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It should be no great surprise that I write in the areas I like to read. Here are some of the best books I've read in the last several years, grouped into my favorite topic areas. Biographies Boats and Sailing Writing Maps and Exploration Relationships Science Fiction and Fantasy General Fiction Humorous Nonfiction My Family and other Animals by Gerald Durrell - I want to write just like him. Wicked sense of humor and as the flyleaf on The Drunken Forest, another of his books says, "Gerald Durrell's particular genius lies in having things happen to him that could not possible have happened to anybody else..." I've read maybe a dozen of his books about his adventures growing up on Korfu, becoming a naturalist and his adult career as a collector for zoos. They are all laugh-out-loud funny! Gerald Durrell: The Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting - A 650 page tome that let me see deeply into the writer I wanted most to be like. His life reminds me of my father's, but at a higher pitch of seeming impossibility. While his drive and ambition in pursing his cause of conservation was something I had seen little of in reading his books, it is covered deeply in this book. The more human side of his relationships with women was more than a little sobering (why can't heroes just be heroes?). King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild - Just finished this intense and chilling account of the "hidden" holocaust of the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century that killed approximately 50% of the area's population. The book provides a very accessible account of how King Leopold II of Belgium grabbed a vast area of central Africa as his personal colony and exploited its resources and native population for more than two decades for his own profit. The tragedy is offset by the heroic efforts of a small number of foreign missionaries and an single individual in England who took it as his personal reason for living to expose the atrocities and the conspiracy of silence around them. This book is very well written and lives up to the uniformly rave reviews. Desert Queen by Janet Wallach - When westerners think of European influence in Arabian politics they think of Lawrence of Arabia. The English woman Gertrude Bell, a one-time colleague of Lawrence, spent most of her life in the Middle East, played an enormous part in determining the current political boundaries, and at one time was considered one of the most powerful English woman in the world, second only to the Queen of England. Her influence and the respect of Arab leaders earned her the nick-name "Queen of the Desert." The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln by Bernard Wasserstein - The biography of a Hungarian Jew who through his life become an Anglican minister, a Member of Parliament in the UK, a spy for Hitler's Beer-Hall Putsch, and finally a Buddhist monk. Two-Gun Cohen by Daniel S. Levy - The biography of Morris Cohen, from an Eastern European Jewish family living in London, who became an international arms dealer and a body guard to the Chinese leader Sun Yat- Sen. Back to Top Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian - This is the first of twenty nautical yarns that were the basis of the film by the same name. I've read nineteen of them so far and keep going back from more. Recently I've found that there are companion books Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian by Dean King and Jack Aubrey Commands: An Historical Companion to the Naval World of Patrick O'Brian by Brian Lavery. So let fly your stuns'ls and crack on! Shackleton's Boat Journey by F. A. Worsley - The true story of Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to Antarctica in an attempt to reach the South Pole. The voyage could have ended in disaster when the expedition's sailing ship, the HMS Endurance, was crushed in the ice pack, but Shackleton lead his men across the ice and across the south sea to a small group of rocky islands. With no hope of being rescued, he led a few men sailing the Endurance's long-boat 800 miles to the nearest habitation to mount a rescue party for the rest. Miraculously, the entire expedition crew survived. A great story, well told by the Captain of the Endurance, and much less laborious to read than Shackleton's own South: A memoir of the Endurance voyage. In a recent binge of reading nonfiction sailing adventure accounts, I've read Hal Roth's Two on a Big Ocean and Eric Hiscock's Around the world in Wonderer III. Despite the title, Two on a Big Ocean seems to nearly exclude the author's wife from the story. While we must assume she played an equal role, she only shows up every chapter or so as somewhat of a bit character in the play. By contrast Eric Hiscock's wife Susan feels like a much more developed character in the story. Best of all, from my perspective, is that counter to the 1950's norms, he portrays Susan as a fully capable mariner rather than somebody along for the ride. In one telling piece he highlights her night-watch intuition that saves them from crashing ashore in Panama due to a navigation error he made. While there remains a bit of British colonial attitude toward native races that is out of date by today's standards, I was pleasantly surprised by the equality of their roles in the voyage.
Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat by Stephen G. Ladd - An apparently self-published book based on the authors experience of constructing a 12-foot boat then sailing it down the Mississippi, across the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, up into the Andes, down the Amazon and back through the Caribbean to Florida. The review on the back from Latitude 38, a well-known sailing journal says, "One of the most fascinating, well-written voyage accounts we've ever read!" After the first chapter or so, I tend to agree. Back to Top Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss - A fun and amusing little best-seller with lots of little rules on using punctuation. Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O'Conner - A fun and amusing book with loads of tips to improve your writing. The Quest for Kim by Peter Hopkirk - For any fan of Kipling, and especially of Kim, this book is a treasure. Hopkirk reviews the evidence, in the story itself, and by traveling in India, to determine if the character Kim was based on a real person. Back to Top
I am a serious map junkie and have been since I was 8 or so. In those early days I enlarged by hand the square inch portion of the USGS topological map that showed my neighborhood into a full 8 1/2 x 11 page so I could plot my own discoveries accurately in place. These days I read maps like other people read books and read books about maps even more fervently. Mercator's World (a six-issue per year magazine) - Articles about maps, their history, and the history of exploration - all written at a very intelligent but not too academic level. Unfortunately, this wonderful journal seems to have perished. The Illustrated Longitude by Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrews - This is an account of William Harrison an English inventor who was the first to create clocks accurate enough to be used at sea to determine a ship's longitude. The use of his inventions to claim an prize sponsored by the English government turned into a lifelong battle with competitors from the academic world who preferred methods based on lunar observations. Initially quite interesting but seemed to lose steam as it went on. Back to Top
Relationships - Life changes give us an opportunity to learn about ourselves. Here are some great books for anybody who's ever been in a relationship. You Just Don't Understand and That's Not What I Meant both by Deborah Tannen - A sociologist, Tannen is a clever observer of the differences in communication styles that lead to misunderstandings in relationships and in larger social settings. Back to Top
Mary Doria Russell - The Sparrow, The Children of God Jack McDevitt - The Engines of God, Ancient Shores, Eternity Road Orson Scott Card - Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus - I very much like the way Card uses Messianic characters and issues of faith and morality in his stories and this one really shines. And, yes, I love the Ender series, but this is his best from my perspective. Guy Gavriel Kay - The Lions of Al Rasan - I've been told that this is the best of his books and I have no reason to disagree. The semi-historical setting, very much like medieval Spain, is rich with cultural differences and character-developing challenges. I especially like the depiction of a small battle scene where the point of view jumps among several minor and marginal characters throughout the fight - a truly brilliant piece of writing. Robin Hobb - The Liveship Trilogy - Formerly Megan Lindholm, Robin Hobb spins wonder stories in a fascinating fantasy world in three linked trilogies. Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett - I thought I was getting another sailing story by the same author that wrote The Voyage of the Norwhal. What I got was a book about the epidemics brought into Canada by the Irish immigrants during the Potato Famine. It is, however, quite a good book about the heroic efforts of one doctor facing an on-coming tidal wave of desperately ill refugees. The Temple of my Familiar by Alice Walker - This wonderful study of several characters as they deal with the issues of being African Americans also has one of the coolest science fiction themes I've seen in a mainstream fiction book. One character has conscious access to each of her previous lives and when she is photographed appears as one of those previous selves. Back to Top
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Copyright © 2000-2006 Chris Powell. All rights reserved. |
