Tracks

Davidson, Robyn. Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback. New York: Vintage. 1980. Print.

First Sentences:

 

I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes....A freezing wind whipped grit down the platform and I stood shivering, holding warm dog flesh, and wondering what foolishness had brought me to this eerie, empty training station in the centre of nowhere. 

Description:

With personal challenge and survival memoirs, I always try to imagine whether I could achieve what the author accomplished. Almost always the answer is a resounding "No, not in my wildest dreams." That is even more obvious while reading Robyn Davidson's magnificent journey, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback.

 

Davidson is just an ordinary Australian-born young woman with no special skills or ambitions...except for a persistent desire to walk across the Australian outback desert, alone, with only camels and her dog as her companions. Yes, that's right. She will walk on foot, not ride the camels, for 1,700 miles, making her "lunatic idea" (her words) even more impossible-sounding.

 

So she takes a train from her home in Queensland to the bleak outback town of Alice Springs, where men are men and women stay home. There she hoped for the first time to actually even see a camel and then learn how to manage them by herself. 

 

She began to work for a domineering man who captured and tamed wild, feral camels that roam the outback. Taking on the lowest position on his ranch, she agreed to work for free in exchange for camel-training experiences and, at the end of eight months, be given three of his camels for her expedition. Not all goes according to this plan, however.

 

Eventually, off she goes, with her two camels, following old desert roads, trails, and open terrain from one feeding spot to another, hoping local information about watering holes is correct and the rumored tiny settlements are still active and places where she can get rest and advice along the way.

I knew [people] all had that sinking feeling that they would never see me alive again, and I had the sinking certainty that I would have to send messages from Redbank Gorge the same day, saying, "Sorry, muffed it on the first seventeen miles, please collect." 

Along with her faithful dog, Diggity, and occasionally a photographer from National Geographic magazine, the source of her funding and eventual article, she slowly walks, gaining rhythm, confidence, and power in her aloneness. Wild, unpredictable camels, numerous hardships, and the vast desert all around her. What could possibly go wrong?

We were breaking camp at four in the morning, walking until ten, resting in the shade until four, then continuing until eight at night....Living on one's nerves and expecting every moment to produce a horrendous catastrophe is one thing -- doing it in 130-degree heat is quite another. Hell must be something like that. 

Along the trek, she encounters wild camels ("If you see one, shoot it first -- immediately" is the advice given her), snakes, dried up water holes, abandoned villages, as well as friendly, generous people and moonlit skies that kept her dream alive.

 

I really enjoyed reading her clear, honest prose as she recounts adventure after challenge, or just the boredom of putting one foot in front of the other mile after mile. It is a powerful, yet simple read, one that should be enjoyable to anyone seeking an insight into the beauties and threats of the Australian Outback desert, and the perseverance of one woman who tries to live in it.

It struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity....One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever, one really could act to change and control one's life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders.   

One woman's quest to trace the route of Marco Polo through China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries...by bicycle. Wonderful descriptions of her journey, the land, and the few people she encounters in the vast, mostly unsettled mountains of Asia. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 475 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

The Racket

Niland, Conor. The Racket: On Tour with Tennis's Golden Generation -- and the Other 99%. Dublin, Ireland: Sandycove (Penguin). 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Behind every successful tennis player is a parent who refused to allow them to quit. I was ten when I first told my folks that I wanted to give it all up. They didn't yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business, and the stakes were made clear to me when I was young. 

Description:

I used to play a lot of tennis, from age eight through college and later as a teaching professional internationally. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I had the game, physicality, or mentality to compete on any professional level. Without formal lessons, playing rag-tag survival tennis with "interesting" shots (my Turn-Around-Jump-Reverse-Spin serve comes to mind), I knew early on there were way too many levels above me to delude myself into pursuing a playing career. But teaching tennis was for me a different story, one I could excel at and really loved.

For Conor Niland, an Irish tennis player in the early 1980s through the late 1990s, the professional dream was his reality. At least it was for his parents and subsequently his two older siblings who trained and joined the professional circuit. 

 

Niland's recent autobiography, The Racket: On Tour with Tennis's Golden Generation -- and the Other 99%, relates his ambitious climbs from playing on his backyard court under the stern instruction of his parents, through college in the United States, and then into the Futures Circuit (now ITF World Tennis Tour) for players ranked 500 or lower in the world. 

 

His first goal was to break away from the lowly Futures up into the Challenger Tour (for players ranked 100-500) and ideally into the elite ATP Tour of the top players ranked 1-100. Niland explains that each win in any tourney gave him ATP points, helping improve his ranking and placement in upcoming tournaments. A high enough ranking allowed him to enter the next prestigious level of tournaments with more luxuries, prize money and ATP points available.

I grew to like the atmosphere around the house on the morning of a final, my senses were always heightened. From the moment you woke up, every sound appeared that little bit sharper: the spoon hitting the cereal bowl, the bread popping out of the toaster. Everyone was dressed more smartly, and spoke in a quieter, softer tone.

Junior training had its ups and down for Niland. At twelve, he beat an unknown Roger Federer in straight sets. Later, when training at the Nick Bollettieri IMG Academy for two weeks, he noted that the facility is "a tennis zoo: kids are kept caged in courts all day and fed tennis balls," although the Academy did develop players including Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Jim Courier, and Maria Sharapova.

His climb from the backyard upward, recounted on a tournament by tournament basis, reveals the trials and tribulations of a young player on his way up (hopefully), the goals he achieves along the way as well as the blown opportunities that might have helped him. His lifestyle and behavior are also laid out as he struggles with decisions faced both on-court and off. He recalls practice hitting sessions or matches with great players like Andy Murray, the Williams sisters, Andy Roddick and many others now lost in tennis obscurity. Along the way, Niland provides astute, fascinating comments about each player. 

It's not exactly right to say that the very top guys like Djokovic hit the ball much harder....But they hit it deeper, right to the baseline, and they do it relentlessly. It doesn't look like a big difference on TV, but that extra foot and a half of depth, over and over, is a killer. This didn't so much put me under pressure as put me under siege.

Traveling 35 weeks a year, he had no time for social relationships with women or player s concentrating on their own struggles to survive. Sometimes he played nine tournaments in ten weeks, flying all over the world from Doha to Chennai to Montreal to Switzerland to Banja Luka and on and on and on.

Expenses are also always in his mind. Can he afford  to pay a coach who could free him from the tedious requirements of finding hitting partners, give him professionals training and advice, and provide companionship as Niland travels weekly from country to country? How can he deal with the pressure of competition, knowing that a win would secure necessary funds and ATP points (not to mention necessities like travel expenses, equipment, and food), while a loss would lower his ranking? 

Along the way he also discusses his encounters with physiotherapists, gambling on matches, banned substances, sideline coaching, tennis parents, qualifying tourneys, wildcard entrances to the main draw, and even food poisoning at an inopportune moment.

 

I was totally involved with Conor Niland's life, his ambitions, his frustrations, and his day-to-day, tournament-to-tournament lifestyle. When he succeeded, I felt elation. When he stumbled (choked?), I honestly felt bad for him, a player I previously had never heard of.

There were matches in my career in which it felt as though what was at stake was not merely qualification, but my identity too....How long was I going to give it? I was going to give it years if it meant getting a few great hours in return.

Highly recommended for an insider's look into the everyday adder to tennis success and the impending slide back down that also awaits every player at every level.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

McPhee, John. Levels of the Game.   

Point by point analysis of the 1978 US Open tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. McPhee takes readers inside the players' minds as they devise strategies, relish successes, and overcome missed opportunities. Provides the background and personalities which influence each player's shot selection, strategy, and mental game.

 

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

  

Apple of My Eye

Hanff, Helene. Apple of My Eye. New York: Doubleday 1978. Print.

First Sentences:

On April Fool's Day, I came home from a meeting with a publisher, hurried through my apartment-house lobby and told all the tenants waiting at the elevator:

"I've got the dream assignment of all time! I'm going to write copy for a book of photographs of New York City."

Description:

Sure, author Helene Hanff is rightfully excited to land the plum assignment to write the text for a book of photos of New York City. The pictures will be of the famous sites in the city: the Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, the Cloisters, Grant's Tomb, etc.

But there is one problem: Hanff, a born and raised New Yorker, has never visited any of these famous sites. So nothing would do but grab onto her friend Patsy, (someone who also has not seen these destinations) and set out to visit, observe, and take notes on the intriguing aspects of each location. The result of their frantic tour around New York in 1975 is the delightful, insightful book, Apple of My Eye, a tour-de-force that I highly recommend for any one interested in witty writing, overwhelmed tourists, and, of course, New York's iconic attractions.

With little money and no maps (or ones they were unable to decipher), the two women ride buses or walk to take in all the scenery tourists might come across, poking their heads into small restaurants, shops, and historic markers along the way. They refused to ride subways since that underground experience would rob tourists of the views of the city. 

Going from Grant's Tomb to Zabar's was going from the sublime to the ridiculous or from the ridiculous to the sublime, I'll never be sure which.

They are game to see everything, but their acrophobia make them very hesitant to take the elevator to the top of the Statue of Liberty and the new-opened twin towers of the World Trade Center. (It was quite a shock to read about these towers from a New Yorker's perspective in 1975):

Throughout its construction, the World Trade Center was cordially detested by all New Yorkers. The unpopular Rockefeller brothers were so closely involved in the financing that for a while the twin towers were knows as Nelson and David....the financially desperate city didn't need two new 110-story office buildings and couldn't afford to supply them with services.

But later, when they had swallowed their acrophobia and made it to the Tower's Observation Deck, Hanff felt differently:

And suddenly, irrationally, I gloried in the highhanded, high-flying damn-your-eyes audacity that had sent the Trade Center's twin columns rising impudently above the skyline at the moment when New York was declared to be dying, and so deep in debt it couldn't afford workers to dispose of the Center's trash, police its plaza or put out its fires.

Of course, Hanff and Patsy have their differences. Hanff, who has done copious research, constantly quotes "interesting" statistics and detailed stories to a non-listening Patsy, while her friend is constantly worried that Hanff will not include items in the book that might attract tourists. Their dialogue in Battery Park is typical of their back-and-fourth exchanges:

[Hanff] "President Washington," I told Patsy -- though I knew from experience that the minute you start a sentence with "President Washington," everybody stops listening -- "used to stroll here on summer evenings with his wife and the members of the Cabinet..."

[Patsy] Who's on this slab? Did you write him down? Who's on that slab over there? Did you read this one? Write it down. You're not writing anything down....I think you're being very haphazard about this...Somewhere in this book you'd better write: "Everything in this book is half-accurate."

When they drink coffee outside the Metropolitan of Art, Hanff sits with her back to the museum "Which is he only way I will ever consent to sit." You see, Hanff is bitter that the Met takes up space "torn out of Central Park, which does not belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it belongs to me. Me and a million other New Yorkers..."

They have judgmental observations about the people of New York as well:

West Siders look dowdy, scholarly, and slightly down-at-heel, and the look has nothing to do with money. They look like what a great many of them are: scholars, intellectuals, dedicated professionals, all of whom regard shopping for clothes as a colossal waster of time.

Witty, informative, personable, and always slyly funny. As a bonus, it's wonderful to see photos from that year of Central Park's model sailboat pond, the cable car over the East River to Roosevelt Island, Grand Central Station, the Metropolitan Opera House, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and yes, sadly, the World Trade Center towers. A wonderful overview of the city to accompany Hanff's text.

Hanff is the author of 84, Charing Cross Road, the epistolary story of her correspondence with a rare book dealer in London as she tries to procure obscure editions of favorite books. She is a very skilled wordsmith, someone you want to listen to forever as she reels off stories, demands, confusion, and self-reflection, all in witty, personable manner that makes you want to hear more and more.

I really love Apple of My Eye, especially since I have spent time in New York City over the past few years. Her descriptions of places I have seen, entered, or at least walked by struck a note that supported the idea that this is a great city during any age. And for anyone not familiar with New York, well, here's your chance to read all about it as you walk along side with Patsy and Hanff in their delightful explorations and observations.

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City.   

Author Hayes, newly moved to New York City after the death of his partner, loves wandering his new city late at night, talking with people, observing the world, and photographing the heart of New York, then sharing his thoughts with us lucky readers. Wonderful. (previously reviewed here)

West with Giraffes

Rutledge, Lynda. West with Giraffes. New York: Lake Union. 2021. Print.

First Sentences:
 

...I'm older than dirt. And when you're older than dirt, you can get lost in time, in memory, even in space. I'm inside my tiny four-wall room with the feeling that I've been...gone. I'm not even sure how long I've been sitting here.

Description:

 

Lynda Rutledge's West With Giraffes is delightful, compelling, romantic, and thrilling novel rooted in actual historic events. The novel depicts a cross-country journey from New York City to San Diego, California during the Great Depression, transporting two giraffes in a small truck. Rutledge brilliantly re-imagines that trip, backing up her narrative with historical news articles which documented the journey at that time and described the fate of the giraffes to the very interested public. 

 

On September 21, 1938, a hurricane hit New York City. Besides the usual destruction, the storm damaged nearby cargo ships, one of which, the SS Robin Goodfellow, was transporting two giraffes, Miraculously, these animals survived, although they had been abandoned as dead during the storm by the freighter's crew when the crates housing them were crushed.

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, now 105 years old, remembers that day and storm as the start of his adventure with the animals, and thus serves as the novel's narrator. As a 17-year-old orphan, Nickel had fled with Dust Bowl dryness of Texas where his family had died. He landed in New York City only a few weeks before the hurricane hit.

 

The giraffes, judged to be healthy after the storm, still need to be transported to the San Diego Zoo in California. Head Zoo Keeper, Riley Jones, gently talks and strokes the crated animals onto the make-shift truck that young Nickel stows away on. He is familiar with animals and, once he is discovered, is given the job of driving the truck and caring for the animals during the long trip.

Along the way, they pick up a young red-haired woman photographer interested in documenting this unusual journey. The giraffes had caught the nation's attention as hurricane survivors, so any accounts of their health and travels, she felt, would be major news.

Of course, the journey is full of surprises. Traveling across America in an old truck with two gangling giraffes was a sight to see for the people of every small town they pass through. And these gentle giants bring a sense of peace and quiet to Riley, Nickel, and Red, the photographer, as they meander over the back roads.

 

But they are pursued by men with more evil intentions. Percival T Bowles, a cruel circus ringmaster, and Cooter, owner of a decrepit roadside animal zoo, both want the giraffes for their own profit. It's up to Riley, Nickel, and Red to thwart these baddies.

 

West With Giraffes is a wonderful read, full of unexpected events, gentle (and not so gentle) characters, descriptions of life during The Depression, and the calming power of  two gigantic beasts on the people and world they encounter. Need a great, quiet, adventurous, can't-be-put-down read? Here's your answer. Highly recommended.

 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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Helfer, Ralph. Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived

True story of seven decades in the life of a remarkable elephant and the boy who bonded with him, from the giant's early life as a circus attraction, to his survival and  rescue of the boy during the sinking of a boat, to his work in teak forests and eventual stardom in an American circus. Simply a great read.

Tip of the Iceberg

Adams, Mark. Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier. New York: Dutton, 2018. Print.

First Sentences:

On March 25, 1899, a gentleman from New York City arrived unannounced at the Washington D.C. office of C. Hart Merriam. At the age of forty-three, Merriam had already been practicing science seriously for three decades, dating back to some unauthorized taxidermy performed on his sister's dead cat.

 

Description: 

In 1899, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman commissioned an exploration trip to Alaska's inner seaway passage. He included experts in a variety of fields, from geology to glaciology to botany to cartography to literature. Harriman's purpose was to have these men explore, document, and discovery interesting phenomena from this 3,000-mile voyage up the inner coast of Alaska.

The scientists included John Muir, glaciologist and wilderness expert; George Bird Grinnell, the founder of the Audubon Society; Georg Steller, naturalist; William Dall, the "dean of Alaska explorers"; Edward Curtis, photographer; and John Burroughs, writer and chronicler of the expedition. 

Harriman's mission had two personal goals:

• Enable scientists in various fields to survey the wonders of Alaska, enlarge their collections of specimens, and share their findings...
• Return...with a trophy bear

Now, over 100 years later, travel writer Mark Adams decided to re-trace the route of those scientists to understand what they first saw and how the Alaska of today had changed (or remained the same).

His trip is beautifully, often humorously chronicled in Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier. Jumping between primary resources from Harriman's exploration, Alaskan history, and his own journey, Adams deftly manages to immerse readers into the past and present worlds of Alaska and its people.

For his trip, Adams chose to utilize the Alaska Marine Highway System of transport boats "designed to move people and vehicles long distances to remote places for a reasonable price."

Alaska's ferries have as much in common with Greyhound buses as with anything offered by Norwegian Cruise Line, but..with a little patience, Dramamine, and maybe a few time-saving shortcuts, it appeared possible to ride the three thousand miles from Washington State to Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians, in about two months, the same time the Harriman Expedition took.

Breathtaking descriptions and adventures follow, and we lucky readers are fortunate to be able to sit close to Adams as he observes, researches, and interacts with this fascinating, challenging environment. Glaciers, indigenous people, totems, kayaks, mountains, and plenty of quiet contemplation are all on Adams' daily agenda.

Along the way, Adams learns valuable wisdom, such as how to deal with bears which are everywhere: play dead with brown bears, but fight back against black bears. Unfortunately, the only way to tell these bears apart is by a hump on the brown bear's back, (just reach around to feel for it while the bear is mauling you to determine your best course of action). The best advice he heard: "Bring a gun and someone slower than you."

Also, he learned through talking with local people and by personal observation that glaciers, which had once advanced 1,000 feet a day, were now located 63 miles back from where they were 250 years ago.

He visits Cordova, the scene of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and Whittier (population 200, many from American Samoa); "The Weirdest Town in Alaska" and inspiration for the television series, "Northern Exposure"; and an active volcano in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

Too much else to share with you. If you are interested in Alaska, exploration, history, and people, this is the travel book for you.

[While kayaking in Glacier Bay] We were surrounded on all sides by the park's namesake rivers of ice flowing down from the mountains. Their frozen innards glowed a phosphorescent blue that eclipsed the cloudless sky above. A few times every hour, the giants discharged ice from their wrinkled faces -- crack, rumble, splash -- one of nature's most spellbinding performances.

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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Ehrlich, Gretel. This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.   

One of my favorite authors, Gretel Ehrlich, describes in her beautiful prose her life visiting and living in Greenland. She is the best at putting a reader into the environment, giving both history and current conditions, descriptions of the personalities she encounters, all the while examining her own feelings for the region and her place in it. Excellent.

 

Lands of Lost Borders

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. New York: Knopf 2018. Print

First Sentences:

The end of the road was always just out of sight. 

 

Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by a blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I even reach the end, I remember thinking, I'll fly off the rim of the world.


Description:

Thus begins Kate Harris's Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. It depicts one of the author's many dangerous efforts to elude unfriendly border guards in China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries in retracing the ancient route of Marco Polo on a bicycle.

Author Harris is a confirmed explorer. From her earliest age, she had a restlessness to her dreams. Although a gifted student in biological sciences at Oxford and MIT, her ongoing goal was to take a one-way trip to help establish a colony on Mars. She even participated in a Mars simulation experience complete with desert living in regulation space suits.

Harris, a voracious reader and researcher throughout her life, always was fascinated to read about into the personalities and adventures of early explorers like Marco Polo, Magellan, Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman, and Alexandra David-Neel. She eventually quit her research job in a windowless lab (staring at "planktonic fecal pellets" through a microscope and recording minute changes). Then, she charted a cross-continent route using ancient maps and out-of-date atlases, grabbed her childhood girlfriend Mel, loaded up their bicycles, and set off to pedal on a year-long trip from Turkey to India, following the route of Marco Polo. 

Along the way, they live on dried noodles, stale water, and the often unusual food and shelter offered from the locals who could neither speak English (and Harris does not speak their language) nor understand what the women are doing on bicycles on these high ranges. The cyclists are continually stopped by police (who mostly want to pose with the women and try out their bicycles), pushed off pot-holed highways by monstrous trucks, and even chased by wild yaks.

As we sped down the pass, every little bump and divot and pebble on the road blurred together into a pavement of pure concussion. Such is the price you pay to reach forbidden Tibet; pain in the legs, in the butt, and in the brain, which can't conceive a coherent thought because all it knows is the jackhammer jolting of the body and bike to which it is connected.  

But through all the adventures and challenges thrown at them, the women kept up their spirits, recording their daily feelings and trials with a camera and a notebook that eventually was turned into this book. They had plenty of time to consider the world around them as well as their place and purpose in the world. And oh, the descriptions of their observations and musings are wonderous, philosophical, emotional, colorful, and truly insightful.

The night air was cool for July and laced with the sweet breath of poplars and willows that grew in slender wands beside the river. No clean divisions between earth and sky, light and dark, just a lush and total blackness. I couldn't see the mountains but I could sense them around me, sharp curses of rock. The kind of country that consists entirely of edges.

And the places they bicycled. They pedaled and groaned and camped on such locales as:

[the] Tibetan Plateau, that upheaval of rock and ice and sky, but also the Pamir Mountains, where herds of sheep with improbably huge horns dodged avalanches and snow leopards with elegance close to flight. And the Taklamakan, a shifting sands desert dwarfed only by the Gobi and Sahara whose name, according to legend in not literal translation, means 'he who goes in never comes out'....Even more compelling than far-flung mountains and deserts were the stars above and beyond them, distant suns lighting who knows what other worlds.'

I always wonder when reading books such as this which depict exploration, survival, perseverance, and challenges, just how well I might do if faced with the same situations. In the case of Lands of Lost Borders, it is clear I would have given up on the first 15,000-foot climb up a mountain of potholed switchbacks. All the more reason to admire Harris and Mel's fortitude, but only from my cozy chair.

What is the point of exploring if not to reveal our place in the wild scheme of things, or to send a vision of who we are into the universe? A self-portrait and a message in a bottle; maybe no other maps matter....After all, the Latin root of the word explorer is "ex-plorare," with "ex" meaning "go out" and "plorare" meaning "to utter a cry."

Happy reading.

Fred

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Beagle, Peter. I See By My Outfit.   

In 1965, two men decide to ride small motor scooters from New York to California (don't ask why). En route, author Beagle describes the people, environment, and culture in a witty, detailed, friendly manner that makes you want to hear every observation he is willing to share.

 

 

In a Sunburned Country

 Bryson, Bill. In a Sunburned Country. New York: Broadway Books 2000. Print.

First Sentences:

Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is....But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of.

Description:

   

I admit that there are only a few authors that really make me laugh: P.G. Wodehouse, A.J. Jacobs, Quentin Crisp, Jim Gaffigan, Tony Hawks, Mark Twain, Donald Westlake, and Farley Mowat are at the top. While we all have our favorites, probably the humorist everyone looks forward to reading is Bill Bryson. I recently found my copy of his wonderful memories about traveling to Australia, In a Sunburned Country, and, in checking out pages marked by my little paper scraps for favorite scenes and text, found the book every bit as out-loud laughable as I had remembered.

 

Bryson is at his best, in my opinion, when he writes about his travels. In his skilled hands, all the Australia's oddities and challenges he might face (or actually does encounter) become funny. His research into the history, cities, and people is insightful and always shared in his  "everyman explorer" style of dry humor. His stream of consciousness writing make readers feel like invisible companions privy to his wandering thoughts and muttered observations of everything around him.

...my guidebook blandly observed that "only" fourteen species of Australian snakes are seriously lethal, among them the western brown, desert death adder, tiger snake, taipan, and yellow-bellied sea snake. The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, it that a sn---."

The Australian history he uncovers is fascinating, obscure, and always quirky. Take his description of the founding of the capital, Canberra:

The young nation had a site for a capital and a name for a capital, and it had taken them just eleven years since union [1901] to get there. At this blistering pace, all being well, they might get a city going within half a century or so. In fact, it would take rather longer.

The people of Australia and some of their notable traits don't escape his observation:

I had read in the paper that Australians are the biggest gamblers on the planet....[T]he country has less than 1 percent of the world's population but more than 20 percent of its slot machines ["pokies"]....We put in a two-dollar coin, just to see what would happen, and got an instant payout of seventeen dollars. This made us immensely joyful.

His descriptions of the rules and play for cricket matches are worth picking up this book. For him, cricket play:

...goes on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue....Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting.

There is so much more in this delightful, informative travel memoir. In a Sunburned Country is one of my go-to books when I need a lift, a laugh, and a wallowing in great writing about a fascinating topic. I never get tired of this book and even after many readings still find things to laugh at or just be astonished by on every page. And I do mean every page. What other book can you say that about?

 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods.   

Bryson decides to reconnect with his country by walking the 2,100 mile Appalachian Trail. He travels with his friend, Stephen Katz, a woefully out-of-shape non-hiker who eats much of their supplies on the very first day, What could possibly go wrong in the days ahead?