Fans pick 100 books like Indonesia, Etc.

Theodore Roosevelt's equally courageous descent of an unknown tributary of the Amazon. What drew me to the book was the fact that the former President, no longer a young man, went through an incredibly hostile environment. Living in Louisiana, I have explored and indeed become lost in several large swamps, but none like this one. And none with no possibility of rescue. At points like this in a book, I am thinking, what would I do in the tight fix they were facing? Guessing ahead.

And then it was the boats. Unable to ram larger vessels through the jungle, they settled for dugout canoes that were inherently unstable, yet more so when carrying their gear. Yet they had to run very fast water at times, over unseen obstacles, and managed to survive the turnovers. The jungle itself became the enemy. It provided little food to eat, vegetables or animals, and… show more.

When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word “geopolitics” is spot on. 

You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shop—it’s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.  

During much of our lives, we don’t even think about… show more.

OK, I’ll confess. I have this Dr. Zhivago fantasy (that may also involve Julie Christie). I travelled more than 200 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway while on a fellowship in Russia’s southern Urals. It was not as romantic a journey as I had expected—lots of forest and drunks in the restaurant car—but I wish I’d traveled further. David Greene, NPR’s former Moscow bureau chief, has traveled the whole line, more than 5,000 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok. It’s not the view from the train window of the landscape of Siberia—spectacular though it sometimes is—that drives the story along. It’s the people Greene meets, the stories of their lives and hardships, and how passengers traveling together day and night for almost a week cope with the journey and each other. 

I’ve traveled to many of the places that Thubron, the acclaimed travel writer and novelist, visits, but his take on them is much different from mine. He delves deep into the histories of the peoples of the steppes, mountains, and fertile agricultural regions of Central Asia, their art, architecture, belief systems, and cultures. It is a broad historical sweep, from the rise of the Mongol empire to Stalin's deportations to the wrenching economic, social, and political challenges faced by the governments and populations in the post-Soviet era. Thubron’s research is impeccable, his descriptions of places and people engaging and lyrical. 

This account of a backpacker’s quest for hedonistic excess made me want to pack my bags and set off into the unknown. A kaleidoscopic rollercoaster of an adventure story moving from India to Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, and Indonesia… the whole odyssey, like so many of my favorite reads, starts from a simple sliding door moment.

With all its gripping twists and turns, this was vicarious living at its best. Such an adrenaline hit. And it’s all true!

Self-discovery after being brokenhearted from a love relationship is what I refer to as the dark night of the soul. We’ve all been there. There is no way out except to go in, which is what the main character did in Eat Pray Love. Eventually, she finds herself and gains self-love.

Miss Pink, my main character, does something similar. Her journey was going from living in a high rise with a great job to losing it all, including a cheating husband and eventually becoming homeless. What does she do? She starts to give to others who are far worse off, like animals about to be euthanized legally. How uncivilized, how cruel, and Miss Pink, the great warrior, comes up with solutions to save almost all of them. Save the four-legged and two-legged, and you save yourself.

This is one of the best armchair travel books out there. I can’t surf and don’t know the first thing about surfing, but Finnegan’s personal story of chasing waves from continent to continent throughout the 60s and 70s had me nostalgic for a life I’ve never led.

He takes risks and roughs it in ways I never would, but his depictions of places like Madagascar, Hawaii, and Indonesia are so enticing I yearned to hop a plane every time I got to a new chapter. It’s easy to see why Finnegan won a Pulitzer for this autobiography—his writing made for an un-put-downable escape.

From the first chapter, I could not put this book down.

When a lethal and highly transmittable virus turns its victims blue, and the Russians blame America for unleashing a deadly virus, I knew I was about to dive into a true medical thriller. I also thought the timing of this novel was disturbing, reminding me all too well of recent disease outbreaks and then taking me on a journey into a world where plagues and pandemics can easily become commonplace.

To his credit, Lawrence Wright managed to weave science and fiction into a plot that frightened as well as entertained.

This true story occurred over twenty years starting in 1920. A haunted garden on a small island of the Indonesian Maluku archipelago. Here, Felicia has spent her early childhood with her grandmother, the last of an old line of Dutch spice growers. Felicia returns from Europe, after a ruinous marriage, with her baby son Willem. The plantation, overgrown and abandoned, reaches down to the blue-green waters. Felicia and her grandmother settle down again together to the ebb and flow of life surrounded by clove and nutmeg trees, and mystery. But slowly strange events happen in that Garden of Eden and a fascinating story of violence and murder unfolds in a world dominated by the psychic forces of nature, where nothing is predictable or a cliche. 

Open this treasure chest! A perceptive, elegant collection by SE Asia’s leading journalist, public intellectual, and poet. His magnus opus represents 40 years of essays from 1968 – 2014 and each of his 100 brief passages can stand alone as sledgehammers of provocative thought. Often called the Borges of Asia, Goenawan’s dexterous mind tackles issues of identity, literature, nationalism, culture, colonial crimes, terrorism, Islam, mythologies, historicity, and destiny. As he grapples with universal themes, his deep wisdom offers fascinating insights and compassion into questions that concern us all.