Imagine this crossword puzzle clue: “Curl up with a good _ _ _ _”. Duh, right? No one curls up with a good film or song. With a book, it’s mandatory. And winter is the time to embrace that cliché.
Here are nine fascinating ways for armchair travelers to broaden their outlook of the world (and beyond).
Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press
Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein
- Location: International
- Type: Cultural history
- Buy now
“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” is often true. Discover 10 customs in danger of dying out when their few practitioners are gone. Some have long histories; a more recent one is huge, hand-painted billboards for movie theaters. One chapter focuses on Yan Jhen-fa, who has created such billboards in Taiwan for more than half a century. A deputy editor for BBC Travel, Stein puts his work in context with historical and cultural details about Taiwan, film making, and movie posters. Another chapter explores the much-older tradition of making su filende, a labor-intensive pasta unique to Sardinia. Stein is an expert guide to such skills and why they matter.
Courtesy of the Experiment
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge
- Location: International
- Type: Short essays/history
- Buy now
As current conflicts around the globe demonstrate, borderlines are a big deal. Elledge presents an entertaining and enlightening look at how geography, politics, and other factors influenced the lines on today’s maps. His survey includes time zones, the Eurovision Song Contest, cities, the territorial claims that sliced up Antarctica like a pie, maritime boundaries, and microstates, plus nations and empires throughout history. Elledge’s approach is informative without being dry, as these chapter titles suggest: “Spain and Portugal Carve Up the World,” “Some Accidental Invasions,” “The Dangers of Gardening in the Korean DMZ,” and “The Much Misunderstood Mason-Dixon Line.” Includes 23 helpful maps.
Mysterious World by Laura Knowles
- Location: Earth
- Type: Atlas of mysteries
- Buy now
Welcome to the weird world of cryptids. The usual suspects—Bigfoot, Chupacabra, the Yeti—are only a few of the unexplained phenomena on Earth that make up this Lonely Planet book (aimed at readers age 10 and up). Nazca lines, Stonehenge, the moai of Rapa Nui are among dozens of man-made constructions also considered, as well as such natural oddities as the Crooked Forest (Poland) and the Devil’s Lagoon (Chile). Items are grouped by continent and each continent has two pages featuring haunted places, plus two examples of solved mysteries like Blue Lava and the Gate to Hell (Asia). Ample drawings and photographs help tell the stories.
Courtesy of Harvest Publications
The League of Kitchens Cookbook by Lisa Kyung Gross
- Location: International
- Type: Cookbook with cultural notes
- Buy now
The coauthors of this celebration of home-style cooking are instructors with the League of Kitchens, a New York City culinary organization through which immigrant women teach family recipes in their own homes. Like the workshops, the book’s recipes reflect diverse international destinations: Indonesia, Nepal, Argentina, Uzbekistan, and Burkina Faso, among them. The recipes range from simple, such as yamitsuki (aka addictive cabbage) to kateh estamboli (a Persian dish), and the book offers tips and features about techniques too: cooking eggs with coconut oil, how to make chai Afghan style, or ways to serve zakuska, a type of hors d’oeuvre.
Webb’s Universe: The Space Telescope Images That Reveal Our Cosmic History by Maggie Aderin-Pocock
- Location: Outer space
- Type: Photography with scientific context
- Buy now
This coffee table–size book brims with spectacular photos: images the James Webb Space Telescope captured in its first years since its launch on Christmas 2021. Spiral galaxies, nebulae, and supernovas are among the subjects depicted. As you page through one mind-blowing photo after another, you’ll find clear explanations of what you’re looking at by the space scientist author. She also describes how the JWST works; building it was a global endeavor by thousands of engineers and scientists, and the telescope is expected to remain operational for many more years. For those who aren’t billionaires, Webb’s Universe is an accessible form of transportation to outer space.
Courtesy of Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City’s Most Overlooked Buildings by Tommy Silk
- Location: New York City
- Type: History illustrated with photographs
- Buy now
These 120 “overlooked buildings” span the five boroughs of NYC, although most are in Manhattan. They include structures from five centuries that convey the city’s history, and even native New Yorkers are likely to find surprises among these churches, schools, houses, stores, and office buildings. In 2019, Silk began taking photos and writing about a landmarked building daily (NYC has 37,000) on his Instagram account, “@LandmarksofNY”. This distillation includes such gems as the East 11th Street public bathhouse (an East Village gathering spot for the neighborhood’s immigrants in the early 20th century), Alhambra Apartments (a castle-like 19th-century apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn), the Studebaker Building (a former plant for the automobile maker in uptown Manhattan), Warren Place Mews (a tucked-away garden-lined alley in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), and Queens’s Flushing Town Hall built in 1862.
Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Roman Year by André Aciman
- Location: Rome
- Type: Memoir
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This detailed memoir covers 1965, the year Aciman, then a teenager, and his brother and deaf mother lived as refugees in Rome. They had been well off in Egypt but their new home was on Via Clelia, a working-class neighborhood: “The grandeur of imperial Rome had no place here,” he writes. It’s also not the tourists’ Rome. As they adjust to a new language, school, foods, and customs, we meet his relatives, including the irascible Uncle Claude (who could be a character out of Dickens). The future author of Call Me by Your Name finds solace in books; although money is tight, he visits Paris twice and dreams of living in the USA. It’s a perceptive and frank coming-of-age story.
The Hidden Life of Trees: A Graphical Adaptation by Peter Wohlleben
- Location: Europe and United States
- Type: Illustrated text, adapted by Fred Bernard, drawings by Benjamin Flao
- Buy now
First published in English in 2016, the original Hidden Life of Trees became an instant classic, despite containing only a few ink drawings of trees. Its impact was in its text, describing a secret world where trees do things like “talk” to each other by scent. Trees with feelings, forests as intricate communities: Such messages have now been translated into graphical nonfiction. For some readers, this new illustrated alternative will be more approachable, although Wohlleben (translated by Jane Billinghurst) has a direct, jargon-free style. Whatever format you choose (there’s also an abridged edition loaded with photographs), prepare to be amazed.
A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko
- Location: Grand Canyon
- Type: Adventure/history
- Buy now
Winter is an ideal time for reading this account of a genuinely epic hike through the Grand Canyon. This story will warm you right up as Fedarko and his hiking companion, Pete McBride, traverse hundreds of trail-free miles of the canyon, often in broiling conditions. Scarce water reduces them to extracting moisture from potholes via syringes. And while Fedarko starts off as comically unprepared for this adventure, he shines as a writer with vivid descriptions of remarkable vistas and inventive metaphors. You’ll be booking a flight to Flagstaff after reading this survival tale and tribute to a unique national park.
