Books + Reading Lists
09.18.09
I’d love to tell you that I’m off traveling the world (or shopping) most days of the week. Truth is, I spend the majority of my time at the office—and fulfilling those bouts of wanderlust with street-style blogs. Just click and you’re people-watching in Paris, a regular post-modern-day flaneur. Or maybe it’s Copenhagen, or Tel Aviv, or Tokyo ’s Harajuku neighborhood. Oh, there are so many beautiful sites, but the seminal one? The Sartorialist, from New York-based photographer Scott Schuman. It's become a veritable online destination (and a well-dressed one at that), and now, it’s manifesting itself offline, too.
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08.31.09
Ever wondered what Europe smelled like before plumbing? I’m discovering this very thing in the recently published The Smell of the Continent: The British Discover Europe (Pan Macmillan, $32), which recounts 19th-century British travel to Continental Europe. Oxford historians Richard Mullen and James Munson get into the less savory details of sanitation (a scarcity of bathtubs in France; flea-infested sheets in Sicily; four toilets in a 60-room hotel in Germany).
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07.24.09
It’s not every day that a New York Times best-selling author shows up at your book club. When one of my friends suggested How the World Makes Love by Franz Wisner for our next read, I was definitely on board. Wisner’s Honeymoon with My Brother chronicled the unexpected way his life unfolded after his fiancée left him at the altar—as you might guess from the title, he took his brother on his pre-paid honeymoon; from there they quit their jobs and embarked on a two-year world tour.
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05.26.09
We've heard of people doing all sorts of crazy things for love, but author Eve Brown-Waite might just have them all beat. Thought moving across the country to be closer to your girlfriend was bold?Try packing up your cushy New York life to join the Peace Corps, all in the hopes of winning over your dreamy, do-gooder recruiter. That's precisely how Brown-Waite, who is decidedly more Banana Republic than Birkenstock, finds herself heading to Ecuador for a year-thousands of miles away from the charmer who'd inspired her to give up her cappuccino-filled lifestyle in the first place.
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05.14.09
When Simon Majumdar found himself in the throes of a midlife crisis, he didn’t surrender himself to trite clichés—no sports car or twentysomething girlfriend for him. Instead, the fanatical foodie quit his job and embarked on an expedition designed around one tasty mission: “Go everywhere, eat everything.”
The results of this 12-month, 30-nation gastronomic escapade are delectably chronicled in Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything (Free Press, $26), out May 19. Half Welsh and half Bengali, Majumdar grew up in a household where diverse flavors were the norm and food reigned supreme. “To say that our family was obsessed with what we ate would be like saying J.K. Rowling is comfortably well off,” he writes. “Food was not just fuel to keep the plump bodies of the Majumdar clan going. It was the very essence of who we were.”
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