the telling. I found myself questioning what I would do if I was set to board a British passenger ship, knowing full well its country was at war and the enemy had just issued a warning to passengers (to me!) stating they would attack my mode of transportation. In addition, I had options. There were neutral American boats going the same way.
I enjoyed Preston’s Lusitania so much I sought out documentaries about the May 7th, 1915 sinking to learn more.

Cache of worthless information:

  • Admiral Lord John Arbuthnot “Jackie” Fisher would have been a solid contender on Dancing with the Stars.
  • Admiral Lord Charles Beresford had a hunting scene tattoo across his buttocks “with the fox disappearing into the cleft” (p 19). Thank you for that image, Ms. Preston!
  • Businessman Elbert Hubbard’s wife’s preoccupation with potted plants got on his nerves.

Quote to quote, “A disaster always seemed necessary to bring about safety improvements (p 59). Isn’t that always the case?
Here’s another interesting quote, “A group of bellboys had spent the night before sailing electrocuting rats…” (p 133).
But, the most devastating quote to me is, “The German government regretted that the American passengers had relied on British promises rather than heeding German warnings” (p 334).

As an aside, I enjoy when a book educates me further on things I wasn’t aware I needed to know. Reading Lusitania prompted me to look up Leonardo Da Vinci’s underwater suit. I wanted to know more about Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. His portrayed him as a dashing man.

Author fact: There is a saying out there, “stick to what you know” and Preston certainly subscribes to that point of view. She has written four other books about the sinking of the Lusitania. None of these, nor any other Preston books, are on my Challenge list.

Book trivia: at first glance Lusitania: an epic tragedy is a hardy 438 pages long. In reality, its text is more like 380 pages once you remove all the awesome photographs, maps and diagrams. There are 80 photographs, 5 maps, 7 illustrations and 5 diagrams in total.

Nancy said: Nancy called Preston’s account “fittingly moving” (p 76).

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 900s” (p 76).

Coming into the Country

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McPhee, John. Coming into the Country. New York: The Noonday Press, 1977.

Reason read: in four months I will be visiting Alaska. I thought I would start reading about it now.

There is a little bit of all things Alaskan in Coming into the Country. To name a few: the trials and tribulations of traveling rivers via kayak, the must-know laws of sport fishing (for example, fishermen are prohibited from catching fish by anything but mouth. Who knew?), Juneau is two time zones away from Anchorage. There’s more: McPhee details the nature of Grizzly bears, the techniques of placer mining, the bickering over the new location of the state capital, marriage and survival, and my favorite, the people of Alaska (transplant and not). The people you meet in Coming into the Country are phenomenal.

As an aside, Pearl may have called Coming into the Country a “classic” but in a timely twist, the boom of oil in Alaska is anything but old news.

Quotes I liked, “The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go” (p 77) and “On days when the mail plane does not come, the human atmosphere is notably calmer than it is now” (p 199).

Author fact: I already told you McPhee has a huge list of books he has written. And I already told you I have six of them on my Challenge list. I already reviewed “Crossing the Craton” a few years ago.

Book trivia: There are no photographs in Coming into the Country but there are several different helpful maps.

Nancy said: Nancy called Coming into the Country a “classic” (p 15).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “All Set For Alaska” (p 15).

The Oxford Murders

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Martinez, Guillermo. The Oxford Murders. Translated by Sonia Soto. Read by Jonathan Davis. Blackstone Audio, 2007.

Reason read: April is Mathematics, Science & Technology month. This would fall into the math category.

The mathematics behind a serial killer. This is one of those murder mysteries where the clues don’t add up to the crime. When an elderly woman is found dead everyone presumes a family member committed the crime for the money. The woman was going to die of cancer anyway. Someone just couldn’t wait for the inheritance. But, enter world renowned logician Arthur Seldom, author on the mathematics of serial killers, who describes a note left for him indicating this murder is only the first one. There will be more. The curious thing is each subsequent murder victim was already dying of an ailment and every death is accompanied by a strange series of mathematical symbols. It’s up to an Argentine math student (loosely based on the author) to crack the case.

My favorite part of the book – Seldom explaining how to hide a crime.

Author fact: Martinez has written a bunch of other stuff but only The Oxford Murders is on my Challenge list.

Narrator trivia: Jonathan Davis uses great accents to differentiate the characters. He is so much fun I have decided to actively seek out other audio books he has narrated.

Book trivia: The Oxford Murders was made into a movie in 2008.

Nancy said: Nancy called this book a “cerebral puzzle that always makes me wish I were smarter than I am” (p 171).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford: Mysteries” (p 171).

Lost Upland

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Merwin, W.S., The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwest France.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Reason read: Who doesn’t remember the song, “April in Paris”?

Merwin has combined three stories about the Dordogne/Languedoc region of southern France and combined them in a book called The Lost Upland. I use the term “stories” loosely as there no definitive plot to speak of in any one of them. Instead, readers will find a lyrical portrait of place and people. Merwin is a poet, after all. Community members like Fatty and Blackbird may dominate the pages but it’s the landscape itself that takes center stage. Be prepared to be transported to a place time forgot where magic is in the weather.

Confessional: this just wasn’t my cup of tea or coffee or anything. I tried to read it last year (in July) and failed then, too. Oh well.

Author fact: the list of works published by Merwin is extensive but I am only reading The Lost Upland.

Book trivia: As mentioned before, The Lost Upland is separated into three stories: “Foie Gras”, “Shepherds”, and “Blackbird’s Summer”.

Nancy said: she was “quite taken” with Merwin’s story. Which one?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust to Go in the chapter called “Provence and the South of France” (p 188).

Blue Lightning

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Cleeves, Ann. Blue Lightning. New York: Minotaur Books, 2010.

Reason read: to finish the series started in January in honor of the Shetland Up Helly Aa festival.

In Blue Lightning Jimmy Perez, now engaged to Fran, the woman he met in Cleeves’s first book Raven Black, takes her home to meet his parents. He’s not looking forward to the trip because he doesn’t get along with his father and home is a smidgen of an island called Fair Isle. When Jimmy was younger he couldn’t wait to move away and escape the trappings of parental expectations. True to form, murder follows Jimmy & Fran (she found the murder victims in Raven Black). Thanks to terrible storms prohibiting people from coming to or leaving the island they are forced, along with Jimmy’s partner, Sandy, to solve the crime without help from the mainland. Things go from bad to worse when there is a second murder and shockingly, a third. This time the murders center around birds as the killer has woven bird feathers though the first victim’s hair & strewn feathers over the second victim’s body.

For the most part I enjoyed this fourth book in the Jimmy Perez series. It isn’t necessary to read the other three to understand or enjoy Blue Lightning. My only complaint? After the second death I knew when the third victim would die.

Book trivia: In the acknowledgments Cleeves makes reference to a crime scene saying, “probably the most awkward crime scene I’ve yet devised.” It made me curious to know if I would recognize the scene (spoiler alert: because in every Cleeves mystery so far multiple people have died, hence multiple crime scenes). What would make one particular crime scene awkward. Then, I got to it, recognized it & decided, yes it’s awkward.

Author fact:  I don’t have anything new to share about Ms. Cleeves except to say the series continues after Blue Lightning.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Sheltering in the Shetlands” (p 205).

Big Empty

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Randolph, Ladette and Nina Shevchuk-Murray. The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers. University of Nebraska Press, 2007

Reason read: Nebraska became the 37th state in March of 1867.

Big Empty is comprised of 27 essays and excepts covering a variety of subjects but all centered around the geography of Nebraska. Ted Kooser will often quote the Bohemians and the proverbs while telling you about the land. Bob Ross will tell you how to mend fences to keep the cattle in. William Kloefkorn will have you smiling as he remembers an ill-fated trip down the river with a group of friends. Kenneth Lincoln will have you weepy-eyed as he remembers his coming of age. You get the point, this is Nebraska from every angle. Some of the stories will bring tears to your eyes. Some will make you laugh out loud. But most will educate you to the Nebraskan landscape.

My big takeaway from reading Big Empty: Nebraska means flat water. Just kidding. Nebraska has gone from a place I knew absolutely nothing about to something of intrigue. I am more than a little curious about the state now.

Confessional: I used to say I didn’t know anyone from Nebraska until someone told me my deceased uncle was from Nebraska. Then I discovered he was actually from Arkansas. So I still don’t know anyone from Nebraska.

Line I liked from the preface: “Instead of sleeping away the drive through, they are awake and taking notes” (p xi).
Other lines to mention, “My argument is this: if it floats and gets you there, it is a boat” (“This Death By Drowning” by William Kloefkorn, p 73), and “…and when the auctioneer hammered “Sold!” Vic had bought that mule for a price that even brought a smile to the mule’s face” (“Uncle Vic’s Mule” by Roger Welsch, p 84), and “Grandpa’s plate was where the talk stopped and the patriarchal authority started” (“Excerpts from Prairie Homeboys” by Kenneth Lincoln, p 151). There were many, many other lines I could quote but I’ll just let you read the book. You should.

Author Editor fact: Ladette Randolph is also a writer. She published Leaving the Pink House in 2014 (University of Iowa Press).
Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born in the Ukraine.

Book trivia: I know this is a collection of essays but I would have loved a few photographs as well.

Nancy said: Big Empty “offers a diverse look at people’s lives in the state at various times and under various conditions” (p 149).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go from the chapter called “Nebraska: The Big Empty” (p 149). Gee, I wonder where she got that title from?

Red Bones

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Cleeves, Ann. Red Bones. New York: Minotaur Press, 2009.

Reason read: I started the Cleeves series in January in honor of the Up Helly Aa festival. This is the third book in the series.

Detective Jimmy Perez has a new case. At first it is a simple open and shut accidental shooting involving his partner’s grandmother and a rabbit hunt gone wrong. Sandy’s grandmother has been found dead of a gunshot wound and Sandy’s own cousin, Ronald Clouston, confessed to hunting rabbits by moonlight. It was just a horrible mistake. Or was it? Weird coincidences start piling up. Just days before Mina’s death old pieces of a skeleton were found on her property. She had approved an archaeology dig just steps from her front door and a student, hoping to prove existence of an ancient estate on the property, discovered the bones. This same student later discovers ancient coins, proving her theory. She is elated. So, when she is found dead of an apparent suicide, supposedly despondent over Mina’s death, everyone is shocked. What is going on? It’s up to Jimmy to figure it out. While his love interest (Fran from the other Cleeves mysteries) is away in London, he has plenty of time.
A bonus to Red Bones is that Jimmy’s partner, Sandy, plays a bigger role in this mystery. Because it involves his family we get to see more of his character.

As an aside, I can see why Raven Black was everyone’s favorite. I found Red Bones a bit whiny for lack of a better term. Everyone seems really emotional, especially Sandy and not just because his grandmother died. And. And! And, why is it that Jimmy Perez is the only murder investigator in all of the Shetland Islands? He never seems to work with anyone else on a case.

Author fact: My first fact was about how Cleeves is the reader-in residence at a crime writing festival. My second fact was about the awards she either has been short listed for or has won. My third fact, taken from the dust jacket, is that she lives in Yorkshire, England (as of 2009).

Book trivia: this time there is a map of the Shetland Islands in the book (no need to go to Cleeves’ website this time).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go again, in the chapter called “Sheltering in the Shetlands” (p 204).

Hall of a Thousand Columns

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Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah. London: John Murray, 2005.

Reason read: to continue the story started in February in honor of travel adventure.

Following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, the year was 1333 Battutah had now traveled to Delhi, India. Some 600+ years later and Tim Mackintosh-Smith is “hot” on his heels. Smith continues Hall of a Thousand Columns with the same wit and humor found in Travels with a Tangerine. For example here’s a line that made me giggle, “For a ship supposed to be leaving on her maiden voyage, she was being annoyingly coy about her virginity” (p 17).
Mackintosh-Smith titled his continuation of Tangerine Hall of a Thousand Columns because he felt that when IB came face to face with the hall he also came face to face with his destiny (p 31). As much as I liked Tangerine is wasn’t able to finish Hall.

More lines I liked, “Some things are meant to be found, not looked for, and this was one of them” (p 37).

Book trivia: The illustrations are great. Martin Yeoman was Smith’s companion for most of the travel.

Nancy said: Hall of a Thousand Columns was a “pleasure” (p 101).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “In the Footsteps Of…” (p 100).

Falling Angels

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Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels. New York: Soho Press, 1990.

Reason read: On March 29th in 1848 Niagara Falls stopped flowing.

First and foremost I have to say this is a tragic book. I was not expecting it to be so violent, so scary or so very, very sad. The terrible thing is this: I realize there are probably hundreds of thousands of households just like the Fields out there. That thought alone makes the book all the scarier.
Second comment: Nancy included this in the chapter called “Niagara Falls” and yet Niagara Falls isn’t really in the book. It’s a memory and an end.
From the outside, the Fields family looks like your typical suburban household. Dad goes to work everyday. Mom stays home and looks after their three daughters, Sandy age eight, Lou age nine and Norma, ten. The children go to school and occasionally are seen around the neighborhood. No one questions when the family disappears for two weeks. What they don’t know is instead of going to Disney for a family vacation militant and World War III-expectant dad forces them to live in an underground bunker as training for a nuclear disaster. It is the post-war early 60s after all. No one seems to notice middle daughter, Lou, as she does all the grocery shopping for the family, or that the mother is rarely seen outside.
Go inside and the Fields household is even less of a pretty sight. Mom, practically comatose, drinks to erase a terrible memory (involving Niagara Falls). Dad has a violent temper and is prone to attack whomever is in reach when he’s in between girlfriends.
In the ten year span of the story the daughters get older and experience puberty and do so without a responsible parent to guide them. They are on their own. Each daughter copes in her own way. The end results are disastrous.

Scary line, “He was as unpredictable as a police dog”. For one, police dogs are not supposed to be unpredictable to anyone except a criminal.
Two more sad lines, “But his eyes are her eyes gone to hell” (p 105) and “Extreme happiness and terror have always felt the same to her” (p 150).

Author fact: Gowdy has her own website here.

Book trivia: Falling Angels was made into a movie in 2003 and why not? the book has sex, drugs, and death. All that’s missing is a good car chase.

Nancy said: absolutely nothing. But, as an aside: she could have included this in Book Lust in the chapter “Families in Trouble” (p 86).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the short chapter “Niagara Falls” (p 156).

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read by Michael C. Hall. Grand Haven MI: Brilliance Audion, 1986.

Reason read: Because I read Like Water for Chocolate in honor of March being the best time to visit Mexico instead of in honor of the Oscars I decided to chose Breakfast for the Oscars even though this year the awards were dished out in February.

Everyone loves Holiday Golightly. Holly, as she is known to her friends, seems to appeal to all kinds of men and a certain kind of woman. This sassy and shallow teenager makes her way through a Manhattan existence surviving as a society girl, an “American Geisha” as Capote called his creation. She is eye candy to dangle on the arm of a wealthy gentleman so that he might buy her dinners in fancy restaurants, expensive gifts, and maybe, breakfast or two at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly wants to be taken seriously but she is seen as more of an unusual mystery than anything else.
Told from the point of view of her neighbor, a writer who befriends her and becomes enthralled with her (like everyone else), he wants to believe his relationship with her is different. He believes she isn’t using him because he has nothing to offer…until she has nothing to offer him.

As an aside, I am betting many more people have seen the movie than read the book.

Favorite line, “Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion” (p 134).

Author fact: Truman Capote also wrote the short story A Christmas Memory which I make my staff watch every year because I love it so much.

Book trivia: this is actually a novella. Short. Short . Short. You can read it in one sitting.

Narrator trivia: Michael C. Hall is the same actor who played serial killer Dexter.

Nancy said: The curious thing about what Nancy said about BAT is this – she includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the “American Girls” chapter and then discredits the choice by saying, …all novels about female Americans abroad owe a debt to Henry James…Many of them owe at least a little something to Truman Capote’s greatest invention, Holly Golightly, heroine and heartbreaker of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s not my subject here” (p 18). Does Holly belong in this chapter or not?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “American Girls” (p 18). See previous paragraph for my comment on this.

Treachery in the Yard

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Ibe, Adimchinma. Treachery in the Yard. New York: Minotaur Books, 2010.

Reason read: Nigeria’s new president was sworn into office March of 2005.

Meet Tamunoemi “Tammy” Peterside. If this was a television show or a movie, Tammy would be the barely playing by the rules, dripping with sarcasm, wise mouthed but good looking cop who goes rogue from time to time. He would play by his own rules but always for the best reasons, of course. He’d have a beautiful girlfriend he pretends to care nothing about but wear a fierce loyalty to his work on his sleeve. In Treachery in the Yard he is the creation of Adimchinma Ibe, designed to be around for awhile. In this first mystery Tammy needs to solve a bombing that has left several people dead and a politician wounded. Every time Tammy gets close to the truth another body finds its way to the morgue. When someone very close to him is the next murder victim, Tammy knows he has to wrap up the case and fast. The ending may seem a little predictable and Ibe makes too many references to the heat, but other than that this is a good read!

Lines I liked, “You have to spend a lot of time climbing over the bodies to get to the truth” (p 49) and “Nothing is tough if you have an Uzi” (p 143).

As an aside, for a such a short book Ibe mentions Nigeria’s poverty a lot (I already mentioned the heat). Many sentences contained the words “could not afford,” or “it was expensive,” or “no new [fill in the blank],” or “it is cheaper to [fill in the blank].” I counted nearly a dozen such phrases by page 66, not even halfway through the book. It was a little distracting.

Author fact: Adimchinma was born in 1977 which makes me older than him by a few years.

Book trivia: Treachery in the Yard is a super short novel or a longer short story. At only 146 pages one could read it in one sitting. I did.

Nancy said: Pearl said she is confident we will see more of Adimchinma Ibe “in years to come” (p 157). She was right. He has gone on to publish another Tammy Peterside mystery titled Cronies.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply, “Nigeria” (p 157).

Antarctic Destinies

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Barczewski, Stephanie. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007.

Reason read: February is exploration month.

Stephanie Barczewski’s Antarctic Destinies is organized into thirteen different topics. She is careful to set the groundwork for Destinies with an overview of Antarctic exploration from its humble beginnings with the 1901 Discoveries expedition. She goes on to make comparisons between the 1940 Terra Nova expedition of Robert Scott and the 1914 Endurance expedition of Ernest Shackleton. The ever-present question is of heroism. Scott had a heroic death while Shackleton had a heroic survival. So what exactly is a hero? Of the two, who is more the hero? How does the public respond to failure as opposed to the perception of success? Barczewski analyzes the reputations of both before wrapping up Destinies with how each member of the different expeditions has been commemorated. She finishes with Where Are Our Heroes Now?

As an aside – someone wrote in the margins, “how does sheer luck get transmuted into survival?” They wrote a whole bunch of other gobbledygook, but I liked that question best.

On a personal note: my father was busy in the Antarctic when I was born. There is some debate as to what he was actually doing. As a member of the Coast Guard I recall he was on a Coast Guard cutter clearing ice for research vessels. Mom remembers he was actually on board the research vessel itself. But, doing what?

Author fact: a Google query brought me to a Clemson University faculty web page where a smiley Barczewski poses with Mickey Mouse.

Book trivia: Antarctic Destinies includes only nine black and white photographs.

Nancy said: nothing interesting.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “To the Ends of the Earth: North and South (Antarctic)” (p 235).

Travels with a Tangerine

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Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Travels with a Tangerine: from Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam’s Greatest Traveler. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

Reason read: Admittedly, this is an oops read. I had Hall of a Thousand Columns on my list a few years back. At the time I didn’t realize you must read Travels before Hall so I vowed when the subject of “exploration” was to be honored again, I would circle back to Mackintosh-Smith and read Travels. The mistake lies in the fact I forgot to remove the other exploration book I had slated for 2017, Antarctic Destinies. As a result, I am reading them both.

Travels with a Tangerine takes us back to the year 1325 when the “greatest Islamic traveler” Ibn Battutah departed from Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 21 years old. There is nothing astonishing about someone wanting to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is so remarkable is where Ibn Battutah ended up. The trip took him almost thirty years and 75,000 miles. He spent his life on the road. At the same age, author Mackintosh-Smith sets out to follow in IB’s footsteps, admittedly taking short cuts because he doesn’t want to spend his entire life on this journey. But the result of this fascination is an interesting look back at the Arabic fourteenth century with eye an toward the future. Mackintosh-Smith’s humor makes it an easy read.

Quote to quote: “Then there were those reports of violence against Maghribi immigrants in Paris and Marseille, the deportations, the unimaginable shittiness of being an illegal alien” (p 31). Think about that sentence for a second. What has changed? Here’s another one, a little more lighthearted, “Defecation and ingestion of knowledge are such complementary activities” (p 105). So, that’s why men bring newspapers in the bathroom!

Author fact: Mackintosh-Smith is the winner of the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award

Book trivia: Illustrations by Martin Yeoman. They are delightful. I especially liked the monkey on page 249.

BookLust Twist: Twisted twice – once from Book Lust in the chapter called “Here Be Dragons: the GReat Explorers and Expeditions” (p 110) and once in Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “In the Footsteps Of…” (p 100-101).