Getaway Reads
March is often a time when people take off for far-away destinations in order to escape the winter blues. If you’re one of many who are unable to head to exotic places this year, remember that books are the next best solution to transporting you to other lands. Check out the following selections from the Library’s collection:
Fiction
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Matt King, a descendant of one of Hawaii's largest landowners, finds his luck changed when his fun-loving, flighty wife Joanie falls into a coma after a boating accident. Matt is left in sole charge of his two daughters, teenage ex-model and recovering drug addict Alex, and Scottie, a feisty ten-year-old. The novel is the basis for the 2011 Academy Award winning film of the same name starring George Clooney.
For 120 years, an ideal society has flourished on a Pacific island where drug use and promiscuity are encouraged, and children are not at the mercy of one set of parents. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over the island and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Farnaby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and give him hope.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the color red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.
Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet
Deb and Chip, a couple honeymooning at a Caribbean resort, meet a marine biologist who claims to have sighted mermaids at a nearby coral reef. They join with other adventurers to protect the mermaids when the resort reveals plans to build a theme park on the reef.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Having quit his job, Toru Okada is enjoying a pleasant stint as a "house husband," listening to music and arranging the dry cleaning and doing the cooking. That is, up until his cat goes missing, his wife becomes distant and begins acting strangely, and he starts meeting enigmatic people with fantastic life stories. They involve him in a world of psychics, shared dreams, out-of-body experiences and shaman-like powers, and tell him stories from Japan's war in Manchuria, about espionage on the border with Mongolia, the battle of Nomonhan, the killing of the animals in Hsin-ching's zoo and the fate of Japanese prisoners-of-war in the Soviet camps in Siberia.
The Best of Us by Sarah Pekkanen
An all-expense-paid week at a luxury villa in Jamaica—it’s the invitation of a lifetime for a group of old college friends. All four women are desperate not just for a reunion, but for an escape. Languid hours on a private beach, gourmet dinners and late nights of drinking kick off an idyllic week for the women and their husbands. But as a powerful hurricane bears down on the island, turmoil swirls inside the villa, forcing each of the women to reevaluate everything she knows about her friends—and herself.
When her fiance is delayed in London, Emily Harrington sets off on their long-awaited vacation to the exclusive Caribbean resort of Island Bluffs on her own. Fearing boredom, she is pleasantly surprised to discover that this romantic resort is filled with fascinating people. Emily soon finds herself witness to the secrets of her fellow vacationers and, as the days unfold, new relationships offer friendship and diversion. When one of her new acquaintances is found dead on the ocean beach from a gunshot wound, diversion soon turns deadly.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
In remote nineteenth-century China, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The other girl, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in an unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive.
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. Jean's travels leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.
The Vacationers by Emma Straub
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
Non-Fiction
Lunch in Paris: A Love Story With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard
Peppered with mouth-watering recipes for summer ratatouille, swordfish tartare and molten chocolate cakes, Lunch in Paris is a story of falling in love, redefining success and discovering what it truly means to be at home. In the delicious tradition of memoirs like A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, this book is the perfect treat for anyone who has dreamed that lunch in Paris could change their life.
Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America by Brian Benson
Brian Benson has a million life plans but no sense of direction. So when he meets and falls for Rachel, he's ready to go wherever she'll take him. In a whirlwind of new love, they embark on a bicycle trip from northern Wisconsin to western Oregon. As the pair travels through stunning landscapes, they contend with merciless winds, vivid characters, broken bikes and bodies--and the looming question of what comes next.
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
In Bill Bryson’s previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail the result was the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder and unflagging curiosity.
A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance by Marlena de Blasi
He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando — “the stranger” as she calls him. Featuring Marlena’s own incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a woman who opens her heart — and falls in love with both a man and a city.
In 2002, Daniel Hernandez traveled to Mexico City, searching for his cultural roots. He encountered a city both chaotic and intoxicating, both underdeveloped and hypermodern. Surrounded by volcanoes, earthquake-prone and shrouded in smog, the city that Hernandez lovingly chronicles is a place of astounding manifestations of danger, desire, humor, and beauty, a surreal landscape of “cosmic violence.” For those who are intrigued by one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, Down and Delirious in Mexico City is essential reading.
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs--these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold and converts. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.
The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia by Alden Jones
Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar. By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlane
Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener brings Hawaii’s epic history vividly to life in a classic saga that has captivated readers since its initial publication in 1959. As the volcanic Hawaiian Islands sprout from the ocean floor, the land remains untouched for centuries—until, little more than a thousand years ago, Polynesian seafarers make the perilous journey across the Pacific, flourishing in this tropical paradise according to their ancient traditions. Then, in the early nineteenth century, American missionaries arrive, bringing with them a new creed and a new way of life. Based on exhaustive research and told in Michener’s immersive prose, Hawaii is the story of disparate peoples struggling to keep their identity and live in harmony.
Black Wave: A Family's Adventure at Sea and the Disaster that Saved Them by John and Jean Silverwood
Successful businessman John Silverwood and his wife, Jean, both experienced sailors, decided the time was right to give their four children a taste of thrilling life on the high seas. Their journey aboard the fifty-five-foot catamaran Emerald Jane would have many extraordinary and profound moments, yet rather than flourishing amid the new freedoms and responsibilities thrust upon them, the children were sometimes confused, frightened, resentful. John's dream trip that began on Long Island Sound ended almost two years later as a nightmare in treacherous waters off a remote atoll in French Polynesia, where, in an explosion of violence, the terrifying brunt of the ocean's anger fell upon the Emerald Jane.
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