Lately I've been reading travel diaries, biographies and natural history books. Armchair travel, living and exploration.
I am currently reading Out of Africa and am waiting for Durrell's Bitter Lemons to come in to the library. I finished a wonderful book on mosses a couple of weeks ago, and am hoping to find some more books to add to my stack.
Any recommendations?
I am currently reading Out of Africa and am waiting for Durrell's Bitter Lemons to come in to the library. I finished a wonderful book on mosses a couple of weeks ago, and am hoping to find some more books to add to my stack.
Any recommendations?
12 comments:
For natural history Roger Deakin, unfortunately dead, is worth reading. For travel diaries, Patrick Leigh Fermor is my favourite.
which was the moss one?
"solovyovo" by margaret paxon. i am reading it just now and it is great
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=22256
Which book on mosses is it? BTW, Lars Gustafsson used in one of his stories a beautifull metapher of humans as mosses-like creatures: Like the amazing skills of mosses come from their symbiotic nature, Gustafsson views the human mind as symbiosis of biology and the organism of language. I'd like to enlarge the picture by viewing the human mind as symbiosis of biology, language and platonic "ideas". The later because of my and others impressions from doing mathematics and the observation that some people apparently have bright brains and great language skills, but lack access to the later, are "idea-blind".
Recommendations:
THE 16th century armchair traveler's compendium, "A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC", one of the most thrilling life's of the 20th century (link, video-lecture, biographers site)
Correction: Gustafsson's remark refers to lichens.
Two more recommendations: The books by Fabre; this wonderfull book (by a famous mathematician, whose work was crucial for solving "Fermat's Last Theorem") on japanese Imari. Why the later? They offer an unexpected "land" for armchair traveling into a different culture's mind, I guess.
Your post makes me wonder about trying something like travel diary sometime. Next to the armchair here is an accidentially bought natural history book: G. Agricola's "De Natura Fossilium". Initially I thought it to be boring, but actually it is very nice to read in and makes curious for looking mineralogical museum collections.
A couple of recent periodical references:
Travel Issue Lapham’s Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magazine/travel.php
New Yorker April 19th 2010 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2010/04/19/toc_20100412
Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time For Gifts," a wonderful and evocative story of a walk across a Europe on the brink of World War Two.
Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps
Sounds interesting:
"Pirates, like gangsters, highwayman, and other colorful outlaws, have always carried a certain romantic appeal with them upon the high seas. Thanks to a certain movie trilogy, they are the most appealing of the outlaws at this moment. And the language…y'arrgh! But exemplars of democracy? In a swashbuckling and daring new article for the Journal of Political Economy, "An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization," Peter Leeson explores the fascinating "golden age" of piracy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and finds...." (more)
Thanks everyone!
'The moss book' is Gathering Moss by R. Kimmerer. She's best when actually writing about moss and not as good when drawing analogies, etc. I still really enjoyed it.
After having read some reviews of Kimmerer's book, I think her themes connect nicely with the great, philosophical "Snail on the Slope" by the Strugatskii brothers.
The two parallel stories in it (someone entering the science community/buerocracy for studying nature - symbolized the 'forest' in the novel - and desperately, but finally unsuccessfully, trying to get out of the 'institute' for getting a direct experience of the 'forest' and it's people; then a pilot crashlanded in the 'forest' and desperately trying to get out of it) is a long reflection on the troubled relation between organized civilisation and nature. This seems to be one of Kimmerer's themes. What I like specially in the novel, is the new word 'knowledge-sickness' in analogy to 'home-sickness' ("Wissensweh" in the German translation) from which the main characters suffer, but without which they wouldn't like to live. In contrast to them, the well-adapted people in the science community resp. forest tribes live physically and mentally in a kind of dulling symbiosis with their surrounding.
Here a short review, this seems to be a translation online, but I have not looked closer to that. Some people claim that Cameron took many ideas of his "Avatar"-movie from this and other Strugatskii novels - however that may be, this hints to a connection with Kimerer's other themes.
in a way, i am re-reading a travel diary, too: selma lagerlöf's nils holgersson! have you read it? it is eternally beautiful. and hello! hope you're well!
x
e
Sounds interesting: "For centuries, the city of Ubar was the object of legend, quests and uncertainty. An ancient trading outpost in Arabia, it had, according to the Koran, sunk into the desert sands as a result of God's wrath upon its sinful population. In the 1980s, Clapp, a documentary filmmaker, undertook to find the city. After exhaustive research that took him from ancient texts to satellite photos, he eventually led an expedition that finally located Ubar in what is now Oman." (booklink)
Post a Comment