The most recommended books about Indonesia

Any discussion of how people and nature relate to each other in the twenty-first century will come up against the issue of climate change. And there are so many good books to read on the topic – Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes right to mind, or the collection All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. What Tale of Two Planets offers is a global perspective on rising seas, changing seasons, and damaging weather through genres from poetry to prose to fiction. Each author brings clarity to the science and politics of climate change, but the sections here are also portraits of love for place and community. If you’ve never read a book on climate change before, it’s a great start; if you’ve read them all, there’s something new and beautiful here.

A remarkable and incredibly brave epic saga of a young woman struggling with the inheritance of her father who grew up in the colonial era of the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies and who had been interned in a concentration camp by the Japanese as a child and her mother who had been abandoned as a little girl at the end of WWII because her parents were Nazi sympathizers and were therefore imprisoned. The author grew up in California, USA, with many questions about her family’s identity and secrets in the war. A courageous book breaking the taboo of shedding light on ‘the other side.’ The author is a personal friend of mine.

Since the 1980s, anthropologists have been confronting the fraught ethics of representing other people, other places, other cultures much more directly than their counterparts in journalism or travel writing. Will Buckingham didn’t stick with anthropology, and this book about his fieldwork with woodcarvers in eastern Indonesia – written two decades after the events it describes – goes some way to explaining why. It’s wry, funny and thought-provoking. The title refers to the theft committed by every travelling writer.

The late Daniel Cameron served as an undercover CIA officer at a remote post in Indonesia in the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, when Sukarno was playing off the Chinese, Soviets, and the Americans, leading to the fateful and tragic events of 1965.

Cameron describes these events, including his and a fellow Dutchman’s incredible espionage coup, stealing designs of Soviet missiles, saving hundreds if American pilots’ lives during the Vietnam War.  Cameron’s memoir reads like a spy thriller, and he expertly captures the excitement, mood, authenticity, and sense of place, similar to the writings of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham in describing Asia. 

Cameron writes beautfully, and his sense of realism makes one feel as if the reader is there, feeling the tension, humidity, heat, and smells of Surabaya and Jakarta.

When 11-year-old Jingwen moves to a new country, he distracts himself from his loneliness by attempting to bake every cake on the menu of Pie in the Sky, the bakery his recently deceased father dreamed about opening.

Part prose, part graphic novel, and a hundred percent heartwarming, this book is studded with delightful bakes that you’ll want to try out at home. 

Migration in the Time of Revolution pushes the international history of the 20th century into a new and exciting direction. Using the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia as a lens, Taomo Zhou elevates citizens to agents in international relations. On the basis of Chinese archival research and oral history, she explores how Indonesians of Chinese descent lastingly influenced the diplomatic relations between their home country and divided China during the Cold War.

Bali is known as a peaceful Hindu "paradise” in Asia. But today most tourists are ignorant of its tumultuous history. In my book I travel by sea on a freighter from Singapore to Jakarta, and journey through Java to Bali. Before reading Hanna’s book, I too was largely ignorant of the invasions Bali had experienced before tourists came: centuries of domination by Muslim sultanates; then early 1800s, the Dutch alongside the French; then the British, followed by the Dutch again in 1816. Next, Bali’s people joined the fight for independence before Japan invaded in 1942. The Dutch returned in 1945, so back to the struggle for independence 1945-1949. Within Indonesia, Bali had to fight hard to maintain its Hindu religion and culture. A peaceful paradise?

I’ve travelled to more than 40 countries, and written about many, but when I’m asked which I’d like to explore more, my answer is always Indonesia. Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist, travelled across the vast archipelago, clocking more than 21,000 miles by boat, bus, and motorbike, and as many by plane. More than half a century since gaining independence from the Dutch, the world’s fourth most populous country, with more than 300 ethnic groups, is still struggling to establish its identity amid regional conflicts, the depletion of natural resources, and a growing wealth gap. With insight and wit, Pisani takes the reader on an enthralling, sometimes maddening journey from crowded cities to remote islands, where she bumps into people from many walks of life—from politicians to peasant farmers—as she tries to make sense of an “improbable nation.” 

I love quirky characters like Nick Fox, a witty and sexy-as-sin thief and con artist. I lap up the sparks that fly when Kate O’Hare, an attractive, dedicated FBI agent, gets paired up with Fox, the criminal she’s determined to catch.

The stage is set for a dash of romance, which is, of course, taboo, and I’m always wondering how long Kate will hold out. I’ve read this book twice and will probably read it again, just for the fun. 

This is a book that changed my life. In fact, I probably want to be Elizabeth Gilbert. Witty, wise, and wonderful, it made me want to go to Italy to eat, to pilgrimage to India to pray, to fall in love in Bali, and to write about that journey.

I read it nearly twenty years ago and it still inspires me today.