I’m a preacher’s kid, and I’ve always had an evangelistic impulse to get other people to love the books I admire, through my teaching at Harvard, through my writing, and simply by pressing books into my friends’ hands. I grew up hearing about my parents’ early years in the Philippines, where my father was an Anglican missionary, and I was always drawn to tales of distant or imagined lands. My literary interests led me to study a dozen ancient and modern languages, and then to learn more about the places where my favorite authors came from, and to study their cultures and history.
Inspired by Jules Verne’s globe-circling Phileas Fogg, I set out to counter the Covid pandemic’s lockdowns by traveling the world through eighty exceptional books. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Egypt, and points beyond, and via authors from Virginia Woolf and Dante to Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, I explore how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.
Around the World in 80 Books is a memoir of a life of reading, and an invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings. We can see our world in new ways through the eyes of characters who have undertaken remarkable imaginary journeys of their own.
When I was sixteen, I had a great love of rollicking, satiric tales, and a work called The Divine Comedy sounded like it should fit the bill. I soon found that Dante’s three-day journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise wasn’t quite the knee-slapper I’d expected, but I was drawn in by his melancholy eloquence, his spiritual intensity, and his ability to bring his cosmic landscape to life through the most concrete details. 2021 is the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, but he still speaks intimately to us of the perils and the pleasures of our travels “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” -- in the middle of our life’s journey.
Described variously as the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages and, because of the author's evangelical purpose, the `fifth Gospel', the Divine Comedy is central to the culture of the west. The poem is a spiritual autobiography in the form of a journey - the poet travels from the dark circles of the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatory, where Virgil, his guide leaves him to encounter Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Dante conceived the poem as the new epic of Christendom, and he creates a world in which reason and faith have transformed moral and social chaos into…
A fascinating counterpoint to Dante’s otherworldly journey is this great Sufi poet’s down-to-earth account of a group of birds who are seeking a leader to put their chaotic lives in order. Attar’s twelfth-century verse novel combines spiritual quest with pointed social satire, as his bird-brained characters keep putting off their journey, held back by earthly attachments: to power, wealth, even to poetry itself. Finally they go, only to find that their wished-for savior is -- themselves. In Attar’s masterpiece, all history, all storytelling, the Holy Qur’an, and even the poem we’re reading become a hall of mirrors in which we see ourselves multiply refracted, guided by the poet who tells us that “he cooks his own heart into verse.”
Farid ud-Din Attar was a Persian poet, druggist, and social theorist of Sufism, who wrote much of his poetry while treating hundreds of patients a day with his herbal remedies. As a young man he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and sought wisdom during his travels in Egypt, Damascus, and India. His masterpiece, “The Conference of the Birds”, has survived centuries because of its captivating poetic style and its symbolic exploration on the true nature of God. This 4500-line poem follows the birds of the world, each of which hold special significance, as they seek out the Simurgh, a mythical…
I’ve always been fascinated by the ways writers can transmute real-life events into art. Dante was indirectly doing this when he turned his life of exile into his underworld journey, but Wu Cheng’en’s 1592 novel is actually based on the travel account of a seventh-century monk, Master Xuanzang, who’d journeyed to “the West” -- India -- in search of Buddhist texts. In Wu’s imaginative vision, the monk has to surmount 81 dangers on the way, aided by a river ogee, a talking horse, and a mischievous, irascible monkey named Sun Wukong, “Monkey Enlightened to Emptiness”. Who knew that enlightenment could be so lively?
Probably the most popular book in the history of the Far East, this classic sixteenth century novel is a combination of picaresque novel and folk epic that mixes satire, allegory, and history into a rollicking adventure. It is the story of the roguish Monkey and his encounters with major and minor spirits, gods, demigods, demons, ogres, monsters, and fairies. This translation, by the distinguished scholar Arthur Waley, is the first accurate English version; it makes available to the Western reader a faithful reproduction of the spirit and meaning of the original.
Having grown up on a desert island (Mount Desert Island in Maine, to be precise), I’ve always loved tales of imaginary islands, from Thomas More’s Utopia to Spidermonkey Island in Hugh Lofting’s Voyages of Doctor Doolittle. Judith Schalansky’s atlas offers us a cornucopia of actual islands that she’s recreated in her imagination on the basis of travelers’ accounts; her book is subtitled Fifty IslandsI Have Never Set Foot Onand Never Will. She gives us meticulously drawn maps of each island, with a facing-page hinting at the tangled history of its discovery, settlement, or abandonment. “Paradise is an island,” she says, but she adds: “So is hell.” Dante couldn’t have put it better.
Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets wouldn't let anyone travel so everything she learnt about the world came from her parents' battered old atlas. An acclaimed novelist and award-winning graphic designer, she has spent years creating this, her own imaginative atlas of the world's loneliest places. These islands are so difficult to reach that until the late 1990s more people had set foot on the moon than on Peter I Island in the Antarctic.
On one page are perfect maps, on the other unfold bizarre stories from the history of…
Since I first read Tolkien half a century ago, Middle-Earth has always been for me the best of all imaginary worlds, the setting for the quest romance to end all quest romances. Tolkien drew deeply on his life experiences (as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, as a scholar, and as a Catholic) to create his matchless imaginary world, filled with multiple histories and beings, from real people like Aragorn to half-real people (hobbits), “real” fairytale creatures (elves, dwarves, wizards), and wholly invented beings (orcs, Ents, Nazgul). As his admirer W. H. Auden said, “only an exceptional poetic imagination could have created a Secondary World so complex, on so grand a scale, yet so completely credible in every detail.”
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
An ambitious orphan. A ruthless warlord. An impossible destiny.
Arya Nameless is a lowly Raider posted to an isolated fort in the most dangerous place in Dunidaen. She has few prospects, and as much as she loves her fellow soldiers, she burns for more—more control, more autonomy, more power.
When her bravery during an unexpected attack leads to an offer to join the household of one of Dunidaen’s warlords, Arya finds a home and family she never expected. Yet her quicksilver temper and fierce pride put her place there at constant risk.
And as her warlord embroils them all in a dangerous political game to rule Dunidaen, over the border to the west, the Nightstalker lurks. A king who wields powerful magic, the Nightstalker’s fate is inextricably entwined with Arya’s. His relentless pursuit will force Arya into a choice she doesn’t want to make, between loyalty and love, and taking hold of the destiny she was born to fulfill.
Which will she choose?
An ambitious orphan. A ruthless warlord. An impossible destiny.
Arya Nameless is a lowly Raider posted to an isolated fort in the most dangerous place in Dunidaen. She has few prospects, and as much as she loves her fellow soldiers, she burns for more—more control, more autonomy, more power.
When her bravery during an unexpected attack leads to an offer to join the household of one of Dunidaen’s warlords, Arya finds a home and family she never expected. Yet her quicksilver temper and fierce pride put her place there at constant risk.
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