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Hav
I have never, in my life, read a book two times in a row. Until I read Hav. This was possible because Hav is not a novel in the ordinary sense. It’s a travel memoir to a fictional place that could...
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Jan Morris’ Journeys
Reading a collection of travel essays written in the early 1980s is a surreal experience. So I’ll break this discussion into two parts: by golly I love Morris’ writing, and the essays themselves. By...
View ArticleThe Olive Season
It’s fair to say that I take what previously I would have called a guilty pleasure in reading books about foreigners who go to France (or Spain) and rehabilitate dilapidated farms. It’s a guilty...
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A Year in Provence
Every now and then I fall into reading one of those stranger-in-a-strange-land books, where some person goes to live in a foreign-to-them country and has amusing experiences. Sometimes I feel...
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Mermaid Singing
I had thought that I liked travel memoirs. And I do – I can enjoy a good ‘and then we went here and experienced that’ story. But I’ve eventually realised that what I really enjoy is what I choose to...
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Peel Me a Lotus
I read this courtesy of NetGalley. You don’t HAVE to read Mermaid Singing, the first of Clift’s memoirs about living on a Greek island in the 1950s, in order to understand what’s going on here; not...
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Green Chili and Other Impostors
I read this courtesy of NetGalley. Part travel memoir, part personal memoir, and part food history; it’s an intriguing combination. Furstenau discusses her own history – born of Bengali parents, in...
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Atlas of Forgotten Places
I read this courtesy of NetGalley. It’s out now. These are beautiful books, even in electronic copy – this Atlas of Forgotten Places, and the Atlas of Improbable Places; I’m sure they’re even more...
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Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
I read this courtesy of the publisher, Bloomsbury. It’s out now; $39.99 trade paperback. … and I thought I was an iconoclast. What a remarkable, thought-provoking and intriguing biography. Things I...
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Kon-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl
I do love a good adventure/ travel story, so when I saw this in a secondhand book shop I thought – why would I not read the book that as far as I can tell, arguably started the modern version of...
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