Okay, "excitement" may be a little bit of an overreach, but we have obtained several long-awaited additions to our popup book inventory, which will be available for perusal Saturday morning, October 28th at the Carter Center's Freedom Farmer's Market. Sometimes we really like a book, but availability through publishers can be a problem. Both these books hit the proverbial Destination Books sweet spot -- good writing, travel to distant places, an appreciation of the planet.
Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Not Visited and Never Will (2009) by Judith Schalansky.
The German author and graphic artist Schalansky credits the idea when she surveyed a giant globe in the Berlin National Library and began studying the tiny islands names that dot the blue expanses of the ocean. First, she collected the facts including their longitude and latitude coordinates, their current population (if any), a timeline of major events and their distance to nearby continents or other remote islands. Some you may have heard of such places as Easter Island, Iwo Jima, or Christmas Island but she gives equal billing to some uninhabited ones like Deception Island (near Antarctica), Bouvet Island (in the South Atlantic) or the cold and barren Lonely Island (near the Arctic Circle).
She dedicates four pages to each entry/chapter. The first two pages provide the facts and the timeline and a detailed map including points of interest such as elevation, bays and any villages. Pages 3 and 4 are very short essays about the history or geological/biological makeup of the place such as the Pacific Isle of Banaba, which is made up entirely of phosphate from centuries of bird guano buildup. Schalansky's writing style has been aptly described in The Paris Review " as a prose poem of sorts. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction; we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation."
The End of the End of the Earth: Essays (2018) by Jonathan Franzen
In addition to being a novelist and a misanthrope, Franzen is also an essayist and an avid bird watcher, the latter which is one of the major themes of this collection. He explains:
“To my shame, I am in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t like birds for their own sake. I go birding to their beauty and diversity, learn more about their behavior and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many lists. I count not only the species I have seen worldwide, but the ones I have seen in every country and every U.S. state I have birded in. Also at various other sites, including my backyard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalize my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.”
The quote above does a good job summing up the majority of these essays. Franzen— traveling around the world (Ghana, Egypt, Jamaica, St. Lucia, islands off the coast of California, and Antarctica) — adding to his list of birds (African cuckoo-hawk, ringed plover, crested quail dove, black finch, Farrion murres, and the Emperor Penguin, —while commenting on the dire circumstances of shrinking habitats. He doesn’t blame everything on climate change (one criticism of book when it was first published was that he was a skeptic), but he can be witheringly critical of organizations and corporations. Fortunately, he reports on successful conservation stories as well.
In the final two essays of the book (the last one was a response to early criticism that the hardback edition was too tolerant about climate change), Franzen addresses the question that lingers “How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end?” His answers are provocative, insightful, and not as dour as you might think. Pure Franzen.
And there's more...
Adding to the frolic, we have a bench load of fresh books on sale for reduced prices.
