Recommended Reading from our Travels
Fiction
Oran Pamuk, Snow (recent Nobel Prize winning Turkish author)
Urrea, Hummingbird's Daughter (ficticious telling of the real life healer & teenage girl, Saint Theresa, and her fanatial followers in in early 20th century Mexico)
Kiran Desai, Inheritance of Loss (recent Booker Prize winning Indian author)
Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River (story of Jewish-sympathizers in WWII Germany)
Shauna Singh Baldwin, What the Body Remembers (story of Sikh-Muslim conflict in pre-Independent India & life as a second wife to a first who cannot bear children - by Indian-Canadian author)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (commentary on African-American family, street, and academic life)
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (best post-9/11 novel yet, told through the eyes of a rare and intelligent 11-year-old boy who lost his father in the tragedy)
Banana Yashimoto, Amrita (magical-realism about the post-amnesia intuition of a young Japanese girl)
Meg Wolitzer, The Position (novel about the lives of 3 children whose parents wrote a famous how-to sex book in 1970's Britain)
Chitra Divakaruni, Mistress of Spices (book which conjures up the mysticism of India, told through an immigrant spice woman's eyes-recently made into a Bollywood movie)
Non-fiction
Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World (the title tells it all)
Amos Oz, Tale of Love and Darkness (autobiography of a love for words, following the Jewish experience from WWII Europe to modern day Israel)
Gucharan Das, The Elephant Paradigm (thoughtful reflections on India's rapidly changing economy and culture)
Reza Azlan, No God but God (excellent explanation of Muslim faith and history for the Western mind)
Travelogues
Michael Booth, Just as Well I'm Leaving (travelogue of a British author who follows HC Anderson's Bizarre Poet's Journey from Denmark to Turkey in the early 1900's)
Franz Wisner, Honeymoon with my Brother (one of the more insightful, entertaining, round-the world travelogues we've found)
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Love, Pray (follows this journalist's post-divorce, solo voyage to learn Italian in Rome, find peace in an Indian ashram, and fall in love in Indonesia)
Rita Golden Gelman, Tales of a Female Nomad (story of an affluent American woman who forfeits everything - marriage, possesions, home- to begin travelling the world in her late 40's. Often the benficiary of the kindness of strangers, she has not stopped since 1988. It was here that we learned about the wonderful Servas host family organization)