READING FOR A SMALL PLANET

Careful!  This first Attic Planet Summer Reading List is about to do something shocking!  The list below has no: A) novels; B) “beach reads;” C) bestsellers; D) books you’ll struggle to recall come September.

Instead, acknowledging the absurdity of picking ONE book per continent, here are six books for a kinder, cooler planet.  This summer, read like your whole world depends upon it.  Because it does.

1.  AUSTRALIA — The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin — classic memoir blending personal travels on the outback with the mystical dreamworld of the natives.

2.  SOUTH AMERICA — The Motorcycle Diaries, by Ernesto “Che” Guevara — Long before he became a legend, “Che” left med school and, with a buddy, bummed his way from Buenos Aires through Chile, up into Peru and on to Venezuela.  People who read the book because it’s “Che,” are surprised.  The legend could really write, and along with the soul of several countries, he captures the joy of being young and on the road.

3.  NORTH AMERICA — Bad Mexicans, by Kelly Lytle Hernandez — A deep and surprising history of the forgotten rebels who resisted Mexico’s murderous Porfirio Diaz and, slipping back and forth across the border, sowed the seeds of the Mexican Revolution.

4.  AFRICA — The Village of Waiting, by George Packer — Packer’s account of his Peace Corps years in Togo contains all the cross-cultural tension, inertia, and embattled hope of rural Africa.  The best account of Peace Corps life this Peace Corps veteran (me) has read.

5.  EUROPE — The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman — 1890-1914 — Europe captured at its most imperial, most colonial, most precarious — before the fall that was World War I.

6.  ASIA — Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo — Takes you deep into the hardscrabble lives in the urban sprawl of Mumbai.  Won the National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer.  “A ground-breaking work of narrative non-fiction that brings global poverty into sharp, personal focus." — The Economist